The Only Ruler Who Tried to Fix It Ran Out of Road at 38

In the year 936, a Chinese general sat down and wrote a letter to a man ten years younger than him. And in that letter, he called him father. He wasn't being polite. It was the invoice. The younger man had an army. The general needed one. And this was the fee. Call me father and give me the country's northern edge. He agreed. He got his crown. He ruled six years and died Everybody who came after him spent the next four centuries covering that check. Because this is the 53 years everybody skips. 5 dynasties, 10 kingdoms, 14 emperors, and it is not a gap in the timeline. It is the reason for almost everything that follows. So a little while back, we counted down the 5 lamest dynasties in Chinese history. And I made a rule. I said the little ones, the ones that barely held any territory and barely lasted, those don't count. Those aren't lame. Those are just weak. A lot of you did not let that go. Fine. Here they are. But I owe you a correction first. Because I was wrong about one of them. One of these was not weak. One of them did more damage to China than every dynasty on that whole countdown put together. And it never had to win a battle to do it. So the year is 936 and the general's name is Shi Jingtang. He's Shato, a Turkic people who's been inside the Chinese military for generations. He's not Han Chinese. And by this point that barely registers because half the men holding armies in North China aren't either. What he is, is cornered. The emperor he serves is Li Congke, who does not trust him, partly because Shi Jingtang married into the old imperial family and Li Congke didn't. He took the throne by force. So Li Congke does what emperors in this period always do with a general they're nervous about. He orders him transferred away from his own army. And everybody involved understands what that transfer means. It means go somewhere you have no men and wait. Shi Jingtang says no. So Li Congke strips his Now there is no version of this where Shi Jingtang survives by being loyal. So he writes north to the Khitan, Khitan, a steppe confederation with the best cavalry on the continent and a young extremely capable ruler named Yelü Deguang. He needs an army. He asks what one costs. Here's the price. One, 16 prefectures along the northern frontier. Okay. Two, a tribute of silk every year forever. Okay. And three, the part that outlived everything else, he will address Yelü Deguang as father emperor and he will call himself son emperor. Shi Jingtang was born in 892. Yelü Deguang was born in 902. The son was 10 years older than the father. He signs. The Khitan cavalry comes south. The later Tang army comes apart and Li Congke climbs a tower with his family and sets it on fire with himself inside it. Shi Jingtang is now the emperor of the son emperor is now a word, not a nickname, a word. It's in the dictionary. It's still in the dictionary. In modern Mandarin, it means a ruler who took his crown from foreigners and does what he's told. Also called a puppet emperor and Chinese people use it today in live arguments about living politicians. 1100 years later, this man's business arrangement is still how you insult somebody. But now let's talk about what he actually handed over because this is the part every version of this story skips and it's the part that matters. The 16 prefectures. Yan is the area we now call Beijing. Yun is Datong out west in Shanxi and the ground around them is mountains with a handful of passes cut through. That's the entire strategic value of northern China in one sentence. There are only so many ways through and if you hold the ways through a few thousand men can stop an army of hundreds of thousands. That's what a pass is for. Now come south of that line with me and look around. There's nothing there. No ridge, no gorge, no river worth defending. It is flat, rich, open farmland running all the way down to the Yellow River, Huanghe and every capital anybody would ever want to capture is sitting on it in the open with nothing in front of it. So understand what got sold here. This was never 16 counties. It wasn't real estate. It was a door and he handed over the key and the hinges with it. He agreed to it in 936. By 938, the land was gone and then here's the part that's hard to take. Nothing bad ever happened to him. He ruled six years. He died in 942 at 50 in his own bed. He was one of the only people in this entire story who got out clean. Everybody after him is the one who pays. Now to understand why nobody stopped this, you have to see what 53 years of it actually looked like. Five dynasties, 14 emperors. Here are three of them and you'll have the whole idea. Number one, the man who ended the Tang was a bandit named Zhu Wen. He'd ridden with the rebel Huangchao, switched sides at exactly the right moment and was rewarded by a grateful Tang dynasty court with a new personal great name, Quanzhong, wholeheartedly loyal. He then murdered a Tang emperor, installed a child in his place and in 905 gathered up about 30 of the dynasty's most senior officials, forced them to kill themselves at a river station called Baima and had the bodies thrown into the Yellow River. Seven years later, his own son came into his bedroom and stabbed him to death. Number two, the man who destroyed Zhu Wen's dynasty was Li Cunxu and he was a magnificent soldier. He was also obsessed with theater. He had a stage name, Li Tianxia, Lord of All Under Heaven and he performed under it in front of people. Then he started handing out provincial governships to actors, three of them. Meanwhile, the men who'd followed him through a hundred battles got nothing. In 926, those men mutinied and one of them put an arrow in him. So sad. Number three and then there's Feng Dao. Feng Dao served the later Tang, then the later Jin, then when the Khitan invaded, he served the Khitan, then the later Han, then the later Zhou. Ten rulers across every dynasty in this video and the invaders on top. He never lost a post. He died old, rich and honored. Song dynasty historians have been calling him the most shameless man in Chinese history for a thousand years and you can also make the case that he's the only person here who was paying attention. Ten rulers, five dynasties, one guy. If that doesn't make you want to know how this ends and you're somehow not subscribed, I don't know what to tell you. Hit like and subscribe because it gets worse. Now, 51 years into this, China finally got a good one. Later Zhou, Hou Zhou, the emperor's name is Chairong. You'll see him as Emperor Shizong and he was excellent. He went through his own army and threw out every man who couldn't fight, which is a thing everybody knows you should do and nobody does. He melted down the monastery's bronze into coins. He rewrote the tax rolls. He started pulling the south back in and he did one more thing nobody in 51 years had been willing to do. He looked north at the door and treated it like a wound instead of a fact. 956, he takes an army up there to get it back and he gets part way and then in the field he gets sick and turns the army around and he dies. He was 38. He left a son who was six years old. Four months later, in February of 960, a report comes in that the Khitan are moving south again. So the army marches out to meet them under Chairong's best general, a man named Zhao Kuangyin. 20 miles out of the capital, they make camp at a place called Chenqiao and they don't march any further. The story goes that in the morning, his officers came into his tent, draped a yellow robe over his shoulders, the emperor's color, and told him they needed a master. Now historians will tell you the robe was almost certainly added later to make an organized coup look like an accident of loyalty. Either way, he rode back to Kaifeng. The six-year-old abdicated and that is the Song dynasty. The Song inherited everything Chairong built and none of the time he needed. And then the bill came. 979, the second Song emperor goes after the door himself. He gets as far as the walls of the city we now call Beijing and the It's a route. He leaves the battlefield in a cart with an arrow wound and he never really recovers from it. 986, he tries again. Three armies, three directions, one plan. All three lose. 1005, and that's it. That's the end of trying. The Song signed the Treaty of Changyuan and the terms are these. 200,000 bolts of silk and 100,000 tails of silver paid to the Khitan every year. And the two emperors will address each other as brothers. So the richest, most sophisticated, most productive empire on the planet is now renting its own front door annually from the people Shi Jingtang gave it to. 1127, the Jurchen come through those same passes. They take Kaifeng. They take the emperor. They take the retired emperor as well. And both of them die in captivity in the north. The Song run south of the Yangtze River and they never come back. 1368, a Ming dynasty army rides into Beijing. And for the first time since a general sat down to write a letter, the door is Chinese again. 432 years. So the five dynasties, it isn't the boring part between the Tang dynasty and the Song dynasty. It's the part where the bill got signed. Everything you already know about the Song, how rich they were, how much art and poetry and porcelain came out of them, how they could never hold down their own north and in the end didn't hold anything at all. That isn't a Song problem. That's a debt they inherited from a man who had been dead for 18 years before their dynasty existed. And the puppet emperor word China made for him is still in the dictionary today. If you know somebody who thinks Chinese history is just a list of dynasties you're supposed to memorize, send them this one. It'll fix that in about 12 minutes. One more thing. This whole video I stayed away from the 10 kingdoms down south. There's a reason. The last of them had a king who was terrible at being a king. And the greatest poet China ever produced, arguably, the Song took his country, took his palace and gave him a title that translates to Marquess of Disobedience. Then they let him keep writing. He wrote a few sentences about an autumn moon that every Chinese school child still knows today. And the story goes that those few lines are what killed him. That's the video on your screen right now. And it's going up for the mid-autumn festival. Click it to watch. And until next time, Zaijian!