The person with the most children in the history of the world is the second sultan of the Alawite dynasty in Morocco, whose name is Moulay Ismail. Ismail lived to be 80 years old, and the harem concubine gave birth to 525 sons, 342 daughters, a total of 867 children, a staggering number, and no one has broken the record so far. And the minister we are going to talk about today, although the number of children is not as large as Ismail, his method is much more "advanced" than Ismail.
We know that many princely states in the Spring and Autumn Warring States period originated from the division of the Zhou Dynasty, but when King Wu of Zhou first sealed the State of Qi, it was Lü Shang, the Duke of Jiang, who paid attention to the inheritance of parents and children, and Jiang Taigong belonged to the Jiang surname and the Lü clan, how did it spread to the Warring States period, and the king of the State of Qi changed his surname to Tian? All this has to start with the two key figures Tian Guan and Tian Chang.
Tian Quan is the ancestor of Tian Chang, and Tian Chang is the sixth grandson of Tian Quan. Tian Quan also had another name called Chen Quan, because he was the son of Chen Guo in the Spring and Autumn Period, the son of Chen Ligong, and a proper aristocratic clan, but something happened in Chen Guo at that time, chen Quan was worried about his suffering, so he ran to the State of Qi with his family and defected to the Duke of Qi Huan, when "Chen" was homophonous with "Tian", he changed his surname to "Tian".
Since then, this Tian clan from the Chen kingdom has taken root in the state of Qi, and after successive generations of operation, the authority in the hands of the Tian clan has become more and more stable. When it was passed down to Tian Chang's generation, the ambitions of the Tian family were already very large, and their status was already very high, and Tian Chang used the method of "collecting rent in small buckets and releasing grain in big buckets" to buy people's hearts, and then killed Qi Jian Gong and supported Qi Ping Gong to reconcile with the rest of the princely states.
Duke Qi Ping appointed Tian Chang as Xiangguo, and Tian Chang requested (threatened) That Duke Qi Ping kill many of the old nobles of the State of Qi, and gave most of the land of the State of Qi to the Tian family. However, the Tian family's time for development in the State of Qi was limited, and the clan population was not large enough, so how to ensure that these lands would always belong to the Tian family, and that the Tian family's talent resources were sufficient and could always rule the State of Qi, became a big problem in Tian Chang's heart.
So Tian Chang came up with and implemented an unconventional method: he ordered people to select beautiful women who were about 1 meter and six meters tall across the country, picked more than a hundred, and included them in their backyards, so that they could not keep giving birth to children; but he was also old, and a person could not be busy at all, so he opened the door and allowed his own doormen to enter and leave the backyard, and the children born were all surnamed Tian no matter who they were.
The "Chronicle of History" records: "Tian Chang nai chose the women in the Qi state who were more than seven feet long as the harem, and the harem numbered in hundreds, and those who made the guests enter and leave the harem could not help but enter and leave the harem." And Tian Changjian, there are more than seventy men. That is to say, by the time Tian Chang died, he already had more than 70 sons of mixed blood, which did not include daughters, if you add a daughter, it is estimated that the number of children is less than 100.
The tian family's power grew rapidly, and in 391 BC, Tian Chang's fourth grandson Tian He deposed the Duke of Qi Kang, exiled him, and established himself as the monarch of the State of Qi, and was recognized by Zhou Tianzi's seal, so the Tian family drove away the descendants of Jiang Taigong, but they did not change the name of the country, and still called him "Qi" to the outside world.
This is the famous "Tian Shi Dai Qi" in history. Although Tian Chang's method is very successful, but there are very few people who learn from him, after all, according to normal logic, everyone is more willing to have their own children, Tian Chang's "brilliant plan" is a specific method adopted under specific historical conditions, such a method, even if it is placed in the modern era of open-mindedness, it is difficult for everyone to accept it.