I’ve been making my way through The History of China Podcast produced by Chris Stewart. It covers the entirety of Chinese history from the prehistorical mythical period up through the Ming dynasty as of this blog post. Only the Qing left to go!
Chris is an American English teacher living in Shanghai. He has a critical view of the Communist party in China today due to their human rights violations. Every year on June 4th he reuploads a reading of a declassified intelligence report describing the events of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While his podcast flies under the radar of Communist censors, its unlikely that it would if he directly covered the foundation of the Communist party truthfully. For that reason, the Qing dynasty is likely to be the conclusion of the podcast. That is, as long as Chris is still living in China.
Chris’s style has changed greatly over the podcast’s lifetime. For the first 50 or so episodes he was basically just paraphrasing from historical sources and narratives on the events. At around episode 50 he started providing some analysis. Looking at the official versions of Chinese history with a critical eye is especially important for dynasty transition periods. When a dynasty is replaced, the final years of that dynasty’s history are written by the people that just killed them. The victorious replacements have an incentive to make the originals look bad so that the replacement was justified. The last emperors of most dynasties in Chinese history are thus always described as morally corrupt with accusations of rape, murder, and cannibalism being fairly common even if none of those crimes took place.
Chris has become more comfortable with his role as a podcast host since the beginning. During the last few years about every other episode on the biweekly schedule is a special episode about a particular topic instead of continuing the historical narrative. Chris intersperses little pop culture references or his own characterizations of the historical figures. I recently listened to his episodes about the Zhengde Emperor and he frequently does an impression of the emperor’s decision making as if he were a drunken frat boy.
Every year at Halloween Chris releases a few special episodes where he reads classic Chinese ghost stories. He’s been working his way through a book of tales and has now started to include some modern and some non-Chinese stories as well. His 2021 reading of The Thing on the Doorstep was excellent!
The History of China Podcast has been a great way for me to refresh on parts of Chinese history I had already learned while filling in all the numerous gaps. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Chinese history. You can find the podcast by searching History of China on your podcast app or by going to the website or the active Facebook page at the links below.
https://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/thehistoryofchina
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