Monday, June 25, 2012

OMG Sick as a Sick Person

Howdy, you wonderful nerds.

I am tooooo goddamn sick to blog right now. I'm sorry.







Speaking of sickness, did you know that the Ming Dynasty in China (1368-1644) was only founded because  a widespread and devastating disease ravaged the country?


Before about 1360 the Mongols had been ruling China under the name of the "Yuan" dynasty. The Chinese were not exactly fond of foreign rule. They weren't any fonder of the contempt and disregard that a lot of the Mongol elite held for them. They would have liked to have thrown the Mongols out but so far they had not because the Mongols had a habit of killing anyone who tried to throw them anywhere.


Well that's when the plague rolled on in. Chinese and Mongol alike started ti die from it. Things got grim and people began to lose hope. Then, since the Chinese folks had decided that they would probably die anyway, they might as well kill a few Mongols while doing it, and the whole country rose up in revolt. The Mongols killed as many as they could, but they had been hit by the plague too. There were a LOT more Chinese people than there were Mongol people, so the Mongols were quickly thrown out.


The head of the Chinese army that triumphed over the Mongols had been an illiterate peasant with a pig-face and plague scars. He was not exactly a vision of heavenly Imperial rule, so to counteract that fact, he named his dynasty Ming, meaning "Bright."




Moral of the story: don't get sick if you're Mongolian.

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