Dr. Ken Swope is a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. He studies and writes on the imperial and military history of East Asia. In this podcast, I interview him about his upcoming book On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China During the Ming-Qing Transition.

1:27 – Dr. Ken Swope discusses how he started writing history. He studied Chinese history from the 16th and 17th century and has mainly written on that period.

2:47 – He discusses the origination of the current book which grew out of his research on previous books on Chinese history. He’s used obscure materials for research that not many people know about.

4:32 – The subject of this book is a person nicknamed the Yellow Tiger, a legendary figure associated with peasant rebellions against the Ming Dynasty. Follow on rebellions were very bloody. His own adopted sons become the defenders of the Ming Dynasty against the Manchus.

7:32 – Ken Swope then discusses what made the Ming Dynasty weak and susceptible to rebellion. Much was written in his previous books. Court intrigue contributed to the weakness. At the same time the Manchus were on the rise in the early 1600s. They also suffered climate change that caused epidemics and famine. Many rebels had been part of the postal service and when they were laid off they became bandits.

11:47 – Many of the peasant rebels were literate. China had very high literacy rates in this historical period. Silver from the Americas helped feed Chinese trade.

13:50 – Communications at the time was weak and the rebels could hide in places the government couldn’t reach. The Mings also had been involved in many wars and were taxing people too much. But they still had a huge army in comparison to the rebels. They also used eunuchs to collect taxes for the Emperor.

17:13 – Ken Swope says that the main theme of the book is the effects of war on society. The trauma and changes it creates. Uprisings in the southwest area of China are common and they experience lots of conflict and disruption.

19:12 – He had many resources to go to for research. There were many collected records for the period. Many people wrote things down at the time. Memoirs, diaries, battlefield reports, imperial proclamations, foreign accounts, “wild” histories, and family chronicles.

Lots of the materials were compiled during the Ching period. Other items were compiled in the 19th and 20th centuries.

22:47 – He came across some interesting artifacts. He found an interesting [tomb] grave in an obscure area. He found a public park with steles that had pictures of old heroes and their execution sites. He found the spot where the last Ming Emperor was executed. There was also a big naval battle in 1647 and many artifacts, maybe 30,000, have been found in the river where it happened. Ken Swope did a paper on this find.

27:32 – The old documents are written in classical Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong still use traditional characters. It’s a difficult form of Chinese to read. Some of the manuscripts are handwritten which makes them more difficult to read.

30: 10 – Ken Swope most enjoyed looking at documents that only a handful of people have ever read in 400 years. The battlefield sites were also very interesting to see including a famous pass to Chongching. The weapons and historic homes were interesting to see. But there’s not a lot of battlefield preservation in China.

32:18 – He was most surprised by the frank discussions that people had at the time about life in China. People were worried about the poor and being away from home. There were also many rural folk tales about ghosts and evil spirits.   During times of chaos people say the spirit world is out of hand too.

37:00 – Both armies created and read omens during fighting. For example,