EARLY EPISODE: The Taiping Rebellion Part 2: Working in the Dog Blood Factory

The Heavenly King in Yellow is honestly a pretty apt portent of things to come

All I can picture is the raft from Snowcrash.

Fun fact: the Yangtze river dam shift so much mass before and after its construction, it makes a day 0.00000006 seconds longer by slowing the earth rotation down.

Also, not to criticize pronunciation, but it would be very kind to some ears if “quan” in Hong’s name can simply be pronounced like “chuan” in “Szechuan sauce” instead of “Kuan”… please excuse me.

Muslims are tolerated by Taipingdao beacause of shared strict ban of idolatry (catholic icons and Protestant’s paintings of Jesus are considered idol)Muslims are considered kind of a “man of book” by Taipingdao

Hey joe. Just wanted to let you know that me and my friends set a bag of shit on fire and put it on someone’s doorstep when we were teenagers. That was in about 2015 or 2016. Hopefully this puts your faith back in the younger generation 🙏

Okay so don't do this but the basic idea is that one of the most common ways to make nitrate back in the day was peeing on straw, so I guess these guys are using dog blood as their nitrogen source and horse manure as their "straw" since horses don't break down cellulose the way cows do. As far as the bricks, some minerals do contain sulfur so I guess that could be their sulfur source? Also I don't know why they didn't just pee on straw like normal 19th century people but I assume the whole cult thing had something to do with it.

“Every episode gets progressively worse” and that is 100% certified Joe guarantee! It’ll get worse (horn blaring sound, yells “He said the thing!”, celebratory gunshots) or your money back!

Insofar as pronunciation matters, Q in Chinese is usually a Ch sound, like in cheese. Ch is also a Ch sound, but that has other implications for the vowel that follows it that I can’t explain quickly. So Qing would be pronounced “Ching”. Also, I knew the Taiping rebellion happened, but I don’t think I ever knew how genocidey it got.

Yaaaay