We’ve made it to 100 episodes! So let’s throw it open to some questions.

* Transcript

* Comparison of ROTK with Game of Thrones

Transcript

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Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast 100th episode extravaganza.

Yes, I know, we’re only at episode 92 in the narrative, but counting the seven supplemental episodes I’ve done, this IS the 100th episode since we began our podcast journey through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I know I’ve said this before, but thank you all for your support of this podcast. Knowing that more and more people are checking out the show and discovering the novel through it is a huge part of what keeps me doing this. I love all the comments you’ve sent, so keep them coming.

With the podcast celebrating its 100th episode, I figured that’s as good an excuse as any to pause the narrative for a day and mark the occasion with a question-and-answer session. A number of you have sent in questions, to which I have some long-winded answers, as the length of this episode suggests. So let’s get to it.

 

Listener Kyle asked, and I’m paraphrasing a bit here: What happens after the Three Kingdoms period?

To answer this question without giving away too many spoilers for those of you who don’t know how the novel ends, I’m going to refrain from talking about how the Three Kingdoms period ended or who ultimately came out on top, and just focus on what happened afterward.

Actually, the novel kind of gives away the ending anyway with its first line: Ever since antiquity, domains under heaven, after a long period of division, tend to unite. The Three Kingdoms period officially ended in the year 280, almost 100 years after when the novel began, and the empire was reconsolidated under the rule of the Jin (4) Dynasty. However, the Jin was not one of the more long-lasting dynasties in Chinese history. It had problems from the beginning. The government was corrupt, and its ranks were filled with officials who received their positions because they were close with the ruling family rather than anything having to do with talent, skills, or character.

The trouble ran all the way to the top of the regime. The founding emperor of the Jin Dynasty more or less just inherited his enterprise, so he wasn’t someone who had to fight for everything he got, like a Cao Cao or Liu Bei. He listened to sycophants and was way too fond of women. In fact, he actually banned everyone in the empire from getting married for a whole year so that he could have his pick of all the pretty young girls in the realm for his palace. When things were this bad at the top, you can imagine how that trickled down through the ranks. Truly, the entire governing apparatus was just rotting from the inside out.

Things got worse when this founding emperor died. He only had one living son, so he named that son as the heir apparent. However, this son had a developmental disability and really was not up to the task of governing. The founding emperor placed him in the hands of a trusted regent, but as soon as the founding emperor breathed his last in the year 290 — 10 years after the empire was reunited — things started to hit the fan.

The new emperor, the one with the developmental disability, became a mere puppet, and his 17-year reign was marked by one power struggle after another between various factions vying to play the puppeteer. One of those factions was his wife, who lived up to every wicked female trope in Chinese history and literature as she vici...