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Hello. Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 313, Frontiers Part 2, The Vastness Devours Us us, mountain monasteries, and money pits.

Tibet is a land where the king does not rule the monks, and the monks do not rule the king.

Yet both rule the people.

Jesuit scholar Ippolito Desideri, Notizier Histori del Tibet, 1722. To lose Xinjiang would be a lasting shame. To recover it, we'll empty our coffers, but it must be done.

General Zhou Zhong Tang, memorial to the Tongja Emperor, 1895.

In the deserts and the mountains, the state grows thin.

Liu Er, Travel Diaries of the Northwest, 1903.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation.

It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune, 1981.

In the last episode, we covered two of four of the Qing Empire's major,

and increasingly

majorly problematic, frontier regions, that, by the turn of the 19th century, were already

...