Hi everyone, Las La Montgomery here with Epistoio Numero Se Tente and Dose.

Today we look at a topic I thought of early on when I was brainstorming the initial

short list of China History podcast topics.

Today we focus on the Hong Kong triads with an emphasis on their historical background

and what gave rise to these secret criminal organizations.

This all goes back to the Ching Dynasty.

And if you really want to trace it back ontologically,

the road goes all the way back to the Times

of the Secret White Lotus Society, the Mongol-Yruin Dynasty.

So we're going to take something of an historical overview

of the whole triad thing.

And sorry in advance to disappoint,

but I'm not going to get into all the heavy duty

slicing dicing and chopping in this episode perhaps on another day we'll come

back and do an episode on historic acts of violence committed by the Triads of Southeast Asia and you'll

get to hear all about Broken Tooth Coy, the Baron of East Jim Sajoy, Lidai Hong, Five Fingers Fung, Two Nostrels Lee, Big Spender Jung, and Wu Shihal.

And who can ever forget Wu-Sung,

Four-finger Wu of James Clavell Noble House Fame. So let's just go back into the

mists of time and find out where these Chinese goodfellas came from and what their impact was on history and in Chinese society.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this all started, but the whole notion of secret societies with all their rituals all But in China, if we had to trace everything back to one particular time in history, I suppose we'd have to go to the time of the Kangshi Emperor.

We discussed him in the Qing Dynasty Dynasty overview part one, podcast number 35.

He was the second of the 10 Ching Dynasty emperors and he had the good fortune to reign during the good part of the Ching.

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