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[00:00] Today we are proud to present our new channel, Night Shift – Kurzgesagt After Dark. For years we've wanted to make something new, a place for the stories that keep us up at night.

[00:13] So, we finally did it. Here are the first two minutes of our first video. Flames light the sky over the Pearl River Delta

[00:27] as war junks swarm the banks of San Shan, a fishing village in southern China. It's 1809. The attacker's captain has promised ten silver coins for every villager's head.

[00:40] By now, the villagers know it was a mistake not to pay the Pirate Confederation protection money. They've built a wooden palisade and armed every man between 16 and 60, but now everything goes wrong.

[00:54] Their only cannon explodes in their faces, and their leader gets stabbed in the back in the turmoil. One man makes a last stand from a rooftop, hurling dust onto the attackers until they bring him down with spears.

[01:07] The looting lasts three days. 2,000 are dead, and when the pirates finally sail away, they set the village on fire and leave 80 severed heads hanging from a banyan tree,

[01:19] staring blankly across the water as a warning. The southern Chinese coast is living in fear and no one comes to help The Chinese Empire the largest and wealthiest state on Earth can protect its people How

[01:37] The Middle Kingdom Around 1800, China governs 300 to 400 million people, a third of the world's population, and its economy is the largest on Earth. While European powers fight over colonies and trade

[01:51] roots, Imperial China has been running the same operating system for over 2,000 years. When their Western contemporaries were still hacking at each other with swords and holding chests of gold, they had already invented gunpowder and used paper money. Their compass

[02:07] helped Europeans discover already inhabited lands and eventually led them back to China for tea and porcelain. China sees itself as the Middle Kingdom, the center of civilization.

[02:20] while everybody else are barbarians, slowly learning what it has known for centuries. The current dynasty running this ancient machine is the Qing, but to most people, they're still outsiders.

[02:32] They're Manchu, descendants of horse-riding warriors from the north who smashed through the Great Wall in 1644, realized the Chinese system was too sophisticated to replace, and simply kept it running with themselves in charge.

[02:46] Imagine this realm as a gravitational field. At its center sits the emperor in Beijing, like a supermassive black hole, bending the fabric of society around him.