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This week, I'm going to recommend one of the Great Courses series, digitized lectures from universities around the world,

called From Yao to Mao, 5,000 years of Chinese history by Professor Kenneth Hammond at New Mexico

University.

As we've talked about, Chinese history is pretty important when it comes to understanding Japanese

history, and with over 18 hours of lectures on the history of one of the world's oldest civilizations,

this is a great place to start.

Go to audible trial.com slash Japan to claim your copy.

... Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast. Episode 88.

The Quest for Immortality.

This week's topic is one of those apocryphal stories that doesn't really have great historical evidence backing it up.

It's the kind of topic most historians shy away from, because, A, there's no real good

evidence to support it, and B, the

specific nature of the story, has a tendency to arouse some rather unpleasant nationalist

sentiment in some corners. That said, it's a great story. Like so much of Japanese history,

this particular tale begins in China. Specifically, it begins with a king named Yang Zheng, who came to his throne in 247 BC, in a fragmented China.

In theory, China had been ruled by the Zhou Dynasty, an ancient ruling family, who had run the country for some 800 years.

...