Name: We Made A New Channel!
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T16:54:26.000Z
Duration: 3 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today we're 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.

Here are the first two minutes of our first video.

Flames light the sky over the Pearl river delta as war junks swarm the banks of Sanshan, a fishing village in southern China.

The attacker's captain has promised 10 silver coins for every villager's head.

By now, the villagers know it was mistake not to pay the pirate confederation protection money.

They've built a wooden palisade and armed every man between 16 and 60.

Their only cannon explodes in their faces and.

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.

And when the pirates finally sail away, they set the village on fire and leave 80 severed heads hanging from a banyan tree, 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't protect its people.

Around 1800, China governs 300 to 400 million people, a third of the world's population.

While European powers fight over colonies and trade routes, Imperial China has been running the same operating system for over 2000 years.

When their western contemporaries were still hacking at each other with swords and hauling chests of gold, they had already invented gunpowder and used paper money.

Their compass 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, 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.

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 with themselves in charge.

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.