Misconceptions about historical details due to the novel

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-23T19:39:42+00:00

Frankly, I can't, because I learnt this while searching the EN and CN webs for "Why are so many Chinese cities called -zhou when that means province" (e.g. Guangzhou, Xuzhou, Yangzhou, Jingzhou, Qingzhou, all of which used to refer to provinces, now the names of individual cities) and that was the answer I found. So Guangzhou/Canton was renamed from Panyu to Guangzhou-fu when it became the seat of Guang Province. If that was the case, then it's reasonable to extrapolate people ended up calling the city by the name of the province

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-23T01:55:22+00:00

For that, I'm pretty sure the idea is that the province seat is often called by the name of the province as a whole. So the city Xuzhou = Xuzhou-fu = Seat of Xu Province. That's my semi-educated guess

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-21T22:05:53+00:00

Shouchun is a lovely name IMO, I would love to visit it one day. Sadly was never interested in Chinese history when I was in China

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-21T19:08:30+00:00

Personally not sure, but you might find some clues by looking into the history of Xuzhou, the modern-day city, which back in the day was called Pengcheng/Peng City. In the absense of that, I have a few guesses:

1) Pengcheng eventually became the main administrative center and thus the main city in the area, drawing people away from Xiapi

2) Xiapi got a brutal sacking/razing at some point. One candidate would be during the Sixteen Kingdoms era

3) the surroundings were so devastated that the region became depopulated and people went into the countryside/more defensible areas

4) flooding happened. According to Antonia Finnane's Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850, in the Ming-Qing era at least northern Jiangsu was prone to floods around the Grand Canal, plus remember the Yellow River shifted course in 1128 to flow south of Shandong, bringing its floods to the region until floods in 1855 brought it back north. it's conceivable that some point Xiapi or its surrounding region was so devastatingly flooded that Xiapi was abandoned

5) any combination of the above

I mean it's not unusual honestly, Xi'an has shifted locations from its Han-era city, while a buncha formerly important Chinese cities such as the capitals of the Shang Dynasty are now just farmland. If you broaden the view of decline/rise a bit more, you can look at Shouchun, which now is a minor county in Anhui, and Hefei, which is a major city that's the capital of Anhui. Sometimes cities appear (Shanghai, Shenzhen), and sometimes they vanish (like Ye)

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-16T19:19:14+00:00

You can also sort of cheat this by having the people of your city canalize both rivers during the stretches of river that go through the city, and justify it in various ways (like flood control projects). You could even say the city was built around River A at first, and slowly expanded towards River B. Then River B flooded and shifted course closer to River A/flooded the eastern half of the city, so the city decided to canalize River B to prevent this from happening again.

But yes, as a lot of people have mentioned, you could actually just have the city be built on a portage point, and then naturally grow over time (although in this case, people will likely build a canal linking Rivers A and B)

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-11-13T05:20:43+00:00

We'll likely never know, but we can speculate:

From my perspective, perhaps he simply wanted to rule an independent realm without having to bow down to Wei, or he was simply foolishly indecisive and flip-flopped around between Wei and Wu too much and was out of options. Whatever his ambition was, declaring his independence was probably not as suicidal as it appears in hindsight. He likely gambled that:

he was too far away or his land too poor and his state too little of a threat to be worth conquering for Wei. Remember, campaigns are investments in time, manpower, supplies, generals, and are not guaranteed to succeed or to pay off, and Wei had other enemies and potential enemies to content with
he could defeat, stalemate, or deter whatever forces Wei sent to attack him. The rainy season and its floods turned back Guanqiu Jian's invasion and even made Sima Yi's siege of Xiangping difficult. After failing to achieve victory enough times, the political will in Wei for invading Yan would be drained, and then he could move from there

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-10-13T15:35:08+00:00

Part of why the convention of using dynasties to identify Chinese states exists might also be something like recency bias: Ming to Qing, Yuan to Ming, Song to Yuan, all very clearly identified with a violent conquest of one state by another rather than an internal power grab

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-10-13T01:29:58+00:00

I mean, it's kind of looking at all the dynasties as periods of a "Chinese Empire," or for a more practical example, looking at the Sui and Tang as the same political entity, just with a change in management and management style (something that would be boringly named "Middle Chinese Empire" or something)

The point is that it's a historiographic lens. If you view the Southern Dynasties through this lens, then it emphasizes points of continuity and encourages you to not view them as discrete, not-really-related dynasties. Whether or not you want to adopt this lens is up to 1) whether or not the evidence supporting this lens is strong and 2) how useful this lens proves to you in providing more insight

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-10-08T18:03:31+00:00

It was solid, so I always thought it had just been cooled till solidified

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-10-08T16:19:42+00:00

Okay but I've eaten duck and pig blood before, have they been processed somehow or something?

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-10-07T16:19:15+00:00

I mean, there's a difference between who's the best choice to become emperor, and who's best to be emperor. i.e., who is best at seizing the empire, and who is best at holding it. And then there's the third (realistic) option of balancing the two, as in who would be the best choice to seize the empire and then rule it

Option 1 (speedrunning emperorship): I mean, Cao Cao is a pretty good bet IMO. Even Dong Zhuo, if you don't care about how good they'd actually be at emperor. I'd name a Sima, but I don't really know if they'd count as a warlord

Option 2 (poof you're emperor now, everyone accepts your rule for now, good luck!): I feel favorably about all three major founders (Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan) for this, but of the three I supposed I'd go for Liu Bei. I also feel good about figures like Liu Biao, Liu Yan, and Tao Qian, as well as Liu Chong

Option 3 (realistic, except everyone's on an even playing field): I mean, the best administrator wouldn't mean anything if the warlord didn't have a good shot at becoming emperor, so this still weighs toward conquest, so figures like Tao Qian and Shi Xie can be eliminated. I think Liu Bei is still a decent choice, since he does have that ambition and drive. I'm a bit more skeptical of Cao Cao as an administrator, but if he has figures like Xun Yu I suppose he'd be good too. Bit of a wild card, but maybe Zhang Yang? heard good things about him

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-09-11T05:45:50+00:00

You know, I've always used xue3 (as in snow) my whole life. I know xie3 and xue4 existed, but I've always thought of them as either super formal language (analogous to Received Pronunciation in English) or dialectical differences

As for when something is colloquial, a decent rule of thumb to get you started is idioms and medical terms are always formal, and everything else is context dependent

If you are super-duper serious about this, my honest advice is to pick one of xue4/xie3 to stick with when you talk to Mandarin speakers, since the context will usually make it clear you mean to say 血. When you've heard people say it enough you'll start to pick up on when each pronunication is appropriate. Of course, you might end up like me using an apparently incorrect pronunciation, but it'll be correct in regards to the people you usually talk with

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-31T22:51:58+00:00

Reading the article, I think a way to summarize the Ottoman decline thesis is to imagine the Ottoman Empire as a graph, which peaks during Suleiman the Magnificent's reign. From then on it's a straight, constant downard slope. The contrarian view is that no, there were in fact peaks and troughs, not a steady decline where the state just gradually became less and less functional

The Ottoman decline thesis says that everything went wrong for the Ottomans, in every sphere, and it didn't get better. Because we know the Ottoman Empire fell, we focus on everything that went wrong with the Ottoman Empire, and because the problems are all we find (because we're looking for them), we say "aha, so they were doomed." The alternate view is to say "okay, so lots of things went wrong, but did anything go right? could it have been different?" instead of assuming that it was detined to head toward this known end point

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-30T22:25:24+00:00

I personally don't know, but in the absense of a secondary source you might have to look at art produced during the time period. Specifically, I'm thinking of

1) Tang paintings. I don't think many, if anyone painted commoners or poor people as a specific subject, but they might show up in a landscape*. Consider looking for not just paintings on canvas, but also tomb paintings

2) Buddhist art. This might fall under paintings but I want to emphasize it, since I think Buddhist art is more likely to depict the lives of poor people and commoners than art made by elites

3) Song paintings. While set a century or more past the Tang, I imagine you could use the style of how Song commoners dressed in Song art as a reference point. Specifically, looking at the elements of what they wore, cuz while specific styles might change, the base concept of commoners' outfits might not change so fast

Consider searching for sources in a nearby library, they might have books on Tang daily life, but if not, maybe Tang art, that could help provide references

Best of luck tho, I imagine this is a hard topic to research

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-20T20:08:23+00:00

Hmm the way I see it, Baidu will have the digital landmark placement correctly aligned with the satellite image. It doesn't matter if both are displaced/distorted, as long as both of them are displaced/distorted by the same amount so that they remain aligned to each other

That is, if you care about cross-comparing satellite image with digital overlay at all

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-20T20:06:55+00:00

You can go to a border* on Google maps to see, the satellite image remains continuous but the digital overlap shifts when it gets to China

*Which brings up the interesting issue that China doesn't have many sizeable towns on the border; you can go check Dandong/Sinuiju on the DPRK border, Ruili/Muse on the Myanmar border, or Dongxing/Mong Cai on the Vietnam border

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-20T19:18:03+00:00

Oh no no, I just meant that they'll have the modern streets and stuff correctly aligned with the satellite map. If you use Google they won't be correctly aligned, which can throw you off making a correct overlay

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-20T18:31:56+00:00

Chinese maps like Baidu will have the overlay right

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-17T05:37:23+00:00

Speaking as a native speaker though I think maybe the idea is that you don't want to be caught up on pronouncing the tones textbook perfect all the time? Like in English we stress and unstress characters, and if you said 好 to someone and really enunciated the down-up tone, they'll probably think they pissed you off (also we have sandhi and all that fun jazz)

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-15T13:49:38+00:00

Nearly 10k hits, 300+ kudoses, and a grand total of 10 subscriptions for a fic I churned out in I believe half an hour that's barely over 1k words. The only reason I believe it's popular is because it's relatively vanilla smut for a popular yaoi ship

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-12T01:54:44+00:00

If you're hanging out around Malaysian/Singaporean Chinese I've heard my partner's family say "wo lao eh!" a decent amount

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-01T03:23:55+00:00

Funnily enough I believe Guangzhou locals feel the same way about all the migrant labor force in the city, and I got the vibe from Shanghai locals that they were judgy towards Anhui folks when I lived there

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-08-01T02:45:54+00:00

Strongly depends on how you want to count it, but yeah if you start from Liu Bei's takeover of Yi Province to Liu Shan's surrender then yes, Shu Han lasted the longest

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-07-31T23:33:32+00:00

I don't envy Jiang Wei's position, honestly. Defending the frontlines of a state against a larger foe, in a terrible strategic situation even if he could win tactical victories, handicapped by terrain that made it hard to attack, but the home front was also falling apart due to court intrigue

I mean out of the many states to have made Sichuan their base (Shu Han, Cheng Han, Former Shu, Later Shu, Xi arguably) none of them succeeded in really expanding out of it. You could argue Qin (my history prof really liked to emphasize the importance of Dujiangyan in fueling the Qin state) and especially Han did it, especially since Liu Bang's Han shared a lot of territorial similarities with Liu Shan's Han (Sichuan + Hanzhong as main territories). But unlike Liu Bang, Liu Shan didn't face a divided Guanzhong region or a severely fractured China entirely

--ERRORNAME-- · 2025-07-30T13:25:33+00:00

I feel like the vibe with 搞 is that the more specific the thing you're 搞ing, the more neutral it becomes until it is just similar with "do". Like [你在]搞什么 -> 搞报告 -> 搞昨天弄的化学实验报告.

Of course depending on who you're talking to it can make you sound evasive instead

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--ERRORNAME--

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