Things About the Fifth Generation

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms are the most underestimated and misunderstood centuries of chaos in Chinese history. Sandwiched between the two prosperous ages of the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, this period of frequent regime changes and warlord rule was often simply labeled as "chaos and disorder" and ignored. But real history is never accidental: the civilizational transitions, institutional iterations, economic restructuring, and military and political reforms of the Tang and Song Dynasties were all rooted in this turbulent period. This book follows the popular official history writing style of "Those Things in the Ming Dynasty", takes rigorous official history as the foundation, abandons joking about unofficial history and empty preaching, and uses relaxed and popular language and an objective perspective to dismantle the codes of the troubled times of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. The book breaks away from a single war narrative and integrates political games, military changes, economic collapse, cultural fission, people's livelihood, and technological iterations from multi-dimensional perspectives. It three-dimensionally restores Zhu Wen, Li Keyong, Chai Rong, the emperors and ministers of the Southern Tang Dynasty and other troubled times, defines good and evil without facial expressions, and deeply interprets the underlying logic of the separatism of vassal towns, the alienation of military power, and the separation of the north and the south. Using characters as clues, events as skeletons, and the laws of the times as the core, we dissect the fate of the collapse of the Tang Dynasty, the game of competition between heroes, the opportunity for rebirth in troubled times, and the inevitable return of the world to the Song Dynasty. It not only talks about the ups and downs of politics and battlefield battles, but also describes the people's livelihood and the character of the literary people. It restores the real troubled times in the interesting narrative, and reveals the rules of the rise and fall of dynasties through historical review. It makes the less popular history of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms become popular, easy to read, and full of useful information.