• 643: This just in, our father, Calliope Mori, will be doing an “EU friendly” stream week, submitted on 2022-07-25 14:59:20+08:00.
• 644: Four Fthousand FAMA FThread - Weekly Discussion Thread, July 25th, 2022, submitted on 2022-07-25 23:41:34+08:00.
• 645: What are Visney and Barba Water?, submitted on 2022-07-28 18:50:57+08:00.
• 646: When it comes to the Great Wall of China, what is considered part of the “main” wall?, submitted on 2022-07-30 00:05:40+08:00.
• How can you tell what is “main” and what is not? Is it just the longest unbroken portion of wall? Is it the part that was considered the most important from a defensive point of view?
• Why do some portions of wall look doubled up? Does that just mean that one dynasty rebuilt a portion of wall from a previous dynasty that had fallen into disrepair? Are there literally two walls next to each other?
• Why are some portions of wall from the same dynasty doubled up? Was this for extra defense? Did they lose/gain territory and build a new portion of wall to defend the new border?
• What on earth is that chunk of wall doing way up in Mongolia/Russia? I know that Mongolia and China were at one point part of the same empire but that piece seems so far removed from the rest.
• The orange portion of wall seems really long for how little space it takes up on the timeline at the bottom. How’d they get so much done in 15 years?
• Why are some of the purple sections more like a dotted line rather than an unbroken line?
• 647: Was a colonizing country ever invaded by a country they tried to capture?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:17:50+08:00.
• 648: How did resistance movements historically recruit new members? How did they ‘prove their worth’ without jeopardizing the entire operation?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:38:04+08:00.
• 649: Herodotus named the Germanii as a Persian (Iranian) tribe. What does this mean?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:41:12+08:00.
• 650: Would someone born in 1976-ish in what is now Macedonia have encountered barbed wire as in a war zone?, submitted on 2022-07-30 11:23:52+08:00.
• 651: Why has China repeatedly (re-)unified and splintered, while other regions, namely Europe, (sort of) unified once (under the Roman Empire), and then stayed splintered forever?, submitted on 2022-07-31 06:13:22+08:00.
• 652: What’s going on with Nancy Pelosi visiting Asia and China making threats while conducting military exercises near Taiwan?, submitted on 2022-07-31 12:39:49+08:00.
• 653: “Christianity didn’t become a world religion because of quality of its teachings, but by the quantity of its violence” - Eleanor Ferguson. Is this statement historically correct?, submitted on 2022-07-31 14:01:57+08:00.
• 654: 🎉Omaru Polka🎪 celebrates 1,000,000 subscribers!🎉, submitted on 2022-07-31 16:02:12+08:00.
• 655: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of August 1, 2022, submitted on 2022-07-31 23:00:13+08:00.
• 656: Why did Chinese ‘civilization’ spread to Japan but not to Taiwan and the Philippines before the colonial era?, submitted on 2022-07-31 23:43:43+08:00.

643: This just in, our father, Calliope Mori, will be doing an “EU friendly” stream week, submitted on 2022-07-25 14:59:20+08:00.

—– 643.1 —–2022-07-26 02:03:45+08:00:

To add to that, Calli’s music career is largely tied to UMG Japan and a lot of the infrastructure for 3D concerts is Japan-based, so there are some strong incentives to keep that work visa active and valid.

644: Four Fthousand FAMA FThread - Weekly Discussion Thread, July 25th, 2022, submitted on 2022-07-25 23:41:34+08:00.

—– 644.1 —–2022-07-26 11:05:24+08:00:

35. Three gens of 5 members, three of 4, and one of 3.

EDIT: I guess people are really salty about those graduations, huh?

—– 644.2 —–2022-07-28 01:03:00+08:00:

This is the first I’ve heard of Suisei having ‘disappeared’.

—– 644.3 —–2022-07-28 01:17:08+08:00:

Well yes, but Osekkai hasn’t clipped Suisei in a long time. We’re talking over 4 months for the most recent clip, and over a year since they were clipping Suisei consistently. So I’m just a little confused on the idea that Suisei somehow dropped off the face of the planet at one stage.

—– 644.4 —–2022-08-01 15:22:27+08:00:

I was tempted to be there out of sheer interest but I ultimately decided against it. Good to see it’s going well though!

—– 644.5 —–2022-08-01 15:31:25+08:00:

Nice. I was at the con on Friday and didn’t see as much VTuber-related stuff (cosplay-wise especially) as when I went last year, but I suspect that’s because a lot of that gravitated to today instead. That said, I did see one La+ cosplayer in the itakimono.

—– 644.6 —–2022-08-01 21:40:30+08:00:

I mean, referring to an HK event as a ‘Chinese con’ is probably stretching it.

—– 644.7 —–2022-08-01 21:52:26+08:00:

Yeah, even in that case ‘Chinese’ is a language family rather than a single language – it’d be like calling a con in London or Stockholm ‘German’.

645: What are Visney and Barba Water?, submitted on 2022-07-28 18:50:57+08:00.

—– 645.1 —–2022-07-28 19:20:54+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

646: When it comes to the Great Wall of China, what is considered part of the “main” wall?, submitted on 2022-07-30 00:05:40+08:00.

—– 646.1 —–2022-07-30 10:32:11+08:00:

One of the most frustrating things about writing about the Great Wall on AskHistorians is that it is an incredibly prominent motif in popular culture, but there has not been a comprehensive academic work published on the subject of its physical history since Arthur Waldron’s in 1990. While there are two more recent academically-authored works with ‘Great Wall’ in the title, one by Julia Lovell from 2006 and one by Carlos Rojas from 2010, these are cultural histories and not specific discussions of wall-building policy (for which Lovell draws heavily on Waldron anyway). So the answer below mostly reflects the academic understanding ca. 1990, which to be fair we could consider to still be the understanding today in the absence of an easily locatable update, supplemented with some material from the late 00s.

To give a very general overview, we need to understand that the Great Wall as it exists in the popular imagination is entirely a product of the Ming empire, which engaged in wall-building primarily over the course of the late 15th and 16th centuries. While there are considerable archaeological remains of prior walls, these ‘walls’ are in fact relatively spartan earthworks consisting principally of a ditch and embankment, without substantial masonry reinforcement like the walls that still stand today. The extent to which these Ming walls were necessarily deliberately built on top of existing structures is… controversial, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that the ideal sites for fortification remained pretty consistent over time. Nevertheless, the notion of a Ming ‘restoration’ of the Great Wall is problematic – not all of the Ming walls followed the path of prior structures, and even those that did most likely built on top of structures that were so eroded as to be effectively nonexistent anyway. This wall system was not, however, conceived of as a singular system to be built contiguously. Rather, wall-building was done at the regional level at different times along the northern frontier, and was intended to supplement defences whose principal element was semi-mobile armies, with the walls serving to slow raiders and invaders or to funnel them into more advantageous terrain for the defenders. That is why there seem to be so many ‘gaps’ in the Ming wall system – those are the product of both its quite disorganised construction history and its design philosophy.

We also need to consider that wall-building tended to serve the specific purposes of specific states, and states that did not see themselves as needing walls to defend against frontier threats (either in the absence of such threats or out of the presumed existence of more cost-effective solutions) would simply abandon these walls. There was no substantial wall-building in China between the 2nd century BCE and 6th century CE, and again between the 7th and 15th centuries, for the simple reason that successive states saw no need for them. What the map describes as ‘construction’ is probably a little deceptive: if three successive periods are shown to have carried out ‘construction’ in the same area, that probably actually just indicates continuous occupation and consequent maintenance.

So then to answer your specific questions in turn:

How can you tell what is “main” and what is not? Is it just the longest unbroken portion of wall? Is it the part that was considered the most important from a defensive point of view?

Simply put, this is the rough length of the Ming wall from its western end at the Jiayu Pass in Gansu to the Shanhai Pass in Hebei, excluding the Liaodong Wall (largely a more austere structure that was mostly earthworks and palisades) that extended into Manchuria. This wall structure was the most elaborately built and maintained, being mostly masonry walls rather than simple earthworks. How 2400 was calculated is not exactly clear, as given the pitfalls of the coastline paradox you can give some wildly varying numbers depending on how precise your gradations are. Still, if you were to drive from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan on modern roads you would end up covering about 2300km per Google Maps, so I do want to just affirm that the 2400km number doesn’t come from nowhere, and would be around what you’d expect from a low-resolution estimate.

Why do some portions of wall look doubled up? Does that just mean that one dynasty rebuilt a portion of wall from a previous dynasty that had fallen into disrepair? Are there literally two walls next to each other?

So this is where the limitations of the scholarship come up, because it could be that the map is based on more up-to-date information than is easily accessible. However, based on Waldron and others, there are some reasonable explanations, for different spots. I’ll broadly go chronologically here.

The stretch between Guyuan and Yulin appears to have both Warring States and Qin walls, but this is effectively just to indicate that the structure was used by both the Kingdom of Qin and its immediate successor state, the Qin Empire.

The wall on the north bank of the Yellow River probably was newly built by the Qin, assuming that we can parse the language in the historical accounts as referring to Qin Shi Huang ordering the construction of ‘a wall around the cities’ and not ‘walled cities’. Wall-building further eastward under the Qin seems dubious and instead the map likely just reflects Qin occupation of walls from the Warring states period. The same goes for the Han, where the historical record suggests the existence of walls on the Han frontiers, almost certainly held over from the Warring States, but not the construction of entirely new structures outright.

The Han did build new walls in Gansu, but the Ming ones don’t ‘double up’ with these for the most part. Even where they do, this is easily explained by the general topography of the region – and thus the most defensible positions for the territory that most needed defending – being effectively the same.

The Northern Qi walls at Xuanfu-Datong are perhaps better understood as part of a large local fortification network rather than as a frontier wall, and the continued occupation by later states is pretty comprehensible given the location’s defensibility. As can be seen, the Ming walls only cover the northern part of this area, and not the southern, because of their function as northward-facing frontier defences, tracing the line of older fortifications already built on good defensible ground.

Why are some portions of wall from the same dynasty doubled up? Was this for extra defense? Did they lose/gain territory and build a new portion of wall to defend the new border?

This gets back to my general overview from the start. If I’m not mistaken there are two main areas of ‘doubling up’ visible on the map: the presence of Qin walls both south and north of the Yellow River, and a few stretches of Ming wall that exist in front of what seem to be the ‘main’ structure. Both of your explanations are correct, but each for a different situation. The Qin Empire definitely did expand over the Yellow River to control territory it had not held as a kingdom, and so built new walls to encompass these conquests. The Ming, on the other hand, were deliberately aiming at building layered defences in places.

What on earth is that chunk of wall doing way up in Mongolia/Russia? I know that Mongolia and China were at one point part of the same empire but that piece seems so far removed from the rest.

The answer is that the map is sneakily claiming the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin states as ‘Chinese’ ones. In reality these states were founded by peoples from the region sometimes known as the Northeast and sometimes as Manchuria, and they were primarily based in that region, which historically lay outside the effective control of most Chinese states. Only the latter would ever exercise rule over a substantial amount of China proper. The earthwork systems built and maintained by the Khitans and Jurchens (the latter of which were quite sophisticated) follow the line of their frontier with the Eurasian steppe, rather than being from either of the two states (Yuan and Qing) which controlled the entire region (as these states also controlled Manchuria anyway).

The orange portion of wall seems really long for how little space it takes up on the timeline at the bottom. How’d they get so much done in 15 years?

There are in effect two sides to this. The first is the simplicity of the Qin-era walls, which were simply earthworks that could be completed in a matter of weeks. It was not that hard to build one. The second is my suggestion – though I would like to think a reasonably-supported one – that the map displays continued occupation of a wall system as ‘construction’ when in reality it is more like ‘maintenance and limited upgrading’.

Why are some of the purple sections more like a dotted line rather than an unbroken line?

Again, there are I think multiple, potentially complementary explanations. The first is that the Ming wall was never intended as a contiguous structure. The second is that the Ming system, being substantial masonry-faced works, was much harder to build, and thus filling the gaps was not always considered cost-effective. The third I think is the most important, which is that our information about the older walls is pretty patchy, whereas the Ming wall has left very easily located traces. Paradoxically, this means that the map shows a lot of gaps where we have high certainty and none where we don’t. I would suggest that part of the reason why the older walls are displayed as contiguous is that if there are gaps, we simply don’t know where they are, and so the map is tracing their general route rather than specifically marking where we actually know walls to have existed.

—– 646.2 —–2022-07-31 00:49:41+08:00:

Not really. But to be quite honest the ‘Great Wall’ (changcheng) is itself a relatively modern term, and its consistent employment began only really under the Qing. In effect, ‘Liao/Jin frontier walls’ is the most precise way of putting it, even if ‘Liao/Jin Great Wall’ would be more dramatic and evocative.

—– 646.3 —–2022-08-02 09:01:59+08:00:

A good catch – there may well have been, but as the Wall is not my primary specialism I don’t have a full picture of the non-Anglophone historiography.

647: Was a colonizing country ever invaded by a country they tried to capture?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:17:50+08:00.

—– 647.1 —–2022-07-30 11:37:38+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

648: How did resistance movements historically recruit new members? How did they ‘prove their worth’ without jeopardizing the entire operation?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:38:04+08:00.

—– 648.1 —–2022-07-30 11:38:26+08:00:

Apologies, but we have removed your question in its current form as it breaks our rules concerning the scope of questions. However, it might be that an altered version of your question would fit within our rules, and we encourage you to reword your question to fit the rule. While we do allow questions which ask about general topics without specific bounding by time or space, we do ask that they be clearly phrased and presented in a way that can be answered by an individual historian focusing on only one example which they can write about in good detail.

So for example, if you wanted to ask, “Have people always rebelled against health rules in pandemics?” we would remove the question. As phrased, it asks broadly about many places collectively. However if you ask “In the time and place you study, how did people rebel against health rules in a pandemic?” we would allow the question. As phrased, while still asking broadly, it does so in a way that clearly invites a given expert to write exclusively about their topic of focus! We encourage you to think about rewording your question to fit this rule, and thank you for your understanding. If you are unsure of how best to reshape your question to fit these requirements, please reach out to us for assistance.

649: Herodotus named the Germanii as a Persian (Iranian) tribe. What does this mean?, submitted on 2022-07-30 10:41:12+08:00.

—– 649.1 —–2022-07-30 11:38:42+08:00:

This question has been removed because it is soapboxing or otherwise a loaded question: it has the effect of promoting an existing interpretation or opinion at the expense of open-ended enquiry. Although we understand if you may have an existing interest in the topic, expressing a detailed opinion on the matter in your question is usually a sign that it is a loaded one, and we will remove questions that appear to put a deliberate slant on their subject or solicit answers that align with a specific pre-existing view.

650: Would someone born in 1976-ish in what is now Macedonia have encountered barbed wire as in a war zone?, submitted on 2022-07-30 11:23:52+08:00.

—– 650.1 —–2022-07-30 11:42:11+08:00:

Sorry, but your submission has been removed, as we don’t allow questions which pose possible privacy issues for living, or recently deceased, persons who are not in the public eye. If your question pertains to military service, try referring to our guide on Military Records and Identification, and you are welcome to resubmit without a name to ask about unit histories. Additionally, /r/Genealogy is a great community to find resources when doing research on family history.

651: Why has China repeatedly (re-)unified and splintered, while other regions, namely Europe, (sort of) unified once (under the Roman Empire), and then stayed splintered forever?, submitted on 2022-07-31 06:13:22+08:00.

—– 651.1 —–2022-07-31 11:10:45+08:00:

I feel like this is a question that needs to be approached from several directions, as there’s an interesting set of colloquialisms behind the premise, but these do not actually add up properly.

The ‘sort of’ regarding Europe in the question is kind of a dead giveaway. Has Europe ever been unified? Because if you look at a map of the Roman Empire at its peak, it didn’t control many regions we would now consider unequivocally European – Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the northern part of the Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, or Ukraine, to name a few. Large parts of the Roman empire were, moreover, outside Europe, encompassing the North African coast, Syria, Anatolia, and parts of the Caucasus. But if we set that aside, we should also consider that Rome itself had plenty of civil wars: do we count these as fragmentation or not, especially in cases such as the Crisis of the Third Century when the Gallic and Palmyrene empires split off outright? And to what extent do we count the partial restoration of imperial scope under Justinian?

But going at it from the other direction, there is a fundamental question to be asked about what ‘China’ actually is. What do we consider to be the territorial scope of ‘China’ exactly? If we mean the modern territorial scope of the People’s Republic of China, then no state has controlled the entire region in question before the Qing conquered the Tarim Basin in 1757. Now, we can choose to selectively exclude certain regions: if we don’t count Xinjiang, then we can go back to 1279 and the conquest of Southern Song by the Mongol Yuan, but that also means that the Ming period would have been one of Chinese ‘division’. But let’s say we just mean China proper. Well, paradoxically, that also means the Mongols, because the region of Yunnan was not part of any prior China-ruling state. Much of the southern coast of China, which today is among its wealthiest regions, was not part of any Chinese empire until colonisation by the state of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period, and the interior regions linking these up were in many cases still devoid of Chinese state power even under the Tang. Much of what is now southern China did not really start to be consolidated as ‘Chinese’ (read: aggressively colonised) until late in the first millennium CE. So, what if we say the Central Plain on the lower reaches of the Yellow River? Well, that’s a very small ‘China’ to define, but that was definitely unified under the Zhou by 1000 BCE (quite plausibly under the Shang for some time prior), fractured into the Warring States in the 8th century BCE which were eventually conquered by Qin in 221, and then underwent that apparent repeated unification and splintering. Which is all nice and easy, right? Except what about any of the southern states post-Han, like Wu or Southern Song? These held none of the Central Plain, yet nobody would consider them not to be Chinese states – indeed, the whole Song period is considered a ‘canonical’ entity in the traditional dynastic succession, completely eliding the Jurchen Jin that controlled the north after 1135.

In effect, the reason why China seems to have repeatedly unified and splintered is that the goalposts keep shifting. ‘China’ does not refer to a single territorial concept consistent throughout history, but instead iterates every time someone claims to have re-established some form of unity over it. If ‘China’ were used to refer to the high water-mark of ‘Chinese’ territorial expansion, then there is no unified China today given the amount of Qing-era territory that remains outside PRC hands within the borders of Russia, Mongolia, and Taiwan. If you go the other extreme and define ‘China’ as just being the Central Plain, then you’re now looking at a region the size of France, not the size of all of Europe, which does sort of deflate the core idea.

To put it slightly differently, with apparent Chinese splintering and unification it helps to look at it less in topographical terms as being a territorial unit that naturally tends towards its own consolidation, but in chronological terms as a succession of state entities to which the same label has been applied thanks to having overlapping – though not precisely contiguous – territorial scope. But it is arguably only that element of territorial continuity that distinguishes Chinese empires from, say, the symbolic succession from the Western Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire. And, it must be said that this is partly retrospective: the consistent use of the term Zhongguo to collectively describe this succession of states is quite a modern one, no older than the Qing at most. Any kind of firm definition of ‘China’ at all either in geographical or political terms is anachronistic before the emergence of nationalism, even if there was generally a loose notion that there was a historical chain of states through which the present Chinese state, at any given time, claimed cultural and political congruence.

652: What’s going on with Nancy Pelosi visiting Asia and China making threats while conducting military exercises near Taiwan?, submitted on 2022-07-31 12:39:49+08:00.

—– 652.1 —–2022-07-31 15:36:52+08:00:

This is hardly the case. As of 2020, 64% ROC residents identify exclusively as Taiwanese and not Chinese, compared to around 30% identifying as both and 2.6% as Chinese but not Taiwanese. (source) While the KMT political platform supports reunification, the DPP and its coalition partners, which have held both a parliamentary majority and the presidency since 2016, are pro-independence.

653: “Christianity didn’t become a world religion because of quality of its teachings, but by the quantity of its violence” - Eleanor Ferguson. Is this statement historically correct?, submitted on 2022-07-31 14:01:57+08:00.

—– 653.1 —–2022-08-01 20:47:34+08:00:

Tacking on for China, the answer is complicated because so too is China’s relationship with colonialism. For once I don’t mean in the sense that China has been itself an eager perpetrator of colonialism (although it most definitely has), but rather that European colonialism in China was never ‘total’ in a way comparable to Africa, Oceania, or the Americas. While Western states and Japan exacted considerable privileges for themselves and their subjects on Qing and later Republican soil, considerably eroding those states’ sovereignty within their own boundaries, they nevertheless never established direct sovereignty of their own, and so evangelism was mostly (outside of territorial concessions) undertaken within Chinese territory and outside the direct bounds of foreign state power.

In broad terms, we can periodise Christianity in China in about four phases, of which I really only specialise in the third:

1. The first phase was from around 635 to perhaps the mid-fourteenth century or so, when Christianity in China meant the Church of the East, also (somewhat erroneously) known as the Nestorian Church, which arrived in western China via Central Asia and seems to have died out some time after the late thirteenth century.

2. The second we can put at around 1600 to 1800, when Christianity primarily cohered around Jesuit missionaries resident at Beijing, who attracted a limited number of converts, at least until the Chinese Rites Controversy in the 1710s (on which more later).

3. The third phase in the nineteenth century involved missionaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, agitating for access to the Chinese interior in order to proselytise, backed implicitly by the military power of their respective states, although it also saw the rise of the medical mission, where the charitable function generally trumped the evangelical.

4. The fourth phase, which can be marked roughly from 1910 to 1949, was dominated by medical missions which certainly sought and attracted converts, but which ultimately saw themselves primarily as hospitals; in addition, China happened to be (mostly) ruled by a Methodist, Chiang Kai-Shek, during the last two decades of this period.

Neither the Nestorians nor Jesuits were spreading Christianity at the point of a spear, and nor were the medical missionaries of the 20th century particularly strongly backed by state power, especially given both the somewhat retrenched status of the old empires (Britain and France) and the relative diplomatic isolationism of the USA. That sort of ends up leaving the nineteenth century as the odd one out in terms of violently-backed Christian proselytisation, and even then no state power actively demanded that China convert to Christianity, rather that Christian missionaries (and to a (much) lesser extent their converts) be afforded protection. To put it another way, while there was violence involved in nineteenth-century attempts to spread Christianity in China, it was violence that (at least ostensibly) sought to prevent either state or grassroots inhibition of that spread, rather than enforced conversion as a means of strengthening political control. Otherwise, during the Jesuit-dominated and hospital-dominated phases, it was mainly the case that Christian missionaries happened to be missionaries and happened to achieve some level of conversion, while their practical main role was in providing other ‘secular’ services albeit motivated by their faith – the Jesuits as technical advisors to the Ming and later Qing courts; the medical missionaries as, well, doctors.

While I don’t have an old answer specifically on Christian proselytisation, you may find this one on Boxer-era anti-Christianity to be at least partially of interest.

Now, it would be remiss not to also account for the Taiping here, but in a sense it is tricky talking about the Taiping because it is very difficult if not impossible to state with any certainty how effectively the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom managed to a) communicate, b) enforce, and c) successfully entrench their brand of Christianity during their brief ascendancy between 1850 and 1864. Even so, we ought to consider that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was absolutely a violent entity, however successful or otherwise its attempts at evangelism were. Even its predecessor entity, the God-Worshipping Society, was in part a militia movement, and in consequence not free from violence either. Ironically, of all the attempts at spreading Christianity in China it was perhaps the least successful while being the most violent.

I want to stress here that just because the history of Christianity in China is largely a nonviolent one, and that it was almost never – with one notable exception – directly spread under conditions of violent coercion, does not mean it had no connection with violence whatsoever, nor does it invalidate the markedly more violent history of Christianity in (especially now-Anglophone) North America. But it is to say that it was a bit different.

654: 🎉Omaru Polka🎪 celebrates 1,000,000 subscribers!🎉, submitted on 2022-07-31 16:02:12+08:00.

—– 654.1 —–2022-07-31 16:07:14+08:00:

ポ！

655: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of August 1, 2022, submitted on 2022-07-31 23:00:13+08:00.

—– 655.1 —–2022-08-02 21:04:42+08:00:

(I know Kizuna has already gone past 3M afer gura and i think there was another)

I don’t believe anyone other than AI, Gura, Calli, and Marine have 2m+ Youtube subscribers, but Argentinian indie VTuber Nimu Spacecat has over 2m Twitch followers as of 10 June.

—– 655.2 —–2022-08-02 21:10:29+08:00:

As an added note for outside observers, Marine has been catching up to fellow Gen 3 member Pekora on sub counts for a while, but until the concert+MV Pekora was looking to hit the 2m milestone first, and then suddenly Marine jumped 40k subscribers in 4 days. I have no idea if this has caused drama yet, but I feel like it might and I am not ready for it.

—– 655.3 —–2022-08-05 20:18:37+08:00:

I thought the whole point of hanfu was that it was a nativist thing which abhorred Manchu influences like the qipao?

—– 655.4 —–2022-08-05 21:21:07+08:00:

A bit of nascent not-quite-drama in the VTuber sphere that may fizzle out, but also interesting enough to at least put out an initial post on: why was a recent Hololive music video made private within less than 24 hours of going live?

For context, Hololive member Nanashi Mumei is part of Hololive English’s second generation, Council, which debuted on 23 August 2021. Her in-character birthday is 4 August, i.e. yesterday, and she had commissioned long-time Hololive collaborator Kanauru to make a music video for an abridged cover of the 40mP-composed Hatsune Miku song ‘Dandan Hayaku Naru’. Kanauru had full creative control, and a chunk of the video was given over to one of her major in-jokes, that being that Mumei, the ‘Guardian of Civilisation’, is actually responsible for many of humanity’s most infamous disasters. The video thus showed her creating and spreading the Black Death (something she has claimed on stream before), and then also suspiciously present for the sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg Disaster, and the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. The video also had other parts, but audience speculation has homed in on this particular sequence for, er, obvious reasons.

The most common suggestion is that the Challenger reference was considered just a bit too close to home, given it happened 36 years ago and thus is potentially in living memory for the small but nevertheless extant older portion of the audience. But there is also the suggestion that it might have to do with the Hololive-ified version of the Hindenburg disaster that was shown. The blimp in the video depicted a logo for KFP (Kiara Fried Phoenix), the in-lore fast food brand of fellow Hololive member Takanashi Kiara. And Kiara makes no secret of the fact that she is Austrian. So, uh, possibly a double-whammy of poor taste there, if you ended up associating your one openly Austrian talent with the Nazi-built Hindenburg, which, y’know, flew swastikas on its tail. But because the official announcement hasn’t specified a reason, it’s basically impossible to tell what actually led to the video’s removal.

The video’s production has also come under a little scrutiny. Kanauru is known for making things on really tight schedules and apparently submitted the video to Mumei 30 minutes before its release, which probably wasn’t enough time for her, her management, and the agency’s PR people to vet it.

An interesting thing is that there’s some meta discussion about whether Hololive management ought to have stated the issue explicitly so as to limit speculation, but IMO anyway there’s not really a better alternative if it was indeed one of those two sequences that did it. Either ‘we made light of one of the most serious space-related disasters in living memory’ or ‘we inadvertently greenlit a video that indirectly implied our one Austrian talent is a Nazi’ or whatever else it might have been would have been somewhat serious statements to officially make.

—– 655.5 —–2022-08-05 22:35:43+08:00:

The way to explain it is that VTubing is a medium and not a genre, and that VTubers are otherwise just ordinary content creators who may do a variety of stuff. Hololive especially, while its core content is video game streaming, is in practical terms a variety entertainment agency, and some of its talents focus more on art or music for instance.

—– 655.6 —–2022-08-06 00:30:34+08:00:

Thing is, both the commissioner and the animator are American, though also likely somewhat on the younger end. So it’s not like this was a Japanese company being out of touch, but almost certainly an off-colour joke by two younger people.

—– 655.7 —–2022-08-06 01:35:37+08:00:

Behold

656: Why did Chinese ‘civilization’ spread to Japan but not to Taiwan and the Philippines before the colonial era?, submitted on 2022-07-31 23:43:43+08:00.

—– 656.1 —–2022-08-01 00:15:40+08:00:

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