Hi, all, just a quick note before we get started.

I'm pretty much maxed out with questions for episode 400, and I've started putting the notes together for that episode.

So if you've got anything you're thinking of submitting, pretty much this weekend is going to be the final cutoff before I start finalizing the script.

So if you've got any last minute questions you've been sitting on, make sure to send them my way before the end of the weekend. So if you've got any last-minute questions you've been sitting on, make sure to

send them my way before the end of the weekend. That's it. Let's get on with the show.

Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 398, Anchors Away.

In Beijing's rather wordily named Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution, there are, among all the other exhibits,

including China's first atomic bomb prototype, some captured American war material from the Korean War,

and more modern equipment from the People's Liberation Army, a pair of anchors.

There's nothing immediately, obviously special about these anchors other than, I suppose,

the fact that they are very big.

Each is 13 feet high, about 4 meters, about 6.5 feet across, about 2 meters.

Altogether, each one weighs about 4 tons or 3,600 kilograms.

Being big, however, is not enough reason to get something into the military tons or 3,600 kilograms.

Being big, however, is not enough reason to get something into the military museum of the

Chinese People's Revolution.

This is one of the most important historical institutions in China, one of ten constructed

at the explicit order of Joen Lai, the second man in the Chinese Communist Party after Mao,

in the early days of the revolution.

The museum, which opened in 1959, and the others like it, were constructed in Joe's words

to, quote, establish the hegemony of the interpretation of history by controlling both the

retelling of the past and the means of representation."

...