This one forced me to look up a million fucking place names, but I still love it because it's so atmospheric. You absolutely get the sense of panic in Wei as the Qin armies advance. (Qin did eventually flood Daliang to conquer it incidentally, which must have looked epic.)
Also: we don't actually know a lot about what was going on inside the Han family round about these times, but what we do know makes it feel like it must have been super chaotic and baroque. I have no clue who the lady running things in this story was or why she was there.
I guess she was probably a regent for King Huanhui, who would go on to accidentally provoke the Battle of Changping and initiate the construction of the Zhengguo Canal. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Guo
He also spent much of the mid part of the century red penning Han Fei's essays, so he's a good bet for being the (unnamed) target of the Gu Fen as well. www2.iath.virginia.edu:8080/exist/cocoon/x…
So... Chinese territory. Of course China has always had a wealth of words for territory (地,疆土,境内 etc.) going all the way back to the earliest texts, and anyone who says otherwise is talking nonsense. But...
They also had a somewhat different idea of how territory worked than was current in Europe and the Anglo world, and that's actually a pretty interesting topic, so strap in.
In traditional Anglo/Euro visions of politics, power is a protection racket: you give me money and I'll use my army to make sure no one else demands any. In traditional Chinese visions of politics, power is a corporation: you give me money and I'll increase your ROI.
This is actually a really nice intro to the different schools of thought (Chinese only, sorry). I'm consistently impressed by how clear, concise and well put-together modern Chinese history shows/textbooks/syllabuses are.
Sure, you've got 3 minutes of obligatory patriotic exhortations at the end of every show, but politics doesn't seep relentlessly into all content, unlike in *certain countries*.
(Shang Yang's reforms are covered in the next show, I assume on the basis that if an idea actually works it's not philosophy any more, just reality.)
Notice something? These are all from the Han Dynasty or later. Qin gets portrayed as a sort of bronze age North Korea (especially by Han writers - just fancy that), but actually its legal system was surprisingly woke and frequently far more lenient than what followed...
For one thing, they tended not to see crime as a moral failing, but just as something that anyone would do if the incentives were right. This robbed legal proceedings of much of the hysterical outrage inherent in them even today.
Secondly, while the central authorities did not trust their citizens, they trusted their bureaucrats even less. The result was that the burden of proof was high and the appeals process strictly upheld...