You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

Hey all, today I'm happy to be able to give to you the audio from my presentation that I gave the

Intelligence Speech Conference this past weekend.

It was a blast. In it I discuss some of the

lesser known stories and ideas from Chinese history as well as take on a battery of

listener questions live. Big thanks go out to Sam Hume from the History of Witchcraft Podcast, which you should definitely check out for being such a great moderator and helping me through a few technical hiccups at the very beginning.

Hope you enjoy and now on with the show. Hello and welcome to the history of China.

So today I'm going to be talking about hidden narratives of the Middle Kingdom,

specifically looking at women, minorities, and what I call reading between the bamboo scrolls.

So even in 2020, to many China remains kind of itself a hidden story, front and back and center.

I and many of the other people who've lived here before comment jokingly but kind of only have j, that it's often feed enough to try to get people to realize that China is a real place on Earth that exists in the corporeal realm.

So sometimes I compare it to the outside world what's known in China as a

shien the ethereal immortal spirit who wanders the desolate areas of the world

drifting around on a distant mountain ridge covered in fog.

You see it in a lot of the Chinese ink paintings.

You can see one here.

Distant, far away, untouchable, something there, but you can't really make out any of the details.

It's kind of alien and otherworldly.

These Sien immortals, by the way, were also the type of immortal that many emperors, including Tinsil Huang, wanted to turn himself into by drinking mercury.

We don't think it worked very well, but hey, what do we know?

No small part of that mystery has been both historically and even today a deliberate policy by the government of China or whatever government controlled it at the time,

both the stories and the images

...