Far East 1628

If you were to travel back to the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1628, what would you do? The Jurchen barbarians outside the Great Wall had risen, and in twenty years they would march into the Great Wall, leaving hundreds of millions of Han Chinese dead at the hands of foreigners. The Ten Days of Yangzhou, the Three Massacres of Jiaxing, the "Retain Your Hair, Lose Your Head" policy, the literary inquisition, and nearly two hundred years of isolation from the outside world, countless humiliating treaties, preferring friendship to domestic slavery, and ceding 1.74 million square kilometers of territory, an area roughly three times the size of France. China, despite its resources and the goodwill of its neighbors, paid 1.95 billion taels of silver in compensation to the powerful nations, a world record, but not a glorious one. [Tea Head]