Greetings everyone. Welcome back to another China History Podcast episode,

Las La Montgomery, bringing you number 230 this time. I intended for the title of this episode to be just plain old Chichi Guang,

but once again my marketing team stepped in and whispered into upper management's ear that the title needed to be jazzed up a bit. Hence the sensationalist appellation of today's episode, not my idea.

But Mongols and pirates were pretty central to the life of Chichi Gwang,

so it's not entirely out of line to mention these two groups in the title.

Anyway, to those of you who thought, gee Lauslow, you always have such boring

titles to all your episodes. I had nothing to do with this. You know, not including the mythical

age, from about the time of recorded Chinese history to now.

More than 30 centuries, there have been a lot of heroes.

Military heroes, hero kings, hero peasants, and all manners of men and women who rose to the occasion

at some key moment in Chinese history to do something that earned them a mention in the official histories or in poems,

opera, and even cinema. For such a long and continuous history as China's,

it's not surprising that so many of these

greats are relatively unknown. How can you remember them all?

Chichi Gwan, I would not call him unknown. In China he's a pretty major mienzu yin shing or

national hero I suppose his achievements perhaps get mentioned in the schools maybe not

he's not a headliner like some of the other military

greats, but in his time, mid to late 16th century, the years marking the decline of the Ming

Dynasty, he was a VIP, a major figure.

And by looking at his life and achievements from the 1550s till his end came in 1588. It allows us to revisit. That time in the Ming Dynasty

covering the three reigns of Emperor's Chiaging, Long Ching, and Juan Lee.

And those times when the Ming Dynasty was in crisis and began to allow that mandate of heaven

...