Jin dynasty

Now, Chan Buddhist tradition holds that their founder came to China from India during the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties, fifth or sixth century AD.

This is a period of Chinese history that follows the downfall of the Han and then the Jin dynasty respectively.

It's characterized by a collapse of the central government.

China is literally split into north and south.

After all these years of fighting and after Wu's final conquest of Yue in 473 BC, the Wu and the Yue sort of merged and the cultures of the two states melded into one.

There wasn't any kind of mass migration like we'll see later in the early 4th century when the Jin Dynasty in the West starts to implode.

But with the absorption of Wu into China proper, Han Chinese from Henan, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong and thereabouts continued this migration to the New South.

And as I said, the former Wu State was like the California or Florida of its day.

But it's a 60-year period where they're essentially competing for who's going to rule.

And it's going to be the Jin Dynasty that's going to emerge after this.

And what I noted with the, you already mentioned the big, the big characters that are lionized in the, in the romance of the three kingdoms.

The one thing I noted here was that throughout the romance of the three kingdoms and the legends around this time, the game of go appears everywhere.

But you have the same thing here.

The difference is, where America's Civil War was four years, China, of course, being China, it has to be 60.

So let's get into the Jin Dynasty then.

We'll let this play.

And just like how ancient Christian apocalypses used coded language, like 666, to refer to political figures like Nero, Daoist apocalypses used codes and ciphers to dance around politically fraught topics.

For example, the phrase golden horse, or jinma, is used by several Daoist apocalypses to refer to the Jin dynasty, whose ruling family was the Sima's and which was associated with jin, or metal, according to the rules of Chinese correlative cosmology.

So when one of these scriptures talks about the end of the golden horse's tail, it's really discussing the end of the Jin dynasty.

Sneaky, right? Even the name Li Hong was written in coded language.

Rather than writing the actual characters, they broke them down to what's called its radicals, building blocks of Chinese characters, or simpler components or elements that combine to form more complex characters.