Last year archaeologists in Xi'an dug up a Korean prince who'd been buried in China for twelve hundred years, and his gravestone called him a lord of the Tang. Not of Korea. That's when I found out that for roughly a thousand years, being born into a Korean royal family came with a real chance of being packaged up and mailed to a neighbouring empire as collateral. Some of them came home and took the throne. Some of them were burned alive. One of them got exiled to Tibet, which I still can't quite get over. And the whole system eventually produced the one king who tore it down, which is the closest history gets to a punchline.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:28 The Job Description
2:26 Silseong's Long Memory
3:54 Bak Jesang's Two Trips
5:31 Baekje's Spare King
7:06 Chang'an, Or Golden Handcuffs
9:26 Hostages At Home Too
10:52 The Ganghwa Island Bluff
12:48 Dadu Finishing School
14:39 Three Years Old In Beijing
15:59 The Tribute Girls
17:44 The Investment Fails
19:16 It Never Actually Stopped

Join our Spotify
https://rebrand.ly/allspotify

Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://rebrand.ly/joinall

Generate awesome thumbnails:
https://rebrand.ly/uvydfqz

Your Life as a Royal Hostage in the Courts of Medieval Korea