No wonder the Westerners get the Chinese people confused all the time insisting, “You Chinese all look alike; you related?” A research based on genetic evidence reported by BBC News identified about 1.5 million men from north-east part of China and Mongolia were direct decendants of a single Qing emperor.
The article credits this incredible phenomenon to the fact that it was not unusual for the royalties of the time to have several wives and concubines. One peom I used to memorize for school romanticized an emperor’s indulgence in 3,000 concubines during the Tang Dynasty.
“Research into an unusually high prevalence of a particular set of genes in China has suggested that 1.5 million Chinese men are direct descendants of Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder of the Qing dynasty.”
No wonder the Qing Dynasty was in such bad shape in the 1800s. The emperors were too busy womanizing and smoking opium. And considering how “productive” Chinese emperors were throughout history, maybe there’s some truth in such stereotypical comments from the Westerners. To make matters worse, emperors used to behead not only the entire family of certain criminals, but everyone who’s related to that family in anyway up to nine degrees of separation, which could have easily translated into thousands of people. The tactic was used to prevent revenge from close relatives of the criminal in question. Sometimes this meant an entire family tree of the same last name disappearing forever from the face of the earth, which in turn explains why certain last names only exist in history books today.
Image courtesy of BBC News.
