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12 Show Notes - What’s the best historical reference in Avatar: the Last Airbender?

Strap into your flying bison because this episode is a doozy!

This week’s question is: What is the best historical reference in Avatar: The Last Airbender?

A. Chin the Conqueror

B. The Order of the White Lotus

C. The Dai Li

D. Tenzin & Monk Gyatso

First of all: it is a cardinal rule of the universe that one cannot talk about history and ATLA in the same breath without mentioning the amazing work that has been done over on ATLA-Annotated https://atla-annotated.tumblr.com, where you will find not only translations of all the Chinese used in the show but also exhaustively researched posts about everything from the clothing styles to the architecture seen in the show.

In the episode, we mentioned an upcoming (at the time) series about Avatar Kyoshi. That series is now out, and it’s called The Rise of Kyoshi! Find out more here: https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/yee-nickelodeon-collaboration_9781419735042/ https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/The_Rise_of_Kyoshi

As promised in the episode, we’ve included pronunciations for names were we could find them. Some had IPA and recordings available, while for others we only found transcriptions in Hanyu Pinyin, the standard transcription/Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin does give you all the information you need to pronounce something correctly, but it’s not the most intuitive for native English speakers. So here are some resources for how to use it for the names in this post: https://www.yoyochinese.com/blog/pinyin-beginners-guide-mandarin-chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Mandarin

Option A: Chin the Conqueror / Qin Shi Huang-di, the First Emperor

Here’s Qin Shi Huang in IPA: [tɕʰǐn ʂɨ̀ xwǎŋ]

And in Hanyu Pinyin: Qín shǐ huáng

And for those who don’t like reading either, here’s a recording: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Qin_shi_huang_pronunciation_2.ogg

Our main source for the IRL Qin conqueror was Mark Edward Lewis’s The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, which goes into the origins of the pre-imperial state of Qin, its militarism and legalistic policies. If you want to learn more about the man himself, we’ve previously referenced Jonathan Fenby’s The Dragon Throne: China’s Emperors from the Qin to the Manchu for its comprehensive coverage of Chinese imperial history and the chapter on the Qin dynasty is just as solid.

One of the major primary (sort of) sources that we have is Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, which you have probably heard Sophie reference before, and which we will draw on again in future episodes. This is because it’s one of the richest sources available to us on early Chinese history, written by Sima Qian [sɨ́mà tɕʰjɛ́n] over a lifetime. It’s this historical tome that contains one of the best-known stories about the First Emperor, which is that he burned books and killed scholars. As powerful as such a story is, it’s unclear how much of it is historical fact and how much of it is a Han dynasty with an axe to grind and a predecessor to discredit. For more on this academic debate, you can start with this article: http://ulrichneininger.de/?p=461.

For those more interested in the myth than the man, Sophie mentions the film Hero, a 2002 film by Zhang Yimou starring Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, and Donnie Yen among others. On top of being a really intriguing film full of mind games, it is! So! Pretty!

Now: back to the show! If you want to learn more about the adventures and misadventures of Avatar’s Chin, the Avatar fandom wiki is a wonderful and thorough source: https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Chin

In the episode we also talk about the worldbuilding and political setup of the Earth Kingdom in general. For those who are interested, we can’t recommend Hello Future Me’s video about this very topic enough! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-FNPuIM9jg

Other sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/people/reference/qin-shi-huangdi/

Option B: The Order of the White Lotus / White Lotus Society

In the original show, the Order of the White Lotus is a secret society, composed of many bending and martial arts masters across the four nations who are implied to be working together to end the Hundred-Year War. Near the end of the show, White Lotus members mobilize in force to liberate Ba Sing Se from Fire Nation occupation. The Avatar wikis have a pretty thorough compilation of the White Lotus’s exploits and history: https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Order_of_the_White_Lotus https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Order_of_the_White_Lotus

The IRL White Lotus Society (Báiliánjiào in Mandarin) was also a secret society (or sect or cult, depending on who you ask). They were around for at least four hundred years—multiple sources record their involvement in the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in the mid-1300s as well as in the White Lotus Rebellion between 1794 and 1804. Some sources even include Zhu Yuanzhang (Zhū Yuánzhāng in Pinyin), the founder of the Ming Dynasty, as one of its members.

Like the fictional White Lotus, the historical society/sect apparently had traditional practices such as martial arts, medicine/healing, and meditation. The historical White Lotus also had a strong religious element; many of its beliefs were based on Buddhism and Taoism but with a smattering of Manichaeism (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Manichaeism) which—to vastly simplify some very old and complex beliefs—is defined by duality and struggle: light vs. dark, good vs. evil, and so forth. There may also have been elements of messianic belief/prophecy in the White Lotus religion—members believed that humanity in its current state had been corrupted and needed saviors to lead them to reconciliation with the good and divine. However, unlike the fictional White Lotus, which seems to be comprised of societal leaders and elites, the real White Lotus attracted people on the other end of the spectrum—women, peasants, and other marginalized populations.

To learn more about the historical White Lotus’s philosophies, practices, and history, check out Susan Naquin’s Millenarian Rebellion in China: https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/5983 and Elizabeth Perry’s article “Worshipers and Warriors: White Lotus Influence on the Nian Rebellion”: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/68415/10.1177_009770047600200102.pdf;jsessionid=608E03C2AA7738C4B7F214F3763E17DD?sequence=2 .

Other sources:

[1] https://heathenchinese.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/millenarianism-pt-4-the-white-lotus-society-and-the-nian-rebellion/

[2] https://www.britannica.com/place/China/Buddhism#ref71731

[3] https://www.britannica.com/event/White-Lotus-Rebellion

[4] The book Sophie was reading that mentions the White Lotus was the one we mentioned in Episode 10, Arthur Cotterell’s The Imperial Capitals of China.

Option C: The Dai Li

In the show, the Dai Li are the shady secret police force that basically runs the Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se. Originally founded by Avatar Kyoshi, one of Aang’s past lives, to protect the city’s “cultural heritage” and “traditions,” by the time of the show they are associated with kidnapping, brainwashing, and political repression in the name of “stability” (“There is no war in Ba Sing Se,”etc.). https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Dai_Li

What you may not know as that the Dai Li, and especially their leader, Grand Secretariat Long Feng, are mostly likely inspired by Dai Li (Dài Lì in Pinyin), an IRL spymaster who was active in Republic-era China before dying under mysterious circumstances in 1946.

The main account of Dai Li’s life and exploits that we used comes from Kathryn Meyer & Terry Parssinen’s Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade (1998), which is (as it says on the tin) about the illicit drug trade (mostly opium and cocaine). The whole book is a fantastic read, but you can find most of Dai Li’s shenanigans in Chapter 8, “Spies.”

For those who hate good books, you can find some more straightforward accounts of his life here https://chinachannel.org/2019/03/22/dai-li/ and here https://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=894. The long and short of it is that he rose from obscure poverty to work under Chiang Kai-Shek [ˈtʃæŋ kaɪˈʃɛk], the leader of the Kuomintang [ˌkwəʊmɪnˈtaŋ] or Republic of China, which ruled mainland China between 1928 and 1949. Dai Li ran the Military Statistics Bureau, also known as the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics or Juntong (Jūntǒng) for short, which was the front for the Kuomintang’s intelligence/security/secret police arm. Like his in-show counterpart, Dai Li’s reputation is one rife with foul play, assassination, and the prioritization of internal threats over external and arguably bigger ones.

The name of his rumored girlfriend, Chinese actress Hu Die (meaning “butterfly”) is pronounced Hú Dié. She was also known as Butterfly Wu. Dai Li died in a plane crash on the way to visit her, one stormy night in 1946—jury’s out on whether that was an accident or not.

Option D: Monk Gyatso & Tenzin / Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

This option is interesting in that the same historical figure is reference twice in the Avatar universe: both Monk Gyatso, Aang’s mentor, https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Gyatso and Tenzin, Aang’s son, https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Tenzin are references to the same figure: the current Dalai Lama, also known by the first two of his religious names, Tenzin Gyatso [tɛ̃ ́tsĩ càtsʰo].

You can read more about the Dalai Lama’s remarkable life here:

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dalai-Lama-14th

[2] https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/brief-biography

As we mentioned in the episode, the Dalai Lama is officially an influential leader (but not the head) of the Gelug [ɡèluʔ] school of Tibetan Buddhism. He and his past lives are believed to be the reincarnations of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara [ˌʌvəloʊkɪˈteɪʃvərə], or Chenrézik in Tibetan.

The connection between the Borjigin lineage and the Dalai Lama, which we touch on, is actually a really interesting one. According to Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, the word “lama” comes from a Tibetan word for “chief” or “high priest” and is a title given to spiritual teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In 1578, two Borjigin descendants—Mongol leaders Altan Khan and Queen Noyanchu Junggen—gave the title of “Dalai,” a Mongolian word meaning “sea,” to the Tibetan lama Sonam Gyatso, making him the first Dalai Lama (“sea of knowledge”). Each of Sonam Gyatso’s subsequent reincarnations has borned the same title, including the Dalai Lama we know and love today.

Finally, in the episode we touched on the real-world and ongoing conflict between China and Tibet. Yes, the Fire Nation is much closer to imperial China than it is to Japan, although there are certainly semblances to Japan too. You can read more about that in ATLA-Annotated’s tag “The Fire Nation is not Japan” https://atla-annotated.tumblr.com/tagged/The+Fire+Nation+is+not+Japan and specifically this post: https://atla-annotated.tumblr.com/post/14206674362/on-the-fire-nation-tibet-and-the-genocides-the

If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading and listening and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks!

#avatar: the last airbender #atla #history #the legend of korra #china #guys this episode was so much #SO MUCH #episode 12

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