Ordos City

In 119 BC, Huo Qubing served as one of the two principal commanders alongside Wei Qing in a major northern military campaign against the Xiongnu in their home country.

Huo Qubing led his army across the Ordos region and into the Eurasian steppe, deep into Xiongnu territory, scoring repeated victories.

These victories reshaped the geopolitics of northwestern China.

By securing the Hexi Corridor, opening safe passage toward the western regions, Huo Qubing helped lay the foundations for a century of Han expansion and prosperity, earning him a place among the most celebrated generals in Chinese history.

interesting.

When you're talking about the format, it made me think last year I was in Ordos in Inner Mongolia, which was previously known as the big ghost city, right? It's a very interesting place.

But one of the places that I went to go visit was this... almost forbidden palace.

It was huge.

The Qin had already built a rammed earth or hangtu wall that served its fundamental purpose in keeping the wrong on the other side.

Over in Zhao, they too had built up these rammed earth walls around Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, along the Yellow River and Ordos region.

To the east of Zhao was Yan.

The last of the three major walls built during this pre-Qin dynasty period was built by their engineers and stretched from parts of Hebei to Liaoning.

The general given command of this enormous undertaking was a man named Meng Tian, one of the Qin Empire's most trusted military commanders.

Meng Tian had already led a large Qin army north to push the Xiongnu Confederation back from the fertile bend of the Yellow River, a region known as the Ordos, reclaiming that territory for the new empire.

With the Xiongnu push back, Meng Tian turned his enormous army, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, toward the work of construction.

Under his direction, soldiers, conscripted laborers, And convicted criminals, sentenced to hard labour, worked for years connecting and extending the old state walls into a single defensive system, stretching thousands of miles across some of the harshest and most remote terrain in the far region.

China, despite promising help and sending a few thousand men so far, could still in reality do very little.

The Ordos rebellion was still burning through Northern China.

The Wanli emperor knew this, but also knew he couldn't wait for everything to shake out before sending help to Korea.

The Jurchens in Manchuria were offering Korea help as well, because they had long wanted to conquer parts of Korea and clearly saw this as an opening.

[laughs]

It's been rolling around in my head for the past three minutes.

minutes.But the reason why China has abandoned this is because the Ordos campaign was all but over, and 40,000 men under the commander Li Rusong had been freed from the fighting and had been ordered to go to Korea as fast as possible.

I will say really quickly, Tom, if you change the lyrics slightly, you could make Send Courtiers Guns and Money, and that song does in fact-

4,300-Year-Old Tomb Reveals Earliest Dragon-Phoenix Pairing Archaeologists in Inner Mongolia have uncovered the earliest clearly recognizable pairing of dragon and phoenix figures yet found in northern China.

The clay figurines came from a 4,300-year-old tomb at the Thaisita Stone City site in Junger Banner, Ordo City.

Radiocarbon dating place is the burial around 2300 BC, during the Middle to Late Yangtsingdian culture within the broader Longshan cultural horizon.

The rectangular earthen pit tomb contained an individual buried face-up with limbs extended and head-oriented northeast.

However, it's not as though the Chinese could exactly leap into action.

There was the Ordos rebellion going, tearing through Northern China where...

This is a very confusing rebellion.

It's another example of the unifying theory of fuck that guy that we always talk about.