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Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 168, highlight of the Golds.

The Kimists are a strange. The Kimists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an incomprehensible impulse to take their pleasure

amid smoke and vapor, fume and flame, poisons and poverty.

Yet among all these evils, I seem to live so sweetly that I may die if I would change places with a Persian

king.

Johann Beher, Physica Subterranea, 1703.

It was late February 1233, early two weeks into the new year of the water snake,

and all across the great capital city of Kaifung,

both within and beyond its high impenetrable walls, could be heard the shouts of people

and the constant hisses and pops of fireworks.

Yet these were not celebratory fireworks, nor were they shouts of merriment,

but the desperate struggle of a metropolis put to siege.

Puddled in the city and manning the ramparts were the cold, sick, and starving citizens and soldiers of the Jean Dynasty, determined in spite of their hopeless situation to carry on the fight to the very last.

Outside sat the arrayed forces of Ogadet, second Cayon of the Yike Mongol

...