Professor Andrew Meyer

It's just west of Shanghai, which is the largest Chinese-speaking city in the world.

But during that time, that region south of the Yangtze River, the people there were not really Chinese in any meaningful sense of the word.

They didn't speak Chinese.

So in the minds of elites in the Zhou realm, this ruler was a barbarian.

and he was given this ancient title of Lord Protector.

That would be shocking enough, but less than 10 years later, one of his own vassals,

the ruler of a state called Yue, which was about 100 kilometers away, he destroys the kingdom of Wu.

He rebels against his former sovereign, traps him in his own capital, forces him to commit suicide, burns his temples to the ground, annexes his territory, erases his state from the map, and then has enough power to force the Zhou king to give him the same title that used to be held by the man he just killed.

So it's just a completely unthinkable event.

Within the traditional framework of people living in the Joe realm, if you become the Lord Protector, your state should be very powerful and very wealthy and very secure for the next 100, 200, 300 years.

So for this southern state, this barbarian state, to become Lord Protector and then get erased from the map and replaced by another barbarian, it was just unthinkable.

And it was a sign that we don't know what's going to happen next.

If this can happen, virtually anything can happen.

Well, that's the Third Great Crisis, again, happening within a few decades.

The sub-feudal families, the noble clans in Jin are watching what happened in Qi, and they're thinking, well, the regional clans, the sub-feudal clans in Qi, they don't really have to listen to the duke anymore.

They're fighting with one another all the time.

They're swallowing one another's estates.

This one clan called the Zhi clan replicate the feat that the Tian clan had been able to do in Qi.

He tries to establish sort of uncontested hegemony over the state of Jin.

He fails.