Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

So now that I've gotten a few episodes under my belt and have cut back the length of the regular episodes, I am finding

them easier to produce. Not so much easier that I would feel comfortable uping the three

episodes a month pace that I had said for myself when this project started, but enough that

I think I might have time to occasionally do a short supplemental episode, where we delve

deeper into things that come up during the narrative that would take too long to explain in detail

in the regular episodes. So today, I want to take a look at the story of Yi Yin. In episode

four, when Dong Zhuo was telling the ministers that he planned to depose the emperor,

one minister spoke against it and invoked the president of Yi Yin.

This minister quoted a line from the great ancient Chinese philosopher Meng Zi,

better known to the West as Mencius, that said,

Only with Yi Yin's talent can one act like Yi Yin, otherwise such a deed as treason.

So let's talk about who Yi Yin was.

Yi Yin was a prime minister during the early years of the Shang Dynasty.

The Shang was the second recorded dynasty in Chinese history and lasted from 1766 BC to 1122 BC.

So it began almost 2,000 years before the time period in which the romance of the Three Kingdoms is set.

Now this is part of the reason I love Chinese history, the simple fact that there is so much of it.

Here we are talking about characters from a novel set almost 2,000 years before our time,

and those characters are making references to people who lived 2,000 years before their time.

As you would expect for someone who lived almost 4,000 years ago,

we don't know exactly when Yi Yin was born,

...