Dan Snow
speaker
15,236 appearances
105 recordings
11 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard yesterday
Dan Snow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 102 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 24.
Appearances
Why do they come to an end?
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Why do the Chinese retreat from these and don't build well the kind of European trading and then colonial empire that does emerge shortly after that?
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Well,
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While Ming power might have seemed absolutely unstoppable on these distant shores, cracks were beginning to show within the palace walls, even in the decades just after the death of the Yongle Emperor in 1424.
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The imperial court became increasingly consumed by political intrigue.
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Officials and powerful palace eunuchs competed for influence, rival factions grew more and more suspicious of one another.
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But the Ming did survive these early crises.
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In fact it would endure for another two centuries.
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But as the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth century,
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And the sixteenth, the seventeenth, those pressures would mount.
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The political fighting continued at court.
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While powerful enemies rose to threaten China's frontiers, wars would place great pressure on imperial finances.
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By the early 1600s, the Ming faced a really very dangerous combination of all these crises.
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Financial instability, harvest failure, an increasingly hostile climate.
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External enemies.
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After nearly three centuries in power, the Ming Dynasty was entering its final
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And most dangerous chapter.
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Jeremiah, at the dawn of the seventeenth century
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the Ming are not super effective anymore and they get smashed with real world events.
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In sixteen twenty seven a new emperor took the throne.
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Showing 381–400 of 15,236 · page 20 of 762
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