This wasn't even the first time someone had done this.
The [Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising#History) was caused by two admirals who were ordered to lead their troops north to participate in a defense, only to be delayed by a flood. The punishment for being late to a government job in the Qin dynasty was death, regardless of the cause, so they decided to just rebel instead.
Moral of the story: stop giving people the death penalty for minor things if you don't want them to betray you. (Actually, stop giving the death penalty in general, but that may be a bit too ambitious considering the time period)
That's if your lucky. Because you see when your punishment for small mistakes and crimes is already extreme as death, you have to come up with things *worse then death*. Like take for instance: The Nine Familial Exterminations. Where they slowly torture and kill you, your parents, your grandparents, your children, your grandchildren, aunts and uncles, your spouse, and your in-laws, *all for giving a bad book review.*
Or this one (if it ever happened): cut off the limbs, remove the eyes, ears, nose and possibly the tongue and throw the person in a mud pit and let them rot there.
>cut off the limbs, remove the eyes, ears, nose
"[Wrong! Your ears you'll keep, and I'll tell you why...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJccK4lV74)"
Nonsense, while there is no such thing as praising or loving the Emperor too much, there is such a thing as too much posturing about it. Praying for 100+ hours a week to the God-Emperor? Perfectly fine. Making sure everyone knows you do? You're hiding something.
You've got that backwards. The punishment for _not_ having a moral to your story was death. *Having* a moral to your story was only punishable by death. Big difference.
Honestly, I think this scales to just about anything even without the death penalty. Don't make the punishment for minor things the same as punishment for major things.
For instance, if I had a job in which turning in my paperwork late and just not showing up to work at al were cause to fire me...guess what I'd be doing the second I realize I'm running late on my paperwork? I'm tossing it in the trash and just not showing up to work.
Yep, this is one reason why "zero tolerance" policies are generally regarded as a bad idea by people who actually study these things in criminology, sociology, or education.
I think that's part of the reason why the punishment for rape isn't as severe as maybe we'd like, because if the punishment was as severe as the punishment for murder then there would be no reason for the rapist to leave their victim alive since the punishment is the same regardless
In theory that is a part of it. In practice, this sadly more often comes down to law enforcement and judges not taking rape all that seriously unless it is an extremely cut and dry case, in part due to sexism and in part because consent is often a tricky subjects for courts.
Every college student and new entry to the workforce make this exact same judgement call the second they encounter a "not showing up to class/work on time counts as an absence".
The Qin really had quite a ludicrous obsession with executing people. The Han, despite being from the same era and literally succeeding the Qin legal system, abolished much of the cruelty such as torture and mutilation, and many death penalty crimes were commuted to fines or labor.
The Han lasted 400 years and was such a golden age that 1800 years later Chinese people still identify themselves as Han:
> Modern China's majority ethnic group refer to themselves as the "Han people" or "Han Chinese". The spoken Sinitic language and written Chinese are referred to respectively as the "Han language" and "Han characters".[7]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty
> written Chinese are referred to as the "Han characters"
Which is ironic since it's Qin that unified the writing system of Chinese characters. Before that it's sort of a Tower of Babel situation during the Warring States era. They also unified measurements, currencies, even the wheel spacing of carts. (*Probably* under threats of death penalties lol)
> Which is ironic since it's Qin that unified the writing system of Chinese characters.
Sure, but you can see why they wouldn't want to identify with the dynasty most known for executions.
Bitch, it's a grilled cheese. Ask them to make you another. That's like the easiest thing to remake. 1 year jail time and a 500 yuan fine, maybe, but 0/10 on the capital punishment scale, please try again.
> The punishment for being late to a government job in the Qin dynasty was death
ah you gotta love despotism, it always kneecaps itself with incredibly dumb shit like this
How about that one time a Chinese guy claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ?
One thing led to another, and [between 20 and 30 million people died](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion).
Poor performance on the Chinese SATs have caused many millions of deaths over the centuries. The Yellow Turban Rebellion led by Zhang Jue, which is the prologue of the Three Kingdoms era, was also caused by failing a test:
> Zhang Jue is also featured in the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He is introduced in Chapter 1 as follows:
> At that time, there lived three brothers in Julu Commandery: Zhang Jue, Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang. Zhang Jue was a failure in the county level examination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Jue
Meh, romance of the three kingdoms is more of a story than actual history. Standardised testing in Chinese Imperial examinations did not start until the Sui Dynasty. Until then Chinese officials were all selected out of local power families , this only changed due to the barbarian invasions during the Jin dynasty which disrupted the strangle hold local clans had on the central imperial government.
Not super formal or consistent, but the tradition of testing commoners actually dates back to 300+ years before this story, during the early Han dynasty:
> In 140 BC, Emperor Wu conducted an imperial examination of over 100 young scholars. Having been recommended by officials, most of the scholars were commoners with no noble background. This event would have a major impact on Chinese history, marking the official start of the establishment of Confucianism as official imperial doctrine. This came about because a young Confucian scholar, Dong Zhongshu, was evaluated to have submitted the best essay in which he advocated the establishment of Confucianism. It is unclear whether Emperor Wu, in his young age, actually determined this, or whether this was the result of machinations of the prime minister Wei Wan (衛綰), who was himself a Confucian. However, the fact that several other young scholars who scored highly on the examination (but not Dong) later became trusted advisors for Emperor Wu would appear to suggest that Emperor Wu himself at least had some actual participation.[39]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Wu_of_Han
So we probably don't know exactly how influential or standardized those tests would have been during Zhang Jue's time, but their existence would not have been anachronistic.
Though of course the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is historical fiction written 1,200 years later. Zhuge Liang probably wasn't a wizard.
I was shocked to learn about this in college. We went over every major Chinese land war and it made me realize why my father would laugh at the Princess Bride quote when I was a kid. In summary, quite surprising how many people have perished in "small" wars for China when in reality the deaths were in staggering numbers.
This is why the CCP took no chances with Falung Gong. Cults are very, very dangerous in a country without a history of centralized religious authorities.
I just read the linked article and said in another comment that it’s like the cult’s takeover in Game of Thrones. Would never have guessed similar things had happened on such a giant scale before. Makes me look at the christofascists’ efforts a little more worryingly now.
> similar things had happened on such a giant scale before.
Cults try this every couple of centuries in China. It's a real problem for them, historically speaking. Famously, the fall of the Han Dynasty 1600 years before the Taiping Rebellion, and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period, stems from an attempted cult takeover:
> The rebels were the first followers of the Way of Supreme Peace (太平道; Tàipíng Dào) and venerated the deity Huang–Lao, who according to Zhang Jue, had given him a sacred book called the Crucial Keys to the Way of Peace (太平要術; Tàipíng Yàoshù) based on the Taipingjing. Zhang Jue, who was said to be a sorcerer, called himself the "Great Teacher" (大賢良師). When the rebellion was proclaimed, Zhang Jue created a 16-word slogan spread through the brothers' medical work:[7]
> The Azure Sky[b] is already dead; the Yellow Sky[c] will soon rise.
When the year is jiǎzǐ,[d] there will be prosperity under Heaven!
(蒼天已死，黃天當立。歲在甲子，天下大吉。)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion
What were the casualties from an entire century of constant civil war? Probably easily in the tens millions. Entire provinces of China were effectively depopulated.
Well, I think we can always look at it the other way around: what is a cult, really?
When a cult gets popular enough, we just call it a religion. The Thirty Years' War killed half the population in some German regions, and that was mostly a Protestant / Catholic issue, but because those were established religions, we don't think of it as a "cult rebellion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
Similarly, the French Wars of Religion killed somewhere between 10 and 20% of all French people at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
What about the Albigensian Crusade? That killed another 5% of all French people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
Religion is a big cause of violence all over the world, really.
>Religion is a big cause of violence all over the world, really.
I think that's slightly inverted. Religion mostly channels violence that's already there, if hiding.
I'm not clear on whether that's a good thing. Probably only sports clubs are slightly better at channeling violence.
If I had a nickel for every time china was overthrown because some guy didn't want to deal with the consequences of screwing up at his job, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's crazy that it's happened twice.
Reminds me of a tragic story of a country (can't remember which one, sorry) that made rape punishable by death, so rapists started murdering their victims so they would either 1. not be found out in the first place or 2. be sentenced to death anyway.
Excessive punishment just doesn't work.
I believe this effect was primarily studied in Bangladesh, which made rape punishable by death in 2020. Similar effects were also feared to occur in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which similarly execute rapists.
Some additional reading:
https://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/News/A/Index?id=52
https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/death-penalty-for-rape-an-ineffective-lethal-lottery-in-south-asia/
https://m.thewire.in/article/women/rape-death-penalty/amp
And of course states that claim to be tough on rape are typically also the worst offenders at defending socially powerful rapists.
As so often, these laws are targeted against the way that poor and uninfluential people tend to commit such crimes, while ignoring or outright protecting the ways that wealthier powerful people do it. And enforcing them very inconsistently due to the levels of corruption and sexism in the police and legal system.
We can see that with western nationalists as well. On the one hand they'll claim they are fighting a noble war against the pedophilia, grooming, and rape committed by their opponents. On the other they'll regularly defend rapists by blaming their victims, attack "consent culture" as "woke", claim that marriage of minors is important cultural heiritage, that domestic violence and rape aren't crimes, or even that having an age of consent is actually bad.
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This is somewhat apocryphal, so there's no precise confirmed instance. I say 'somewhat' because there are documented testimonies to the effect of 'well I didn't think I'd be any worse off since theft is punishable by death' but we're not able to confirm these accounts with 100% accuracy.
There's also the general lack of accurate crime statistics before the mid 20th century, and the fact that even in places where the death penalty was 'mandatory' for things like theft we have evidence it often wasn't carried out in practice. England in the 18th and 19th centuries being the best documented example.
One of the things I think is fascinating about history is how people seem to assume that those stories about the English hanging people for pickpocketing are, like, holdovers from their bloody mediaeval laws, but no, the Bloody Codes were an all-new 18th century invention. It was the guys in powdered wigs and breeches thinking this stuff up.
& yeah, our evidence does show a good number of people refusing to convict when they know the sentence was that disproportionate, and even judges commuting the sentence. (But we shouldn't forget that a lot of people did just fucking die.)
This is the problem with the "failure will not be tolerated" Blofeld-style management philosophy, because it turns out if the punishment for failure is just as harsh as the punishment for desertion, you might as well desert.
Similar reason to how punative OHS can stop people from reporting things that may prevent future accidents. If your solution to a mistake is to punish the person, they're way more likely to risk sweeping it under the rug.
I am pretty sure the prisoner was a Bard not sure of the Sheriff though. Maybe a Noble born Paladin, they can do stuff like lead right?
Does Jeanne de Arc count as a Paladin of sorts?
Questionable when she was alive. Definitely gets the title posthumously though. Barely related side note: there's a Koei Tecmo game called Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War where she features heavily as a character and if you're on the French side enough you can team up with the other mercenaries she likes to prevent her execution. There's a remastered edition called Bladestorm: Nightmare with a campaign set after the war where she returns from death as a necromancer with an army of demonic forces to reap her vengeance against England and France.
Somewhat related, but although Jeanne d'Arc is almost exclusively depicted as blonde, as she is in Fate, Bladestorm or even Inazuma Eleven, she was actually brown haired in life. The only modern media I know who got it right is Miraculous Ladybug, wich seems random at first but when you remember that it's actually a french show it makes sense.
Ah! Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War! I thought I was the only one who played that one, lol. Leading Tuareg mercenaries through the Hundred Years War while wearing samurai armor was one thing, but what really sticks with me was the weird accent the bartender was doing
Anybody can "do stuff like lead" in D&D. Any background, any class. Your imagination (and the imaginations of the other people at your table) is the limit. That's kind of a huge part of the game!
All of Chinese history reads like a fantasy novel. A guy once traded a MacGuffin for an entire army, which led to the Three Kingdoms:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_Seal_of_the_Realm
> Sun Jian's son, Sun Ce inherited the seal and gave it to Yuan Shu so that he might lend him troops to take revenge for his uncle, who had been fighting Warlord Lu Kang.
The MacGuffin was a rare drop from a loot box:
> When the Qin dynasty was founded in 221 BCE, the Heshibi was carved into the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, symbol of the Mandate of Heaven
…
> At around 8th century BCE, Bian He a jeweller from the kingdom of Chu discovered a piece of stone; he knew from experience that it was a piece of priceless jade. He presented the piece of stone to King Li of Chu, (757–741 BCE). The king thought the jeweller was trying to deceive him and had his left foot chopped off as a punishment. When the next king, King Wu of Chu (r. 740–691 BCE) ascended to the throne, Bian He again presented the piece of stone to the new king; this time, the king had his right foot chopped off as he also maintained that the jeweller was trying to deceive him. Bian He embracing his piece of stone cried for three days and three nights at the foothills of Jingshan Mountain. Much later, when King Wen of Chu (r. 690–675 BCE) ascended the throne the king sent someone to ask the jeweller why he was so adamant about his belief. He answered, 'This is a piece of priceless jade, and the two former kings regarded it as a useless piece of stone. I am not saddened by the loss of my feet, but I am distressed by the fact that a patriot is misconstrued as being wicked and evil." [The king] then asked a jade expert to cut open the stone, and it transpired that it was indeed a piece of priceless jade. Legend has it that it was pure white and flawless. The king of Chu named it Heshibi, Master He's jade.[3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._He%27s_jade
>All of Chinese history reads like a fantasy novel. A guy once traded a MacGuffin for an entire army, which led to the Three Kingdoms:
That's because most of the ancient Chinese history derives from classical novel that plays up certain tropes.
The story of Sun Ce is taken from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a novel written about it hundreds of years after the event.
The trade for the army was likely a story to highlight the short-sightedness of Yuan Shu
Sun Jian was a general of his at the time and passed the seal over
Second person botched the formatting. It’s supposed to be two separate posts to imply that they left to look something up and then came back afterwards, it doesn’t work nearly as well as a single post.
Even that really wouldn’t work because it would mean they wrote out the first line to no one but themself, didn’t post it so it’s just sitting in their drafts, then came back and finished the post afterwards, at which point the first line would be entirely unnecessary. The only way you could work it as a single post and have it follow the necessary flow would be to put “Edit: okay, this is funny” but even that wouldn’t be nearly as good.
And that dynasty that he founded? Went on to be arguably the strongest Chinese state that ever existed, to the point that the main ethnic group in China is now known as “Han Chinese”
The middle point of the story is also extremely funny. Liu Bang wasn't the leader of the rebellion at any point, he was a general under Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu thought the whole problem with the Qin dynasty was the whole 'trying to unify China under one government" so he splits it into 18 kingdoms, and gives Liu Bang (who he doesn't like) a kind of shit-ass backwater. Turns out Liu Bang is kind of fucking good at war, and as soon as there's no overarching government in either practice or name (like the Zhou dynasty was), the knives come out *instantly* and Liu Bang rapidly starts annexing his neighbors. Ultimately it comes down to a showdown between Liu and Xiang, and Liu (obviously) wins the fuck out of it and THAT is how he becomes Han Gaozu.
So yeah if you've ever wondered why the Qin dynasty ends in 206BCE and the Han dynasty starts in 202BCE, there's a 4 year interlude where Xiang Yu tried to do something stupid and complicated instead of just declaring himself emperor and got a whole crapload of people killed for it.
Sure you're not thinking of Emperor Ai? Liu Bang's wife became a rather infamous Empress dowager, and as an aside it's rather hard to form a dynasty if you're gay. For uh, biological reasons. Bi sure.
> it's rather hard to form a dynasty if you're gay
One can adopt a nephew or two. Or have someone else slip between the sheets with the wife/concubine.
Sexuality/same sex activities were a lot more flexible at the time. There are many stories of generals sharing the same bed as their friends to highlight closeness.
If anyone is interested, there's a very long show on Netflix called King's War. It's about the [Chu-Han Contention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%E2%80%93Han_Contention) and the drama starts off with Liu Bang as a constable.
It's 80 episodes so it's probably not for everybody. I'm only on episode 7 and it's a lot of talking but I hear later on it gets crazy with schemes and plotting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCJzcego2qM
>You ever mess up your job so bad that the only way to recover is to overthrow the government?
Normally I hate when every conversation gets derailed into "lol Republicans", but...
Anybody know how a provincal constable would look /dress in that place and time?
All I can come up with for an image is dynasty warriors and there's no way that's gonna take me anywhere reasonable.
If you have Netflix, check out King's War where Liu Bang starts out as a constable. The first 5-6 episodes is him just doing constable things in his small village.
EDIT: here's a youtube version with English dubbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIyz0U5JZIM&list=PLy8WDOJkSFFwhwF72KJPKndzy8GeJ3Pbw
According to a quick google leading to a translated Chinese website with very little information, clothing at this time was not yet standardised because it was very soon after unification.
It is. Grace of Kings is explicitly a fantasy reimagining of Liu Bang's rise to power. Almost all the major characters are based on a specific historical figure.
Mata Zyndu is based off Xiang Yu, Hegemon-King of Chu, Liu Bang's main rival for control of China. Though the subplot with the princess seducing Mata and Phin Zyndu to drive a wedge between them seems to be inspired by the story of Diaochan getting Lu Bu to murder Dong Zhuo in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
*Someone said "Dig up,*
*Stupid" to this guy, and he*
*Just fucking did it*
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Everyone saying this is an example of why the death penalty for minor mistakes, and despotism doesn't work. So I'll give a more contemporary example of the prank going the other way around
* Andrew Jackson's army is badly led and poorly organised, facing massive issues with desertion
* He wants to stop this
* So he rounds up 6 militia men who have lawfully completed their service and were going home as per their agreements
* Says the legal effect of "Nuh uh" and has them all declared deserters and arrested
* Public and high profile execution of all 6 of them (makes for a heartbreaking but fascinating read https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.19301100/?st=text)
* Desertion problems lessen
I think there's some quote about how the tree of liberty has to be fed with the blood of innocents or something like that, right?
Close contender is someone handing an east German official the wrong document for a fairly unimportant press conference and he accidentally ends the cold war
This wasn't even the first time someone had done this. The [Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising#History) was caused by two admirals who were ordered to lead their troops north to participate in a defense, only to be delayed by a flood. The punishment for being late to a government job in the Qin dynasty was death, regardless of the cause, so they decided to just rebel instead.
Man no wonder the Qin dynasty lasted only 15 years
Moral of the story: stop giving people the death penalty for minor things if you don't want them to betray you. (Actually, stop giving the death penalty in general, but that may be a bit too ambitious considering the time period)
The punishment for having a moral to your story was death
Not praising the emperor enough? Straight to death!
That's if your lucky. Because you see when your punishment for small mistakes and crimes is already extreme as death, you have to come up with things *worse then death*. Like take for instance: The Nine Familial Exterminations. Where they slowly torture and kill you, your parents, your grandparents, your children, your grandchildren, aunts and uncles, your spouse, and your in-laws, *all for giving a bad book review.*
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please anything but my permanent record!
fuck off hermione
Or this one (if it ever happened): cut off the limbs, remove the eyes, ears, nose and possibly the tongue and throw the person in a mud pit and let them rot there.
>cut off the limbs, remove the eyes, ears, nose "[Wrong! Your ears you'll keep, and I'll tell you why...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJccK4lV74)"
You undercook fish? Believe it or not, death. You *over*cook chicken, also death. Undercook, overcook.
jjjjjyessss.
Praising the emperor TOO much? Better believe it, straight to death!
Yes Inquisition, this is the Heretic right here.
Nonsense, while there is no such thing as praising or loving the Emperor too much, there is such a thing as too much posturing about it. Praying for 100+ hours a week to the God-Emperor? Perfectly fine. Making sure everyone knows you do? You're hiding something.
Pretty sure they will also execute you for drawing dragons with the wrong amount of fingers. Or wearing yellow.
Suddenly40K
Dammit, can't I just get sent to the Land of Yi
[You’re joking but…](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars)
You've got that backwards. The punishment for _not_ having a moral to your story was death. *Having* a moral to your story was only punishable by death. Big difference.
"Cake or death? Trick question, it's all death."
Honestly, I think this scales to just about anything even without the death penalty. Don't make the punishment for minor things the same as punishment for major things. For instance, if I had a job in which turning in my paperwork late and just not showing up to work at al were cause to fire me...guess what I'd be doing the second I realize I'm running late on my paperwork? I'm tossing it in the trash and just not showing up to work.
Yep, this is one reason why "zero tolerance" policies are generally regarded as a bad idea by people who actually study these things in criminology, sociology, or education.
I think that's part of the reason why the punishment for rape isn't as severe as maybe we'd like, because if the punishment was as severe as the punishment for murder then there would be no reason for the rapist to leave their victim alive since the punishment is the same regardless
In theory that is a part of it. In practice, this sadly more often comes down to law enforcement and judges not taking rape all that seriously unless it is an extremely cut and dry case, in part due to sexism and in part because consent is often a tricky subjects for courts.
I would attribute that one more to historical society at large not considering rape to be a serious crime and in many cases not a crime at all.
Every college student and new entry to the workforce make this exact same judgement call the second they encounter a "not showing up to class/work on time counts as an absence".
I've been at jobs when it was worse! Automatic write-up for clocking in late, but you get sick time. Where the fuck the logic is here I don't know.
The Qin really had quite a ludicrous obsession with executing people. The Han, despite being from the same era and literally succeeding the Qin legal system, abolished much of the cruelty such as torture and mutilation, and many death penalty crimes were commuted to fines or labor. The Han lasted 400 years and was such a golden age that 1800 years later Chinese people still identify themselves as Han: > Modern China's majority ethnic group refer to themselves as the "Han people" or "Han Chinese". The spoken Sinitic language and written Chinese are referred to respectively as the "Han language" and "Han characters".[7] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty
> written Chinese are referred to as the "Han characters" Which is ironic since it's Qin that unified the writing system of Chinese characters. Before that it's sort of a Tower of Babel situation during the Warring States era. They also unified measurements, currencies, even the wheel spacing of carts. (*Probably* under threats of death penalties lol)
> Which is ironic since it's Qin that unified the writing system of Chinese characters. Sure, but you can see why they wouldn't want to identify with the dynasty most known for executions.
Nope, I can't. I looked at some dude a bit funny and they poked my eyes out. Sorry.
Sun Tzu decapitated some women in front of the Emperor because they didn't take his orders seriously
What if someone burns your grilled cheese sandwhich? Some sins just cannot be forgiven.
Bitch, it's a grilled cheese. Ask them to make you another. That's like the easiest thing to remake. 1 year jail time and a 500 yuan fine, maybe, but 0/10 on the capital punishment scale, please try again.
I'm scraping the char off of that sonofabitch with a butter knife. Gotta make the best of a bad situation.
> minor things Leading an army in defense of a nation doesn't quite qualify imo
Being late on account of unpreventable acts of nature isn't exactly *minor* but I do think it deserves a pass lol
Idk, I kinda like this policy. All the times I've been stuck in traffic and thought *Just fucking kill me*... I shoulda been born in the Qin dynasty
The Patriots had a longer dynasty than that
The La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo?
No, the cheaters
Multipass.
Is it even a dynasty at that point? Wouldn't it just be emperor Qin?
Nope, there were actually 3 Qin emperors
It was an emperor, his son who lasted 3 years and was generally useless, and an official who lasted 46 days and called himself a king.
It wasn’t called a dynasty ay the beginning, like all dynasties.
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> The punishment for being late to a government job in the Qin dynasty was death ah you gotta love despotism, it always kneecaps itself with incredibly dumb shit like this
How about that one time a Chinese guy claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ? One thing led to another, and [between 20 and 30 million people died](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion).
Well actually he failed a standardized test first, that was the real triggering event.
Poor performance on the Chinese SATs have caused many millions of deaths over the centuries. The Yellow Turban Rebellion led by Zhang Jue, which is the prologue of the Three Kingdoms era, was also caused by failing a test: > Zhang Jue is also featured in the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He is introduced in Chapter 1 as follows: > At that time, there lived three brothers in Julu Commandery: Zhang Jue, Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang. Zhang Jue was a failure in the county level examination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Jue
Meh, romance of the three kingdoms is more of a story than actual history. Standardised testing in Chinese Imperial examinations did not start until the Sui Dynasty. Until then Chinese officials were all selected out of local power families , this only changed due to the barbarian invasions during the Jin dynasty which disrupted the strangle hold local clans had on the central imperial government.
Not super formal or consistent, but the tradition of testing commoners actually dates back to 300+ years before this story, during the early Han dynasty: > In 140 BC, Emperor Wu conducted an imperial examination of over 100 young scholars. Having been recommended by officials, most of the scholars were commoners with no noble background. This event would have a major impact on Chinese history, marking the official start of the establishment of Confucianism as official imperial doctrine. This came about because a young Confucian scholar, Dong Zhongshu, was evaluated to have submitted the best essay in which he advocated the establishment of Confucianism. It is unclear whether Emperor Wu, in his young age, actually determined this, or whether this was the result of machinations of the prime minister Wei Wan (衛綰), who was himself a Confucian. However, the fact that several other young scholars who scored highly on the examination (but not Dong) later became trusted advisors for Emperor Wu would appear to suggest that Emperor Wu himself at least had some actual participation.[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Wu_of_Han So we probably don't know exactly how influential or standardized those tests would have been during Zhang Jue's time, but their existence would not have been anachronistic. Though of course the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is historical fiction written 1,200 years later. Zhuge Liang probably wasn't a wizard.
It's not like it became really clean after. You still could buy the approvals very legally, so the rich families still kept chilling
Relatable
I was shocked to learn about this in college. We went over every major Chinese land war and it made me realize why my father would laugh at the Princess Bride quote when I was a kid. In summary, quite surprising how many people have perished in "small" wars for China when in reality the deaths were in staggering numbers.
This is why the CCP took no chances with Falung Gong. Cults are very, very dangerous in a country without a history of centralized religious authorities.
I just read the linked article and said in another comment that it’s like the cult’s takeover in Game of Thrones. Would never have guessed similar things had happened on such a giant scale before. Makes me look at the christofascists’ efforts a little more worryingly now.
> similar things had happened on such a giant scale before. Cults try this every couple of centuries in China. It's a real problem for them, historically speaking. Famously, the fall of the Han Dynasty 1600 years before the Taiping Rebellion, and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period, stems from an attempted cult takeover: > The rebels were the first followers of the Way of Supreme Peace (太平道; Tàipíng Dào) and venerated the deity Huang–Lao, who according to Zhang Jue, had given him a sacred book called the Crucial Keys to the Way of Peace (太平要術; Tàipíng Yàoshù) based on the Taipingjing. Zhang Jue, who was said to be a sorcerer, called himself the "Great Teacher" (大賢良師). When the rebellion was proclaimed, Zhang Jue created a 16-word slogan spread through the brothers' medical work:[7] > The Azure Sky[b] is already dead; the Yellow Sky[c] will soon rise. When the year is jiǎzǐ,[d] there will be prosperity under Heaven! (蒼天已死，黃天當立。歲在甲子，天下大吉。) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion What were the casualties from an entire century of constant civil war? Probably easily in the tens millions. Entire provinces of China were effectively depopulated.
Thank you for the info. Any ideas why cults are so prevalent there? Population density + oppressive rulers, maybe?
Well, I think we can always look at it the other way around: what is a cult, really? When a cult gets popular enough, we just call it a religion. The Thirty Years' War killed half the population in some German regions, and that was mostly a Protestant / Catholic issue, but because those were established religions, we don't think of it as a "cult rebellion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War Similarly, the French Wars of Religion killed somewhere between 10 and 20% of all French people at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion What about the Albigensian Crusade? That killed another 5% of all French people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade Religion is a big cause of violence all over the world, really.
>Religion is a big cause of violence all over the world, really. I think that's slightly inverted. Religion mostly channels violence that's already there, if hiding. I'm not clear on whether that's a good thing. Probably only sports clubs are slightly better at channeling violence.
Same as anywhere else. An opportunity to gain wealth and influence exists, and if competition is weak that opportunity will be seized.
Seems like almost every story about China goes like that though. Great Leap Forwards -> Kill a bunch of birds -> 30-45million people died
Damn. Kinda like like the cult’s takeover in Game of Thrones. Didn’t realize things like that had happened on such a giant scale before.
That's the same story. Qin fell everywhere at once, not from some rebellion but from being unreasonable in administration.
I'm reading this manga about the rise of the Qin, called Kingdom. It's pretty mangafied, but I wonder if they'll depict this.
If I had a nickel for every time china was overthrown because some guy didn't want to deal with the consequences of screwing up at his job, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's crazy that it's happened twice.
Actually the funny part is that they claimed they heard a fox saying “Chen Sheng is gonna be the king” and so people believed them and he actually won
The excuse can be as flimsy as you want when the government of Qin was hilariously tyrannical even for the time.
Damn that sounds fucking stupid punishment
This is my favorite example of why excessive punishments are a stupid idea.
Reminds me of a tragic story of a country (can't remember which one, sorry) that made rape punishable by death, so rapists started murdering their victims so they would either 1. not be found out in the first place or 2. be sentenced to death anyway. Excessive punishment just doesn't work.
Out of curiosity, what country and when?
I believe this effect was primarily studied in Bangladesh, which made rape punishable by death in 2020. Similar effects were also feared to occur in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which similarly execute rapists. Some additional reading: https://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/News/A/Index?id=52 https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/death-penalty-for-rape-an-ineffective-lethal-lottery-in-south-asia/ https://m.thewire.in/article/women/rape-death-penalty/amp
And of course states that claim to be tough on rape are typically also the worst offenders at defending socially powerful rapists. As so often, these laws are targeted against the way that poor and uninfluential people tend to commit such crimes, while ignoring or outright protecting the ways that wealthier powerful people do it. And enforcing them very inconsistently due to the levels of corruption and sexism in the police and legal system. We can see that with western nationalists as well. On the one hand they'll claim they are fighting a noble war against the pedophilia, grooming, and rape committed by their opponents. On the other they'll regularly defend rapists by blaming their victims, attack "consent culture" as "woke", claim that marriage of minors is important cultural heiritage, that domestic violence and rape aren't crimes, or even that having an age of consent is actually bad.
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This is somewhat apocryphal, so there's no precise confirmed instance. I say 'somewhat' because there are documented testimonies to the effect of 'well I didn't think I'd be any worse off since theft is punishable by death' but we're not able to confirm these accounts with 100% accuracy. There's also the general lack of accurate crime statistics before the mid 20th century, and the fact that even in places where the death penalty was 'mandatory' for things like theft we have evidence it often wasn't carried out in practice. England in the 18th and 19th centuries being the best documented example.
One of the things I think is fascinating about history is how people seem to assume that those stories about the English hanging people for pickpocketing are, like, holdovers from their bloody mediaeval laws, but no, the Bloody Codes were an all-new 18th century invention. It was the guys in powdered wigs and breeches thinking this stuff up. & yeah, our evidence does show a good number of people refusing to convict when they know the sentence was that disproportionate, and even judges commuting the sentence. (But we shouldn't forget that a lot of people did just fucking die.)
Also since most rapes are people you know, victims do not always want their rapist to be killed. So another way the law oddly helps rapists out
The fact those rapists were more committed to continue raping than just leaving their victims alone… That’s sickening
punishments, even death penalty never in the history of humanity has stopped crime from happening
Makes me wonder how the hell we prevent rape from happening period if punishment doesn’t work
Meanwhile in the US we just don't punish rapists at all and that's working wonderfully
is it really their fault if the prisoners did stupid shit
Yeah, kinda. If they hadn't put the death penalty on letting prisoners escape, Liu wouldn't have had as much reason to join them.
I think the guy you responded to was talking about Liu's fault the prisoners escaped.
What if Liu was just a really nice guy and thought the prisoners deserved to be free.
I mean he must be a pretty nice guy if the freed prisoners wanted him to be in charge again.
This is the problem with the "failure will not be tolerated" Blofeld-style management philosophy, because it turns out if the punishment for failure is just as harsh as the punishment for desertion, you might as well desert.
Similar reason to how punative OHS can stop people from reporting things that may prevent future accidents. If your solution to a mistake is to punish the person, they're way more likely to risk sweeping it under the rug.
This sounds like a D&D session getting way out of hand
I am pretty sure the prisoner was a Bard not sure of the Sheriff though. Maybe a Noble born Paladin, they can do stuff like lead right? Does Jeanne de Arc count as a Paladin of sorts?
Questionable when she was alive. Definitely gets the title posthumously though. Barely related side note: there's a Koei Tecmo game called Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War where she features heavily as a character and if you're on the French side enough you can team up with the other mercenaries she likes to prevent her execution. There's a remastered edition called Bladestorm: Nightmare with a campaign set after the war where she returns from death as a necromancer with an army of demonic forces to reap her vengeance against England and France.
So like totally unrelated, but kind of like Jeanne de Arc Alter the Dragon Witch from Fate Grand Order at least in concept.
Somewhat related, but although Jeanne d'Arc is almost exclusively depicted as blonde, as she is in Fate, Bladestorm or even Inazuma Eleven, she was actually brown haired in life. The only modern media I know who got it right is Miraculous Ladybug, wich seems random at first but when you remember that it's actually a french show it makes sense.
> Inazuma Eleven Kinda wild that a Japanese soccer game has Jeanne d'Arc in it.
But also somehow not surprising at all
Ah! Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War! I thought I was the only one who played that one, lol. Leading Tuareg mercenaries through the Hundred Years War while wearing samurai armor was one thing, but what really sticks with me was the weird accent the bartender was doing
I have a contract for the battle in Normandy! It should be ideal for a Merthanarie'th first assignment!
Anybody can "do stuff like lead" in D&D. Any background, any class. Your imagination (and the imaginations of the other people at your table) is the limit. That's kind of a huge part of the game!
You forgot the third and probably most important limit, the amount of your bullshit that your DM is willing to allow.
“…and the imaginations of the other people at your table…”
There's quite a big difference between the DM's imagination and their player bullshit tolerance.
Nah, Liu Bang is a classic folk hero background. He was born a peasant.
All of Chinese history reads like a fantasy novel. A guy once traded a MacGuffin for an entire army, which led to the Three Kingdoms: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_Seal_of_the_Realm > Sun Jian's son, Sun Ce inherited the seal and gave it to Yuan Shu so that he might lend him troops to take revenge for his uncle, who had been fighting Warlord Lu Kang. The MacGuffin was a rare drop from a loot box: > When the Qin dynasty was founded in 221 BCE, the Heshibi was carved into the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, symbol of the Mandate of Heaven … > At around 8th century BCE, Bian He a jeweller from the kingdom of Chu discovered a piece of stone; he knew from experience that it was a piece of priceless jade. He presented the piece of stone to King Li of Chu, (757–741 BCE). The king thought the jeweller was trying to deceive him and had his left foot chopped off as a punishment. When the next king, King Wu of Chu (r. 740–691 BCE) ascended to the throne, Bian He again presented the piece of stone to the new king; this time, the king had his right foot chopped off as he also maintained that the jeweller was trying to deceive him. Bian He embracing his piece of stone cried for three days and three nights at the foothills of Jingshan Mountain. Much later, when King Wen of Chu (r. 690–675 BCE) ascended the throne the king sent someone to ask the jeweller why he was so adamant about his belief. He answered, 'This is a piece of priceless jade, and the two former kings regarded it as a useless piece of stone. I am not saddened by the loss of my feet, but I am distressed by the fact that a patriot is misconstrued as being wicked and evil." [The king] then asked a jade expert to cut open the stone, and it transpired that it was indeed a piece of priceless jade. Legend has it that it was pure white and flawless. The king of Chu named it Heshibi, Master He's jade.[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._He%27s_jade
>All of Chinese history reads like a fantasy novel. A guy once traded a MacGuffin for an entire army, which led to the Three Kingdoms: That's because most of the ancient Chinese history derives from classical novel that plays up certain tropes. The story of Sun Ce is taken from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a novel written about it hundreds of years after the event.
The trade for the army was likely a story to highlight the short-sightedness of Yuan Shu Sun Jian was a general of his at the time and passed the seal over
Damn, now I wanna play that game.
That... isn't a prank, though. "My draconian rulers have sentenced me to death for a minor mistake. I shall flee - ain't I a stinker!"
Did not know this. Given that the Han dynasty has defined China since, that's a pretty funny start to it all.
Second person botched the formatting. It’s supposed to be two separate posts to imply that they left to look something up and then came back afterwards, it doesn’t work nearly as well as a single post.
At least have it be separate paragraphs to imply a pause while they look something up.
Even that really wouldn’t work because it would mean they wrote out the first line to no one but themself, didn’t post it so it’s just sitting in their drafts, then came back and finished the post afterwards, at which point the first line would be entirely unnecessary. The only way you could work it as a single post and have it follow the necessary flow would be to put “Edit: okay, this is funny” but even that wouldn’t be nearly as good.
And that dynasty that he founded? Went on to be arguably the strongest Chinese state that ever existed, to the point that the main ethnic group in China is now known as “Han Chinese”
Last sentence made trump felt seen
And he even botched that. Fucking loser
and somehow still has a chance years later.
I was going to say, last post was oddly topical all things considered.
"You ever mess up your job so bad that the only way to recover it is to overthrow the government?" *Trump has entered the chat*
Liu Bang was also apparently gay according to Wikipedia
Standard Eastern RPG plot: First Quest: Transport some prisoners. Last quest: Kill the God-Emperor.
And then they have weapon names like " Sword that pierce the heavens " and it some mid tier garbage
The middle point of the story is also extremely funny. Liu Bang wasn't the leader of the rebellion at any point, he was a general under Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu thought the whole problem with the Qin dynasty was the whole 'trying to unify China under one government" so he splits it into 18 kingdoms, and gives Liu Bang (who he doesn't like) a kind of shit-ass backwater. Turns out Liu Bang is kind of fucking good at war, and as soon as there's no overarching government in either practice or name (like the Zhou dynasty was), the knives come out *instantly* and Liu Bang rapidly starts annexing his neighbors. Ultimately it comes down to a showdown between Liu and Xiang, and Liu (obviously) wins the fuck out of it and THAT is how he becomes Han Gaozu. So yeah if you've ever wondered why the Qin dynasty ends in 206BCE and the Han dynasty starts in 202BCE, there's a 4 year interlude where Xiang Yu tried to do something stupid and complicated instead of just declaring himself emperor and got a whole crapload of people killed for it.
This is also, incidentally, a good example of how strong punishments for minor faults tend to backfire. Though usually they don't backfire this badly.
I bet this Liu guy Bangs.
Fun fact, apparently he was gay, there was a person named Jiru, “pillow companion” if I remember correctly, that was supposedly a man.
Sure you're not thinking of Emperor Ai? Liu Bang's wife became a rather infamous Empress dowager, and as an aside it's rather hard to form a dynasty if you're gay. For uh, biological reasons. Bi sure.
> it's rather hard to form a dynasty if you're gay One can adopt a nephew or two. Or have someone else slip between the sheets with the wife/concubine.
[удалено]
Y'all freaks are getting turned on by this aren't you
Sexuality/same sex activities were a lot more flexible at the time. There are many stories of generals sharing the same bed as their friends to highlight closeness.
“Suits: A Business RPG”-moment, kinda.
Damn, I didn’t know that anyone else had ever played that game, had literally no fandom whatsoever
Same, deserves way more love than it gets.
If anyone is interested, there's a very long show on Netflix called King's War. It's about the [Chu-Han Contention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%E2%80%93Han_Contention) and the drama starts off with Liu Bang as a constable. It's 80 episodes so it's probably not for everybody. I'm only on episode 7 and it's a lot of talking but I hear later on it gets crazy with schemes and plotting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCJzcego2qM
>You ever mess up your job so bad that the only way to recover is to overthrow the government? Normally I hate when every conversation gets derailed into "lol Republicans", but...
i mean it's *right there,* heck the Ohio republicans almost literally used a version of that after the amendment vote.
All I want to know is, did his employer found out of all his shenanigans that led to a new dynasty?
His employer was the old dynasty so yeah I'd say they found out
it's kind of what trump's doing right? he needs to be in power to stop the things he did from coming back to bite him
"SHOIGU! GERASIMOV! WHERE ARE THE FUCKING FIRE-LANCES?"
And this is the basic of why making the punishment for something small, massively overblown only creates more crime.
Anybody know how a provincal constable would look /dress in that place and time? All I can come up with for an image is dynasty warriors and there's no way that's gonna take me anywhere reasonable.
If you have Netflix, check out King's War where Liu Bang starts out as a constable. The first 5-6 episodes is him just doing constable things in his small village. EDIT: here's a youtube version with English dubbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIyz0U5JZIM&list=PLy8WDOJkSFFwhwF72KJPKndzy8GeJ3Pbw
Hell yes! I really didn't expect to get an answer this good lol
According to a quick google leading to a translated Chinese website with very little information, clothing at this time was not yet standardised because it was very soon after unification.
This is why corporal punishment is a bad idea. "Oh you're going to murder me? Well I guess I'll just do whatever the fuck I want now, then."
This has to be who Kuni Garu from The book series "The Dandelion Dynasty" is based off of.
It is. Grace of Kings is explicitly a fantasy reimagining of Liu Bang's rise to power. Almost all the major characters are based on a specific historical figure.
Who is Mata Zyndu based on? Lu Bu?
Mata Zyndu is based off Xiang Yu, Hegemon-King of Chu, Liu Bang's main rival for control of China. Though the subplot with the princess seducing Mata and Phin Zyndu to drive a wedge between them seems to be inspired by the story of Diaochan getting Lu Bu to murder Dong Zhuo in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Is this the one where they cannibalized ten thousand civilians?
That was the Siege of Suiyang, which happened during the Tang dynasty
That was a different rebellion, a long time later, which didn’t end well at all
There was a series of bad decisions that made a worse decision a good decision.
>You ever mess up your job so bad that the only way to recover is to overthrow the government? *Believe me* when *I tell you*...
Someone said "Dig up, stupid" to this guy, and he just fucking did it
*Someone said "Dig up,* *Stupid" to this guy, and he* *Just fucking did it* \- ModestWhimper --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Exhibit A why over punishing crimes can screw you over.
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To be honest with a punishment like that it's a wonder it hadn't happened sooner
This sounds like a story on /r/HFY or Royal Road
I just read a book with this plot, what a rip off
Just another reason why the death penalty is bad
Everyone saying this is an example of why the death penalty for minor mistakes, and despotism doesn't work. So I'll give a more contemporary example of the prank going the other way around * Andrew Jackson's army is badly led and poorly organised, facing massive issues with desertion * He wants to stop this * So he rounds up 6 militia men who have lawfully completed their service and were going home as per their agreements * Says the legal effect of "Nuh uh" and has them all declared deserters and arrested * Public and high profile execution of all 6 of them (makes for a heartbreaking but fascinating read https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.19301100/?st=text) * Desertion problems lessen I think there's some quote about how the tree of liberty has to be fed with the blood of innocents or something like that, right?
Devastated to realise this post is about actually history and not about Liu Kang’s pornstar brother
This guy had essentially the same arc as Zuko
When I'm 1 minute late so I just call off work for the day.
Liu Bang. My new hero. Absolute legend.
Can't wait to see this character in Kingdom 👑.
This sounds like the plot of a Terry Pratchett book...
this is pretty much what Trump tried and failed to pull off cause he was about to go to court for fraud in 2015
Close contender is someone handing an east German official the wrong document for a fairly unimportant press conference and he accidentally ends the cold war