Untertitel (35)
0:00Today we're proud to present our new channel:
Nightshift - Kurzgesagt After Dark
0:07For years we've wanted to make something new.
0:10A place for the stories that keep us up at night.
0:13So we finally did it. Here are the
first 2 minutes of our first video.
0:24Flames light the sky over the Pearl River
Delta as war junks swarm the banks of Sanshan,
0:30a fishing village in southern China. It is 1809.
0:34The attackers captain has promised ten
silver coins for every villager's head.
0:39By now, the villagers know it was a mistake not
to pay the pirate confederation protection money.
0:44They have built a wooden palisade and
armed every man between sixteen and sixty,
0:49but now everything goes wrong:
0:53Their only cannon explodes in their faces and their
leader gets stabbed in the back in the turmoil.
0:59One man makes a last stand from a rooftop,
1:02hurling dust onto the attackers,
until they bring him down with spears.
1:07The looting lasts three
days. Two thousand are dead.
1:11And when the pirates finally sail away,
they set the village on fire and leave
1:16eighty severed heads hanging from a banyan tree,
staring blankly across the water as a warning.
1:22The southern Chinese coast is living
in fear and no one comes to help.
1:27The Chinese empire, the largest and wealthiest
state on Earth, can’t protect its people.
1:39Around 1800 China governs 300 to 400 million
people, a third of the world's population,
1:45and its economy is the largest on Earth.
While European powers fight over colonies
1:50and trade routes, Imperial China has been running
the same operating system for over 2,000 years.
1:57When their Western contemporaries were
still hacking at each other with swords
2:01and hauling chests of gold, they had already
invented gunpowder and used paper money.
2:06Their compass helped Europeans “discover”
already-inhabited lands and eventually led
2:12them back to China for tea and porcelain.
China sees itself as the Middle Kingdom,
2:18the center of civilization, while
everybody else are barbarians,
2:22slowly learning what it has known for centuries.
2:26The current dynasty running this
ancient machine is the Qing,
2:29but to most people, they’re still outsiders.
They’re Manchu, descendants of horse-riding
2:35warriors from the north who smashed through the
Great Wall in 1644, realized the Chinese system
2:40was too sophisticated to replace, and simply
kept it running with themselves in charge.
2:46Imagine this realm as a gravitational field.
At its center sits the emperor in Beijing,
2:52like a supermassive black hole, bending
the fabric of society around him.
