 Shut up. Would you like some head? Always. Got a little sloppy there. That's alright. That's typical for an old monk head. Hey, welcome back to our stupid reactions. You need some Corbin. I'm disgusted. Yeah. Oh. This is a f- What movie is that? With Jim Carrey and the woman who takes her dentures out. What? There's a movie with Jim Carrey. There's an old lady and she takes her dentures out and goes down on him. It's Ace Ventura. It's Ace Ventura? Ace Ventura. Okay. That is so wrong on so many levels. Anyways, today, this is a super interesting video that came up. Somebody sent it to me. It says, the forgotten great wall of India. And it's about... I didn't even know I should know it was there to forget it in the first place. But it's not a wall wall. It's... It's not a what? A wall wall. It's not a wall wall. A wall wall. It's a woo woo. It's a hedge. Like a... Like a hedgehog hedge? Like a bush. Like your mother's bush. Yeah. But that stretched almost across India. That is my mom's bush. But few people know that about my mom. It is currently stretched across India. So this is a little information. Maybe this might be about her. This is a little inspirational video. It's really... It's a hedge like a... An intentionally grown wall. I think the British. I think it had something to do with them. And... But it's just so interesting. I've never heard anything about this. Yeah. So hopefully this is informational. Hopefully you've never heard about this too. There's other informational stuff. You can send it our way. We love learning new things. And we trust you. You... We are so naive. I do not trust you. They could send us stuff. And it could be so fake. We would have no way to verify it. Following the battle of Plasi in 1757, a trading company became the rulers of the richest province in the world at the time. Bengal. Yeah. This company, the East India Company, went on to rule large parts of India until 1858. The company was dissolved following the Indian Mutiny with the British government subsequently taking over control over India, which became the jewel in its crown. Literally. As we know, wealth poured out of India during the rule of the company and during the British Raj. Heavy taxation was a massive burden during the British rule and this included the salt tax introduced as early as 1759, just two years after Plasi. The introduction of salt tax and the efforts to prevent Indians from smuggling in salt from the princely states led to the creation of the Great Hedge Wall of India around the year 1843. At its longest, the Great Hedge Wall of India ran for almost 4,000 kilometres. Wow, great. The story behind the Great Hedge of India begins as do a lot of stories from British India with the greed of the East India Company. What a song. Does it look like it? What amounted to two months of his annual income on providing salt for his family for a year? While rates of the salt tax varied across British rule territories in India, the rates were highest in the Bengal Presidency. As expected, this unjust burden led to people trying to avoid paying the salt tax in a variety of ways and this included smuggling in salt from the princely states of India. To try and stop this, the British built customs houses, but these were spread out and had little to no effect. These customs houses eventually led to the formation of the England customs line and by the 1840s, the Great Hedge Wall of India came into existence. The Hedge Wall started with thorn bushes being cut and put into place as a barrier. A. O. Hume, who was the Commissioner of England Customs between 1867 and 1870, decided that a living hedge would be much more cost effective and led to the rapid expansion of the Great Hedge Wall. The wall consisted of hedges, babool, bamboo plants and more. Hume, who had an avid interest in botany, also replaced the soil in places where the soil was poor. He also made sure the Great Hedge Wall was regularly watered and built trenches alongside it in parts. As we see with walls and barriers today, the wall wasn't foolproof. Smugglers still managed to get salt across by either driving their cameras through the hedges or by simply tossing sacks of salt over the wall. At its peak, the hedge wall ran from Punjab in the north to the... Oh my goodness! The tax was hard to impose and at its height, the England customs department employed more than 14,000 workers. The job of a customs officer was quite highly priced at the time due to the high pay of 5 rupees a month. Workers could also boost their income through other means including the proceeds from selling seized goods. However, the position did have its drawbacks. Custom workers were made to live away from their families and were almost always posted far away from their hometown. Clashes between workers and smugglers were also common with both customs officers and smugglers often being killed. It did not help that the customs officers were more often than not outnumbered by the smugglers. Records show that more than 6,000 smugglers were apprehended and convicted in 1877-1878. The hedge wall was often considered a hindrance by British officials because it obstructed free travel and free trade. Several British viceroy's considered taking down the great hedge. But it was finally Lord Mayor, the viceroy from 1869-1872 who took the first steps. It was finally abandoned in 1879 and unfortunately since it was mostly a natural barrier barely anything remains to it. The great hedge of India was mostly forgotten to the sands of time until Roy Moxham published his book The Great Hedge of India in 2001. Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, so it was like no shock. British greed was really. And no wonder it was forgotten because it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. You can't keep around a big hedge if you don't. It's just gonna die. I wonder, so it didn't say how it happened, how did the knowledge of it become known to everybody? What do you mean? So it was forgotten until this person made it known again, but how, what was used to... Well, I'm sure there's documentation. It's just that made it popular again. That's wild. It went from Punjab to Odisha. So Odisha down south? I don't think... Down south east, it's below... Odisha? Yeah, it's below Bengal. Oh, okay. It's the southeast in the Bay of Bengal. Gotcha. You've got Punjab basically cutting straight through the middle of India. Just... I don't even know how you maintain something that large. Seriously. Because obviously a former orange monster who was our president wanted to build a wall between the barrier between us and Mexico. Right. Which is... Just like East Berlin did. Great inspiration. Which is infeasible. Yep. If you know the topography, it's not possible. And stupid. A wall is not great protection nowadays, right? Because, you know, we're in the 21st century. But the fact that that wall even though obviously natural is much longer, I feel. Just looking at it, it looked like the longer than the border from the United States to Mexico, right? I wonder how many times, yes, oh yes. And I wonder how many times they built the wall and were like, ah, our wall. And then the Indians were like, shh. Ah, damn it! That section back up in. Aha, bush wall. Great. Just... Flammable. Yeah. Most walls are made out of concrete, bricks, unflammable things. You'd have to have like some barrier of some thorns. Really long thorns so that they can't get their matches nearest. Clearly they saw the error of their ways, like this is probably not that good of a... This really didn't work. Just forget that wall. It's super interesting though. We'll make that go away so nobody can remember how bad we were. Because that's really the only bad thing we've ever done is that wall. Yeah, not a surprise that it was five rupees a month. I just... It just hurts. Yeah. Every day, the more we learn about how awful white people have been to everyone else that isn't white, it's just... Yep. Painful, painful. And the Brits take the top of the heap, man. At least in terms of... Not anymore, thankfully. No, it's kind of us now. Yeah, it's... But thankfully, thankfully... And then to just... Anyway. Tree game. Had no idea that existed. It's super interesting. Too bad Andrani wasn't here to... I wonder if she knew about it. Yeah, I don't know if she may not know. I'm going to ask her. Big part of Engal history. Absolutely. So who knows if they... I'm sure she knows about the taxation on salt. I love salt. Yeah. Which is ridiculous. You haven't seen the Gandhi... Like Gandhi, right? No, I have not. Yeah. Did they go over that? Yeah. The salt thing? Yeah, because that was a national issue. I should, for one, just for his performance. Yeah, for his performance and the direction and you'll... I don't know if I should tell you that. I'll wait. I'm not going to tell you something. But the... Because he starts off... It takes you through his whole life and it starts with him as an attorney in Africa. And it's... What starts to spark inside of him is the injustices he sees that are happening to the Indian people. And that aspect of it was one of the first things for him that became a big, powerful, national issue was the salt. So I'm sure she's aware of that. She may know about this. She's like, oh yeah, everyone in India knows about India, as you guys don't know about that. I wonder what it is... As we're sitting here, I wonder what it is we also don't know about India that we're going to learn to three years from now and go, how did we not know that? Thousands of things? Truly. Yeah, if you ever just want to make a channel of just stuff to teach us history, just do it. Always down to learn new things. Always enjoy learning new things. Well, it says this is the history of India show. So it's a whole show based on the history of India. Anyways, let us know if there's other videos or stuff about this that you know that wasn't in here. They got wrong, obviously. We're just taking a face value. But any other informational videos that we can react to, but history, anything else that we just like to learn. Yeah, especially about Bush. Let us know down below. Josh!