So get this: Emperor Wu of Han—real name Liu Che, but “Wu” means “Martial” and that’s way sexier—was famously, hornily obsessed with living forever. We’re talking gold-plated dildos for yin-yang balancing, alchemists on the payroll cooking up mercury smoothies, and a harem so vast it had its own postal code. This guy spent a fortune trying to get the gods to notice him, mostly by building big-ass towers so he could, I dunno, flash them from his bedroom window. His other pet project was kicking the ever-loving shit out of the Xiongnu nomads to the north, which is what led his boy Zhang Qian to stumble west and basically invent the Silk Road. But what if none of that happened?

Picture it: The year is 121 BC. Or maybe 119? Fuck it, let’s say 120. Wu is balls-deep in a nightmare. Not the fun kind where you’re naked in front of the imperial court—he did that on purpose last Tuesday. No, this was a *prophetic* dream. In it, a shimmering, celestial sturgeon—voiced, I’m told by the apocryphal *Records of the Grand Eunuch’s Pillow Book*, by a very sultry sea goddess—told him the secret to eternal life wasn’t in some mythical western paradise, but in a divine, fermented fish sauce from the southern seas. A sauce so potent, so salty, so exquisitely funky, that one taste could rejuvenate an emperor’s flagging… *mandate of heaven*. The dream allegedly ended with Wu motorboating a mermaid made of anchovies. Classic.

Wu woke up in a cold, fishy sweat and immediately called a meeting. His ministers, bless their silk-swaddled balls, were probably expecting another 50,000-man campaign into the Gobi desert. Instead, Wu stands up and declares, “Cancel the desert thing! We’re building boats! BIG-ASS boats! The gods have spoken! To the south! For the holy fish jizz!” And you can’t exactly argue with the Son of Heaven, especially when he’s got a wild, post-wet-dream look in his eye. So Zhang Qian was recalled, his expense reports for “heavenly horses” were shredded, and the entire Han war machine pivoted 90 degrees south.

The newly-christened “Grand Celestial Garum Fleet” was a marvel—a thousand ships strong, aimed squarely at what we now call the South China Sea. They weren’t looking for allies against the Xiongnu; they were on a divine mission for a holy condiment. They steamrolled their way down the coast of Vietnam, set up a trading post in the Strait of Malacca a millennium and a half before the Portuguese even knew it existed, and scared the absolute piss out of countless local potentates. They eventually found their magical fish sauce—a proto-nuoc mam from some forgotten kingdom in modern-day Thailand—and Emperor Wu drank the stuff by the gallon. Did it make him immortal? Reader, he died in 87 BC, allegedly with a gut full of pickled eels and a smile on his face.