HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-04-15T17:39:57.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Michael Wood: "Why Elon Musk should take a lesson from Confucius"
items: Do The Travels of Marco Polo belong in the non-fiction section, or fantasy?
items: Kublai Khan: ruler of the waves
items: Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
items: North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
items: Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China
items: Historians debate: how do intractable conflicts come to an end?
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"
items: Kublai Khan: life of the week
items: What was traded on the Silk Road?

Michael Wood: "Why Elon Musk should take a lesson from Confucius"
type: item
date: 2025-04-21T08:00:08.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: In his latest column, historian Michael Wood looks back on epic medieval Chinese voyages of discovery
encoded: Watching the news on Elon Musk's SpaceX project to make humanity a “multi-planetary species” beginning with a colony on Mars, I found myself reflecting on an earlier moment in history. Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese sent seven great missions to south-east Asia and across the Indian Ocean, visiting the Persian Gulf, India and east Africa. The first fleet alone comprised many dozens of ships and more than 27,000 men. Admiral Zheng He’s fleets included the biggest wooden vessels yet built, dwarfing the tiny ships that later carried Columbus and Magellan. Modern theories that such Ming ‘treasure ships’ could have exceeded 400 feet (122 metres) in length, however, are now rejected by experts; the size of wooden ships was always limited by the length of trees available for the keel. Read more | Dire straits: the story of Ferdinand Magellan's fatal voyage of discovery For sailing in heavy seas, a single, strongly protected, scarf-jointed keel is the most that shipwrights judge acceptable for safety. According to today’s traditional ship- builders in Fujian, this would allow a boat in Chinese junk style to be at most 200–240 feet (61–73 metres) long. These vessels were highly seaworthy: between 1846 and 1848, a traditional Chinese junk, the Keying, sailed to the US and Britain, where it was visited by Queen Victoria. Why Emperor Yongle commanded this enormous expenditure of resources is still the subject of much controversy. Today in China, these journeys are characterised as peaceable missions to display the flag, encourage trade and wield Chinese soft power. But the idea that Zheng He’s expeditions were done for no real political, economic or practical gain seems, on the face of it, unlikely. These routes had long been travelled by Arab navigators, and the Chinese had first visited east Africa as early as the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). In some places, such as the Strait of Malacca, there was a deliberate effort to develop commercial entrepots. For example, Palembang, …

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Do The Travels of Marco Polo belong in the non-fiction section, or fantasy?
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T10:11:34.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Marco Polo’s adventures in Asia in the 13th century earned him everlasting fame, with his very name now synonymous with the excitement of exploration. But are his accounts of his travels essentially works of fiction? Peter Jackson asks if we can trust this medieval travel-writing superstar
encoded: Life had taken a turn for the worse for Rustichello of Pisa. In the dying days of the 13th century, the Italian romance writer found himself locked up as a prisoner of war. Over the previous years, Rustichello had made something of a name for himself as the first author to pen an Arthurian romance in Italian. Yet he had got himself captured while fighting for his native city in the Genoese-Pisan War. And so here he was, denied his freedom, languishing in a Genoese jail. Yet if Rustichello was searching for some sort of salvation, he didn’t have to look far. It lay in the identity of the curious individual with whom he shared his cell. That man began telling Rustichello an extraordinary story. It was a tale of an epic journey to China – of encounters with unimaginably rich and powerful rulers, of strange and exotic lands, of brushes with creatures that would make your heart race and skin crawl. And it triggered in Rustichello an idea. The Italian writer soon saw the potential of turning the memoirs of his well-travelled cellmate into a book. And so he set about writing them up in the default language of medieval romance: Old French, but with a smattering of Italian. The result – The Travels of Marco Polo, or Le Divisament du Monde (‘The Diverse Parts of the World’), as it was originally known – was Rustichello’s crowning achievement. And it would turn his cellmate, Marco Polo, into one of the most famous figures of the entire Middle Ages. Can we trust The Travels of Marco Polo? Le Divisament transformed perceptions of the far east across medieval Europe, introducing generations of readers to a world that they could barely conceive of, let alone visit. But look beyond its remarkable impact, and how much credence should we give to the text that Rustichello committed to paper following his incarceration with Polo? How useful is the book in understanding life in Asia – especially China – in the Middle Ages? In short, can we really trust Marco Polo’s word? Read more | Why…

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Kublai Khan: ruler of the waves
type: item
date: 2024-12-04T08:30:09.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: Magazine
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
description: Jack Weatherford explains how the Mongol leader became the emperor of China – and dominated the sea in the process
encoded: Genghis Khan may have built a formidable land empire, but his grandson Kublai Khan mastered the seas. So how did a nomadic leader come to have such a formidable navy – and conquer China in the process? Emily Briffett spoke to Jack Weatherford about his new book on the subject, Emperor of the Seas, to find out more. Jack Weatherford is the author of Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T14:53:44.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: "The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago," writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: I’m looking out over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heat waves, migrant crises and the atrocious wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One hundred years ago the British empire was at its height. Fifty years ago we were living under the American hegemony. Now the world order that emerged after the Second World War – economic, political and cultural – is shifting, dissolving like a giant kaleidoscope, and a new picture is taking shape. It’s ‘the great global rebalancing’, as diplomat and think-tanker Samir Puri calls it in his new book, Westlessness. It’s a good pun. The truth is the world has been getting increasingly ‘Westless’ for the last decade or two. The talk now is that although the US is still number one, a new order is arising, with a split between the Global North and Global South where the South no longer believes in the West’s hegemonial narrative and all that goes with it. In Beijing, smart thinkers now speak of US decline and China’s inexorable rise. President Xi Jinping says China’s new strength comes from the inherent greatness of Chinese civilisation, freed now from the Century of Humiliation, which stretched from the Opium Wars to 1949. Even in the movies, China bids to take over the world: no Hollywood film was in the box office top 10 in China in 2023. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? There are, of course, those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on. Till the 18th century the powerhouses of human history were the populous heartlands of humanity: China, India, Persia, Byzantium, Rome and the Muslim world. The rise of our modern world has its roots in what my old tutor Michael Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘Barbarian West’, when successive enlightenments, beginning with Charlemagne, s…

North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:40.000Z
creator: Professor Jerry Brotton
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Why did the ancient Chinese associate north with power? What led early Muslims to pray to the south? And what role did winds have to play in our understanding of directions? Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the history of the four points of the compass
encoded: Writing in his philosophical work the New Organon in 1620, the English scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon famously identified China’s three great inventions, “which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Much has been written about the historical impact of printing and gunpowder. But there’s been far less emphasis on the magnet, and how (using lodestones to magnetise iron needles) it enabled the ‘obscure’ invention of the magnetic compass during the Han dynasty in the third century BC. This technology enabled China and, subsequently, other societies to navigate and orientate themselves according to the four points of the compass: north, east, south and west. We tend to think about these directions and the art of navigation as a consequence of the invention of the compass, but this is not in fact the case. The ancient history of direction and its relationship to the magnetic compass is altogether more surprising. How ancient civilisations understood east and west Thousands of years before the discovery of the compass, early human societies observed the sun rising in the direction we now call ‘east’ and watched it setting in the direction now known as ‘west’. East to west was probably the earliest prime axis that people understood by simply watching the sun’s path across the sky. The worship of the sun, or heliolatry, characterised ancient Egyptian worship of solar gods: Horus (the rising sun), Ra (the noon sun) and Osiris (the dying or setting sun). Read more | Sun gods and goddesses: 16 solar deities from world history This initial east-west solar axis was gradually followed by the understanding of another axis. This one ran vertically from north to south, and could be identified by observing the sun and stars. At noon the sun is always due south in the northern hemisphere…

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Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China
type: item
date: 2024-09-19T10:27:47.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: The British Empire
description: Lured by rich trading prospects, Britain attempted numerous times to cultivate relations with China from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Sometimes, they were successful; often, the attempts ended disastrously. Kerry Brown explores the difficult but ultimately vital links between two ambitious realms
encoded: China may feel like an exotic destination to many Britons – far distant and undeniably other, culturally and politically. Yet China’s influence permeates our daily lives. It was where we originally sourced tea, the first advert for which appeared in London as early as 1658. It was where the technology for making porcelain came from, inspiring the likes of Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode. It was where a huge number of flowers now flourishing in our gardens were first found, collected by botanists and explorers from the 18th century onwards. And it has, of course, produced so much of the technology that today fills and powers our homes. Often unappreciated and sometimes tucked out of sight, China’s contributions to British life today are nonetheless tangible – and largely positive. As these examples show, links between the two nations go back centuries. And, despite the fractious tone of the political relationship today, coloured by arguments about Hong Kong, human rights and espionage, much of that history involved people from both places discovering, appreciating and learning from each other. When did the English first make contact with China? The first English efforts to make formal contact with China came during the reign of Elizabeth I, who sent letters to the Chinese imperial court proposing trade. “We are borne and made to have need one of another, and that we are bound to aide one another,” the queen wrote in one missive. None of her letters ever arrived, but China remained on the minds of English traders and merchants. And the East India Company, established in 1599–1600, made launching trade with the far east a key priority. Read more | The voices of China: 5 perspectives on an extraordinary past One of the earliest recorded incidents between the nations relates to an argument in Bantam, west of what’s now Jakarta on the island of Java. A disgruntled trader, Edmund Scott, blamed his Chinese neighbour for a fire that blazed in his warehouse in May 1604. In a…

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Historians debate: how do intractable conflicts come to an end?
type: item
date: 2024-09-13T08:42:00.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Debate
description: History is replete with examples of intractable conflicts – and not just history, as the Israel-Gaza war continues to dominate the headlines. Matt Elton has assembled a panel of historians to discuss the factors that lead to entrenched warfare and what might help resolve them
encoded: With the end of the Israel-Gaza war no closer, I wanted to discuss examples of seemingly intractable conflicts and how they come to an end. What examples from your research would you like to highlight? Rana Mitter: Firstly, we would all hope for a resolution of these conflicts, in the Middle East and elsewhere. What history allows us to do is to look at the longer perspective and understand that sometimes conflicts that have gone on for years or even decades can eventually be resolved, and that sometimes it’s external factors and sometimes it’s internal factors that enable that to happen. As a historian of modern China, I can offer two examples that provide a contrast. One is the relationship between India and China ever since the former gained independence in 1947 and the latter saw the establishment of Chairman Mao’s regime in 1949. Growing tensions between the two came to a head in 1962 with a small but very vicious war, and there have been border disputes ever since. This territorial dispute between the two Asian giants has never actually been resolved because of an issue of geography: there is an area of the Himalayas which is essentially most of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, but which China argues should be Chinese territory. The two sides have never managed to resolve that dispute. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? That’s in contrast with another example in which a seemingly endless conflict did come to an end: China’s war with Vietnam. In February 1979, China and Vietnam went into a short but very bloody war in which tens of thousands were killed on both sides. Across the following decade there were continuing border battles. Eventually, in 1990, a secret conference held in the Chinese city of Chengdu brought a resolution and in 1991, China and Vietnam signed a lasting border agreement. It’s an example of the way in which a resolution can sometimes be found to seemingly intractable conflict. Hannah Skoda: I focus on …

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"
type: item
date: 2024-08-30T09:47:48.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she considers the emotional trauma that historians can endure while researching the most horrific events of the past, and talk about the unspeakable
encoded: I’ve been researching a new project and have just finished one of the most harrowing books I have ever read: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Written in 1997, and drawing on interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Chang chronicled the devastating weeks during the Second Sino-Japanese War in December 1937 when the Imperial Japanese army swept into the ancient Chinese city of Nanking (now called Nanjing). What followed was the systematic rape and torture of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. What is so disturbing about the book is the excruciating detail Chang goes into of the crimes inflicted. I imagine she didn’t shirk from including the specificity of what the victims endured because she wanted to document the horror in its totality, and leave it for the public record. But there were points at which I could not continue reading. The book was a sensation. It made me think of the toll that researching, interviewing survivors, documenting, editing and promoting the book must have had on Chang, as well as the responsibility to do justice to the victims. Years later, in 2004, Chang was working on another book about another Japanese war crime, featuring the stories of Filipinos and Americans forced to travel across the Philippines on the 1942 Bataan Death March. One morning, Chang took her own life at the age of 36, after experiencing depression. It’s impossible to know what connection, if any, there was to her work. Read more | From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma The author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, in his 2024 book Empireworld, considers the impact that reading about colonial violence has on historians who analyse such accounts on an almost daily basis. He quotes James Robins, author of 2020’s When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, who lost the ability to fall comfortably asleep during the five years he spent studying that subject a…

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Kublai Khan: life of the week
type: item
date: 2024-05-07T06:47:38.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Life of the week (podcast series)
description: Nicholas Morton explores the life of a mighty Mongol emperor who left an indelible mark on 13th-century China
encoded: Kublai Khan will go down in history as the man who cemented the Mongol empire's status as the one of the mightiest powers in the world – and changed the course of Chinese history in the process. In our latest Life of the Week episode, Nicholas Morton tells Spencer Mizen how this hugely capable leader built on the achievements of his grandfather Genghis.

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What was traded on the Silk Road?
type: item
date: 2024-03-18T17:55:18.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: It should go without saying that silk was traded along the Silk Road, but this ancient web of routes between China and the West brought plenty of other commodities too – not to mention new ideas. Rebecca Franks finds out more from Dr Sam Willis about the key goods traded on the famed 'road'…
encoded: One of the key goods traded along the Silk Road, a network of interconnected trade routes that ran for some 4,000 miles from China to Europe, was silk. That might sound glaringly obvious, but the Silk Road – which was established in 130 BC by the Chinese Han Dynasty and active until the 15th century – did not go by that name at the time. It was only centuries later when, in 1877, the term was coined by German geographer, traveller and scientist Ferdinand von Richthofen. And despite its famed moniker, silk was far from the only valuable resource to be transported on the long journey from east to west. “It’s more a kind of an inspirational clue to make you think about all the other things that could be traded,” says historian Dr Sam Willis. On the podcast | The Silk Road: everything you wanted to know Why was silk so important to the Silk Road? Silk farming, or sericulture, was an ancient skill perfected by the Chinese, the only people in the world who knew how to produce this remarkable material for thousands of years. “Legend has it that [the secret] was discovered by a princess who was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her tea and began to unravel,” according to Willis, who was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “And from that, she realised that there was this incredible strand of material which could be woven.” The industry involved growing silkworms, keeping them fed with mulberry leaves, and then cultivating the raw silk, which could then be worked into strong, beautiful textiles. “The Chinese were the only people who knew how to farm it, they knew how to weave it and how to work it,” Willis explains. Among the fine finished products were silk coats and silk dresses, sold by Chinese merchants to the West, and in increasing numbers as demand rose. The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they …

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