Professor Andrew Meyer

That's really one of the things that makes this so significant.

And the reason he gets away with it scot-free is that he now has control of half the arable land of Qi, right?

At this point, he has such a large critical mass of wealth and power that he's able to buy everybody off.

You know, he just basically pays everyone off to say, no, go away, forget what the king said.

When the dust settles, he's still the prime minister, he's still in control of the Qi court, and he passes the prime ministerial seat to his own son.

In effect, the position of prime minister of Qi becomes the hereditary entitlement of his clan.

There are three very traumatic events that alert elites throughout the Zhou world that we're living on a different planet now, that we have to seek fundamentally new kinds of solutions.

Politics is never really going to work along the old lines again.

So the Ku and Xi is one.

Within less than a decade after the Ku and Xi, there's this very, very dramatic geopolitical event that happens in the South.

There's this southern kingdom called Wu.

They're able in, I think, 483 BCE, so just a couple of years before the Ku and Xi, the ruler of Wu is able to force the Zhou king

to grant him this ancient title called Lord Protector.

He's almost a figure analogous to the Shogun in medieval Japan.

The Lord Protector was one of the regional lords who was given a charter by the Zhou king to lead the military forces of the realm.

He's in effect given authority to call up the armed forces of all the regional lords to stave off threats.

And it's a significant event in 483 because the ruler that is given this title, one, his state has only really been around for a hundred years.

And the reason it's only really been around for a hundred years is that he and his people aren't really Chinese.

The capital of this state was on the site of the modern-day city of Suzhou.

Suzhou, of course, is a Chinese city.