Yunkai

The Yellow City

A slaver city of yellow brick, breeder of bed slaves.

The fuller tale

Yunkai, the Yellow City, rises in tiers of yellow brick that its masters find golden, and specializes in the slave trade’s most intimate cruelty: it breeds and trains bed slaves, schooling children in the seven sighs and the sixteen seats of pleasure and selling refinement by the pound. Its Wise Masters wear tokars, file their teeth, and are wise chiefly in the sense that they prefer paying others to fight — when Daenerys marches north from Astapor, Yunkai’s defense is a hired free company and a pair of gilded envoys with chests of gold and insults dressed as flattery. She takes the gold, turns the sellswords by way of a captain named Daario Naharis, and storms the camps by night; the city opens its gates without a proper siege.

What follows outside the walls is the story’s most argued-over image. The freed slaves pour out to meet her calling her mhysa — mother — and lift her over the crowd; the show frames it as a golden apotheosis, the books let a reader taste the unease under the word. Either way, Yunkai is Daenerys’s education in the limits of a light touch: she frees the city and moves on, and the Wise Masters, unbroken and unsupervised, simply restock. Within a season they are the paymasters of the counter-revolution — hiring companies like the Windblown, whose ranks in the books conceal a Dornish prince traveling under a false name, raising coalition armies, and pressing the siege of Meereen with slave-catching back in business behind them.

Yunkai matters because it is the argument Astapor and Meereen sit between. Astapor shows what happens when a freed city is left to wolves; Yunkai shows what happens when the masters are left their gold. The Yellow City never wins a battle in the entire tale and nearly wins the war anyway — through patience, hired spears and the world’s general willingness to let slavers be slavers so long as the goods keep moving. When the story wants to say that evil is less a fortress than a market, it points at Yunkai.

The page and the screen

The books split Yunkai’s hired swords into two companies — the Stormcrows, whose captains Daario beheads to bring his men over, and the Second Sons under the vile Mero — while the show folds them into a single Second Sons with Daario delivering one head instead of two. The later war differs more: the novels give Yunkai’s coalition the Windblown, the Tattered Prince and a grinding siege of Meereen the published story has not finished, where the show reduces the Yellow City’s revenge to a fleet that burns in one afternoon.

The chronicle here

Dany reaches Yunkai and raises the stakes: free every slave, or be the first city she breaks. (S3·E7)
Yunkai hires the Second Sons; their captains debate killing Dany; one of them delivers his officers' heads instead. (S3·E8)
Yunkai's freedmen call Dany Mhysa — Mother — and carry her on their hands. (S3·E10)
Dany learns Astapor and Yunkai have fallen back to old ways, and decides to stay: a queen rules. (S4·E5)
Beneath Yunkai's walls Daenerys treats with sellswords; Daario Naharis brings her two captains' heads and his sword, and the Wise Masters' host breaks in the night. (ASOS 43)
Yunkai buys sellswords and allies while Astapor dies behind its walls; the queen's peace hangs by threads, and the pale mare has begun to ride. (ADWD 17)
The Yunkai'i camp at Meereen's gates with their slave soldiers and their plague; the queen's council urges the peace: open the fighting pits, wed Hizdahr, endure. (ADWD 31)
The peace is signed in ceremonies and hostages; Daario goes to the Yunkai'i as surety, and Daenerys learns what a queen may keep and what she must put away. (ADWD 37)