Professor Andrew Meyer

Thank you so much.

It's really a great pleasure to be here.

I do.

I think a lot of people in my field would agree.

We aren't accustomed to thinking of things that happened quite that long ago as revolutions, which we should still consider as impacting the state of our world today.

But I would argue that the Warring States merits that kind of consideration.

I think one of the simplest reasons is that there just aren't many sources that readers can turn to to learn about this.

There are some good scholarly treatments in English, but there really hasn't been a detailed

chronicle of this period made available for general readers and you know people can't really be blamed for not knowing about something that you can't really read about and there are other reasons of course too there's a general unfamiliarity with some of the details of chinese culture and chinese history and again there are complex reasons for that for why that's so

in the English-speaking world.

I begin the story in 481 BC.

All historians are not agreed on that date as a starting point.

I cribbed it from Liu Zuchen, who's a Chinese literatus from the 12th century, but others have followed him and I followed him

I started with this coup in the state of Qi that took place just two years before Confucius died.

And then, you know, everyone's agreed on when the warring states end.

They end when the first emperor, he's the king of one of the seven great warring states.

His state of Qin conquers the other six, and he founds the unified Qin dynasty in 221 BC.

So that gives us a sort of a neat...

Time frame 481 to 221, that's exactly 261 years.

I think it's quite surprising to a lot of English language readers.