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Awwww yiss! It's back!
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Jan 22, 2023 18:57
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We must campaign against the Wu and unite the sister republics while taking a firm stand against reactionary nationalist tendencies! The Revolution is worldwide and rights should be equal to all, regardless of whatever caste or nation they may hail from
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Jan 22, 2023 23:27
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Exciting to see this just about ready to continue onward!
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Jan 23, 2023 09:00
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Once more, it begins.
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Jan 23, 2023 09:27
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Is there any particular reason why Tibet has 4 times more population than Anatolia?
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Jan 23, 2023 12:55
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Awesome, I read through the whole thread some months back, and I'm super excited that it's back!
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Jan 23, 2023 13:52
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We should focus first on finishing our conquest of continental southeast Asia. Secondarily, while I don't believe we should invest ourselves overmuch in China proper, we SHOULD endeavor to make sure it remains shattered in ideally even smaller pieces than it presently is. I just have the strangest feeling that a unified China would, in some way, be bad for Tibet!
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Jan 23, 2023 17:33
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Can you confirm whether this was picked as the flag of fascist Tibet:
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Jan 23, 2023 18:27
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Dance Officer posted:Is there any particular reason why Tibet has 4 times more population than Anatolia? owns most of north india and one of the most fertile areas in china, plus generally being an imperial core for both china and india for almost 1000 years at this point
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Jan 23, 2023 18:48
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Yeah, Tibet probably has a lot more people in this timeline than in OTL thanks to being an imperial metropole, but that would still mean that most people who look to Lhasa as their national capital live down in the Ganges river plain or in the Chinese holdings around what looks to be Hunan/Hubei. e: looking back to the 1821 development map, Lhasa and its environs are the most developed regions in the world. If that carries over into industrialization, it's gonna be pretty large but also a pain to get raw materials to until railroads develop enough to go up reasonably steep grades. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jan 23, 2023 |
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Jan 23, 2023 19:41
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SirPhoebos posted:Can you confirm whether this was picked as the flag of fascist Tibet: Yes
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Jan 23, 2023 21:19
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habeasdorkus posted:Yeah, Tibet probably has a lot more people in this timeline than in OTL thanks to being an imperial metropole, but that would still mean that most people who look to Lhasa as their national capital live down in the Ganges river plain or in the Chinese holdings around what looks to be Hunan/Hubei. That's actually a pretty old tech and I could see it developing even earlier in this setting  To be clear most funiculars are fundamentally different vehicles than trains, even if they use basically the same tech (arguably, lower tech demand) and most of the ones you'll find pictures of are people movers rather than freight elevators. Nonetheless its very achievable with little technical innovation beyond basic trains that trains could come into a place in a lower region like the Terai, have the cars get transferred from the locomotive driven train to funicular platforms, and then those funicular platforms disgorge onto a different train in a yard on the Tibetan plateau. Such a system would likely create small economic nexuses on either side of the Himalayas, which TBH probably would follow existing economic nexuses that likely date back to the 1400s to meet pre-industrial demand for transportation over the Himalayas to feed and develop Lhasa.
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Jan 23, 2023 21:41
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Tulip posted:That's actually a pretty old tech and I could see it developing even earlier in this setting That's nifty, and I can see glacial ice being used as the counterweight on the descent for shipping to lower Tibet pre-refrigeration for use in lower Tibet - the increased accessibility of Himalayan ice disrupting the traditional low-quality ice manufacturing centers along the Ganges. Most of lower (Indian) Tibet is likely first on the block of industrial disruption - textiles in Bengal in particular. How scalable would funiculars be? My knowledge of proto-industrial throughput is limited to England, but I can imagine resource-intensive heavy industry (steel etc) is likely to be located outside the Tibetan plateau as soon as political tolerance exists for such a move - even with transfer lines, getting substantial quantities of ore and coal up the Himalayas will be no easy feat.
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Jan 23, 2023 22:16
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Kangxi posted:Yes 
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Jan 23, 2023 23:20
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The plateau has solid deposits of a lot of precious and industrial metals, there was just never any drive to develop local extraction and industries in real life. But after 1000 years as the core of a sprawling Asian empire there's probably enough wealth and expertise on the plateau to open up a lot of deposits. Fuel and labor are both going to be scare though, labor can be relocated with sufficient money and/or violence but nothing is going to make getting coal up the mountains easier....
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Jan 23, 2023 23:48
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The Qamdo Basin potentially has substantial hydrocarbon reserves.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:02
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I just don't think we've been getting into enough land wars in Asia
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Jan 24, 2023 00:19
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Crazycryodude posted:The plateau has solid deposits of a lot of precious and industrial metals, there was just never any drive to develop local extraction and industries in real life. But after 1000 years as the core of a sprawling Asian empire there's probably enough wealth and expertise on the plateau to open up a lot of deposits. Fuel and labor are both going to be scare though, labor can be relocated with sufficient money and/or violence but nothing is going to make getting coal up the mountains easier.... I hand wondered about this. The IRL Tibetan plateau has never been a major economic nexus and has only had brief forays into being a political nexus (periods which I only have passing familiarity with, mostly knowing the period during the Tang dynasty when they were largely failing to militarily resist the Tibetans). By game mechanics, the Tibetan plateau is an economic nexus, just factually, based on its development scores in EU4. The question is of course what that looks like. Kangxi is perfectly within her rights to give any of a number of justifications for that, up to and including "has some economic factor that it simply does not have IRL like more water, more fertile soil, etc)." If it does have precious metals that's definitely an avenue of explanation, and depending on the metals in question it may make sense to have the finishing workers near the mines rather than exporting the ores (a counter-example would be iron - iron is an extremely common ore, the locations of iron mines are usually about being close to fuel sources for the extremely fuel intensive smelting process rather than being near the actual sources of iron, because there's a lot of iron sources but not nearly as many heavy woodlands to justify the massive charcoaling operations that you need for smelting). That said, coal fuel isn't the only factor. The Great Divergence is to my knowledge the most popular source on this, and while its only one part of that book its a very very outstanding part, on how coal access was only one of several factors in the development of steam engines. Unless the Tibetan plateau is much wetter than OTL, even the presence of coal on the plateau itself may not be sufficient for it to be a good place for steam engines. But the real thing I was going to go for is that coal-burning steam engines are not the end in themselves but a tool for the production of worker-substituting calories. Wind power might wind up having higher import, and that might lead to electrification happening earlier. And while it seems paradoxical, while Tibet is overall quite arid, it's also the source of a LOT of major rivers, which means not only has tibet already controlled water access to many dense areas of the world, but could leverage that into hydropower, which until later in the 20th century was the macroscale power source, especially for electrification. Hydrocarbon fuel power is somewhat difficult to avoid for some purposes - notably cement - but for many purposes its just a means of getting to spin things, which can be accomplished by a variety of means some of which may be more accessible to the insanely hyperdeveloped Tibet. IDK I'm just thinkin bout some history of technology.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:22
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I may be misremembering but my recollection of the EU part of this playthrough was that Tibet and Anatolia were the two biggest centers of both power and liberalism. While IRL both areas were pretty peripheral and often kind of the last place to get a lot of modernizations and reforms. I suspect that the insane grand histories of this world are radically different, talking about high altitudes rather than high latitudes as just naturally encouraging innovation or whatever the gently caress.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:37
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Tulip posted:I hand wondered about this. The IRL Tibetan plateau has never been a major economic nexus and has only had brief forays into being a political nexus (periods which I only have passing familiarity with, mostly knowing the period during the Tang dynasty when they were largely failing to militarily resist the Tibetans). By game mechanics, the Tibetan plateau is an economic nexus, just factually, based on its development scores in EU4. The question is of course what that looks like. Kangxi is perfectly within her rights to give any of a number of justifications for that, up to and including "has some economic factor that it simply does not have IRL like more water, more fertile soil, etc)." If it does have precious metals that's definitely an avenue of explanation, and depending on the metals in question it may make sense to have the finishing workers near the mines rather than exporting the ores (a counter-example would be iron - iron is an extremely common ore, the locations of iron mines are usually about being close to fuel sources for the extremely fuel intensive smelting process rather than being near the actual sources of iron, because there's a lot of iron sources but not nearly as many heavy woodlands to justify the massive charcoaling operations that you need for smelting). Thesis: The Tawantinsuyu Empire, being stronger and further advanced than OTL, bred potatoes that thrived in the higher altitudes and sparser soils of the Andes, explaining its increased population density. Many scholars (who?) today theorize that the introduction of the 'Inkan Root' to the Tibetan plateau and the subsequent increase in urbanisation across the plateau for disrupting the economic base of the traditional pastoral nobility, setting the stage for the Tibetan Revolution (speculative).
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Jan 24, 2023 01:11
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Dance Officer posted:Is there any particular reason why Tibet has 4 times more population than Anatolia? The Tibetan Republic controls the Sichuan Basin and a huge chunk of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which are extremely densely populated. Even with these areas being more industrialized and urbanized than our timeline, this is still largely represented by peasants in game terms. Tulip posted:That's actually a pretty old tech and I could see it developing even earlier in this setting To provide some historical context from our timeline: railroads have been notoriously slow to come by the Tibetan plateau. In China itself, railway construction was hampered by competing colonial ventures, the warlord era,, and of course the Japanese invasion and civil war. with construction only really starting in the mid-1950s with the construction of a line from Xining in Qinghai province to the more populated east being finished in 1959. A route between Xining and Golmud, further south, was only finished in 1984. As for railways on the Tibetan plateau itself, a high-speed rail segment between Lhasa and another city was only finished in 2021, and a railway segment between Lhasa and Sichuan is not expected to be finished until 2031 at the earliest. Railway construction would be hampered by the mountainous terrain and extreme altitudes, where the bulk of the plateau is over 14,000 feet (4.2 km) in altitude, and modern tracks are built on permafrost and make use of pressurized cabins to avoid altitude sickness. I have to handwave away some things to ensure that some railway construction happens at all, but the bulk of it would be happening in more hospitable areas (again, Sichuan, Bengal). But we can assume some combination of funiculars, or whatever railway systems were already built at high altitudes in the 19th century OTL - we could end up with a Peruvian early rail network, with some smaller isolated lines largely built for resource extraction, or we could end up with an Austrian case, with extensive state-backed projects even over mountainous areas. Crazycryodude posted:The plateau has solid deposits of a lot of precious and industrial metals, there was just never any drive to develop local extraction and industries in real life. But after 1000 years as the core of a sprawling Asian empire there's probably enough wealth and expertise on the plateau to open up a lot of deposits. Fuel and labor are both going to be scare though, labor can be relocated with sufficient money and/or violence but nothing is going to make getting coal up the mountains easier.... Without giving the game away too much, I have adjusted some resource totals and state traits for across some regions to reflect earlier discoveries of deposits and some already existing geographical features. Here's one example.  Tulip posted:IDK I'm just thinkin bout some history of technology. So you mentioned Kenneth Pomeranz, and he's interesting because he's still read a lot today, and his book set off a broader debate in the early 2000s over the 'great divergence', or of how China began to 'fall behind' in economic terms compared to Western Europe. His argument, as you said, draws from multiple causes. He says England was fortunate because it had coal deposits nearby, as you mentioned, which was a substitute for timber. He compares yields of crops in England and the Yangzi River delta in the 1700s, stating that agricultural productivity was equivalent - and includes other factors such as major coal deposits being too remote from the major populations of the Yangzi Delta. This book stirred up a major debate in Chinese history, with a major critique coming from Philip Huang, who suggested that China 'fell behind' because the rice-farming economy of the lower Yangzi delta was inefficient, and in the absence of agricultural technologies or anything else to increase outputs, it really was just a process of increasing more output by having more people trying to work the land. This was a process of "involutionary growth", with no increases in per-capita production and a steady decline in labor productivity. More people producing not enough food. Still another argument was introduced by Mark Elvin, who described the effect of environmental degradation on food outputs, or of all of the intensive labor that was instead devoted to maintaining agricultural systems -- canals, irrigation networks, and so on -- and without those there would be catastrophe. So where Pomeranz might say that colonialism and resource inputs were a major factor for the development of England and the Netherlands, Elvin might say colonialism was a relief from environmental pressures - an infusion of resources and inputs into the English economy, which the late Qing could not later match. How does this matter for Tibet? Well, we can ask a few questions. What is a Tibetan Republic's economy going to look like, with several major urban centers spread across such a wide geographic area? How much can agricultural output further grow? What are the potential centers for industrialization going to look like - near the densely populated areas and maybe those with easier access to coal. This may not involve the plateau itself, and some areas may be left further behind as the industrial economy develops very unevenly. Is the Republic going to seize more colonies for their land and resources? Yuiiut posted:Thesis: The Tawantinsuyu Empire, being stronger and further advanced than OTL, bred potatoes that thrived in the higher altitudes and sparser soils of the Andes, explaining its increased population density. I forget the post, but I did add a little something about how potato and other root tubers were introduced to Tibet in this timeline very early on, about 7 or 800 years before they got to the Tibetan plateau in our timeline, and they do grow at high altitudes as they've survived in Tawntinsuyu...
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Feb 6, 2023 05:41
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I assume you may all have seen this by now: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/ In short, changes to imgur's terms of service which - at least how I am reading it - mean deletion of images that are not affiliated with an account. This will mostly not affect this Let's Play - 95% or so of the images I have posted here are hosted on LPIX, and I have backups for all of them. The problem is just finding those very few images which I had posted on Imgur before I made an account. This will take some time but it is not impossible, and I have backups of all those too. I am just reposting this to spread the word and let people know what might be happening.
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Apr 20, 2023 11:29
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Chapter 87: 1836 to 1840 - A Crooked Path Continued extracts from Shihon no jidai (資本の時代) by Hayashida Emiko, published 1975. When we write the 'world history' of earlier periods, we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contacts, unless the inhabitants of some region had conquered or colonized another, as the Triple Alliance did to Awiropa. Historical narratives are often centered on the Tibetan perspective because of the legacy of centuries of conquest, a dominating position in local or even continental affairs. What can we say of the old places and peoples now? A republic claiming succession from a distant past that now only resides in memory - changing, volatile, a procession of scattered torches carried by past generations and a few remain headed towards the living. Gyalyum the Benevolent, founder or restorer of the Tibetan Empire in the 9th century, was said to have run an entire army into the Yarlung Tsenpo River and then drowned them for blasphemy, and now she is regarded with as much affection as Hotai.  The early years of the Second Tibetan Republic, as I write this, was only a gap of two lives away from my living memory. My grandfather, born in 1848, when he was a boy, was said to have spoken with a retired diplomat who had visited the republic with his father. That was a span of a century and a quarter to him, and so the distant past was made somehow more immediate.  The ancient city of Lhasa itself, one of the highest large cities on Earth [Footnote 1], stood proud and remote. The old boast is that the city had never fallen to a foreign army - which elides the fact that it was pulled apart during the reign of Langdarma and sacked twice - once during the reign of the False Gyalyum, again during the Revolution of 1756.  At three and a half kilometers above sea level, at unfathomable expense, the Empire and then the Republic built up administrative centers and some centers of manufacture, beyond what the roads and traffic on the Yarlung River could bear. The city's remoteness contributed to its ancient authority, and also impeded the basic acts of governance.  Above the city, besides its ancient palaces and temples, was a pyramid of polished dark rock, the last remnant of the grandeur of Lasya the Holy. A landmark to distant travellers, a hallmark of an empire long dead, a monument of distant glory, a sight for tourists and at times a means to scare school children. One thinks of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ordered rivers of mercury built in his burial mound. [Footnote 2]  The Tibetan Repubic was at this time semi-industrialized. Its products, by volume, were recognizable to any person of centuries past: staple grains, woven cloths, teas, and opium. By the late 1830s, there was a growth of some manufactured goods such as furniture and machine-woven textiles. In every city, there sprung up little shops and a class of household servants.  But that is only part of the story. The economy of the Tibetan Republic is a series of islands in a vast ocean, or a few cities in an empty plain. As seen in the graphs of urban centers and population density by distict above, there is almost nothing in the Tibetan plateau itself - the majority of the population in these areas would cling to a nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoral existence along the southern river valleys. The vast majority of the population would reside in Sichuan and in Gyagar [Footnote 3] - Bengal, Bihar, and Awadh, enjoying the combined advantages of accessible geography and a practiced remoteness from the dictates of Lhasa. Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (as, say, in Wu) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy. By the 1830s we can take the existence of all these for granted.  The majority Bengali-speaking provinces themselves would be one of the wealthiest places on the Republic, containing multiple large cities, a middle class, centers of the First Industrial Revolution, and bustling ports for international trade. Money talked; it granted the industrial bourgeoisie privileges, it could organize itself and strength itself. But they did not climb the mountaintop to Lhasa.  The Republic possessed the largest economy of its day. Yet, if organized with the more 20th century measure of GDP per capita, we would only estimate it was somewhere in the top two fifths of all nations at the time. Far from being the apex of the world, it may be recognized as slightly above average.  Some ninety million people - some seventy per cent of the population - continued to till the soil, herd their animals, and carry out the brutal and unforgiving life of subsistence farming. A bad season - a hail storm - dust or drought - would bring ruin. Their lives were not radically different from those of subsistence farmers some one thousand years ago. They would eat their staple grains, their luxuries might be a bit of salt, extra wood for burning (though not at the Plateau, above the tree line), a bit of oil or butter or meat. Water would be carried up, thirty or forty pounds of it, for hours of washing work, for miles. Work was ten to twelve hours a day from childhood until death. Rest days were scarce. Famine is ruinous and the threat of it was constant, epidemic disease stalked the larger populations. Stunting and edentulism from malnutrition was common. Perhaps the only substantial difference between the lives of the poor and those of the era of Gyalyum the Benevolent was the introduction of the potato in the 1100s. Flight to the cities was considered more tolerable to many, even with the risk of poor sanitation and epidemic disease. If I were to raise my children today and they were so stunted as a child of the working poor of centuries past, and had so few teeth, or had such an epidemic disease, the municipal government would charge me with endangerment to the child and take them away. What are we to make of this?  This uneven geography has, through a glass darkly, been reflected in the uneven distribution of power in the Republic itself. The period from the 1800s to the 1830s had seen the progressive transfer of legal rights, assignment of districts, and restructure of voting laws. Gone were the days of aristocrats taking up swords against the wrath of the people - those foolish enough to do so were pulled apart by horses. Those noble families who had fled the republican revolution in Lhasa in the 18th century had guarded their power jealously, and now under their own old names began to make their influence known in the former center of imperial power. The aggregate effect of these reforms was disproportionately to benefit the citizens of Tibetan plateau - increasingly, the wealthier citizens of the Tibetan plateau.  But the Republic was also a place of many beliefs and creeds - a kind of pluralism had settled over the Republic. Most people followed some variation of the Bön pantheon and one or more of the multiple schools of its practices, millions of others did not. Borrowing from one tradition or another became commonplace, the sign of moral practice or intellectual sophistication. The years of paranoid suspicion over secret cults were long gone. For its many faults, the Republic had enjoyed a peace built on syncretism and cosmopolitan beliefs.  The Republic, like the Empire before it, was built on a comprehensive legal system. But in the empire, the legal system was divinely inspired and a gift from the Purgyals. We are far removed from the days where the emperor would cast lots to make determinations on taxes or troop movements. The Republic was nominally based on a system - which had its developments from some of the more materialist Confucian schools as well as the neo-Taoist belief in human perfectibility and personal cultivation. That said, we must make the distinction that it was not quite a democracy in the modern sense. The state bureaucracy did not have the legal responsibilities assigned to it, nor did it have the capacity to act, that a modern state might. It did possess a relatively strong presidency, not again in the modern sense but in that the executive could influence the legislature.  Tibet among its neighbors was still a power to avoid, a lumbering giant that may tread on its neighbors unwittingly. From its size, from the vast proportion of the territory that it had clung to. It a large economy but one still carried along by its sheer bulk and not by any technological advance. By comparison, in later chapters we shall look at Wu, which was still more populated, or Anatolia, which enjoyed the benefits of a regimented modern army, and greater urbanization and industrialization.  An incumbent Sikyong or head of government, nominally held some authority over the government of the Republic. However, owing to the relative power of the executive in the Tibetan system, the republic was dependent on the action (or lack of action) of its leadership. For a few months in 1836, this was was Tsultrim Dbas. At 77 years of age, she was an elderly caretaker, notable mostly for her aristocratic family name, her indulgence in wines, for her decades old patronage of the the National Alliance of May 1756; now much receded from its former heights.  Yet growing in strength almost by the day was the Red Mountain Party. An alliance of aristocrats, military officers, and some monastic heads, they would champion the institutions of the previous social order, and seem totally opposed to any process that in their view would undermine the cornerstones of Tibetan society. This would range from liberal republicanism (the ever present boogeyman of mob rule) to industrialization (the end of old manors and farms, the profaning of sacred rivers). The defenders of the social order, however, had to learn the politics of the people. This was the major innovation brought about by the liberal revolutions. Even the most arch-reactionary Tibetan who slit throats at the altars to Gyalyum the Benevolent discovered that they required newspapers and pamphlets which appealed to 'public opinion' – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy. An appeal to the sacred epics and rites was not enough; an appeal to all the barley-eaters of Tibet was more so.  The budget of the government was small by 20th century standards but prosperous compared to its contemporaries. The function and capabilities of the centralized state apparatus did not yet exist, and taxation and registration of incomes was haphazard, but still more than enough for the republics limited roles and responsibilities. Cities and provinces of millions of people may be served only by a few dozen bureaucrats.  A portion of the budget would be directed to the maintenance of a standing army. The army was one of the largest in the world at this point, and still held back on the traditional military practice of an occasional promotion by merit. The very highest ranks of the army, as late as 1836, would be held by Tibetan, Han Chinese, and Bengali officers.  While there is the core of a professional standing army, the bulk of the land army was militia raised by local and provincial governments, even aristocrats or monastic heads, each wildly varying in equipment, leadership, and capabilties.  By contrast, the Tibetan Republic possessed only a second-rate navy, far outnumbered by its neighbors such as Wu or Majapahit. The small and aging fleets stationed in the Bengal ports is perhaps comparable to regional powers such as Egypt or Estonia.  But the deficiencies of the navy did not matter as much at present, for the foremost threat to the Tibetan Republic was internal rebellion. In this case, the seizure of three southern provinces by Bamar nobles and the proclaimed establishment of a new kingdom. The paradox of this incipient nationalism, as in all nationalisms, was that in forming its own nation it automatically created the counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into the choice between assimilation and inferiority. The Kachin and Shan peoples would have been minorities in this new kingdom, and so many went over to ally with the Tibetans post-war.  The Burmese revolt of 1836 may not be entirely confused with the revolts of later decades. Burma was one of the poorest parts of the entire Republic. It was partly a call for liberation, then a vessel for old elites to reassert themselves - and partly the cries of the working middle class who had said 'enough'. But it may not be mistaken for the liberal revolts of the past sixty years, as it was organized or at least nominally directed by those who intended to restore an absolute monarchy. Hence the later muddling over by scholars of the time who imagined democracy - rule by the people and nationalism - rule of a specific people over others - were identical.  Yet, in the Tibetan Republic itself - scholars and writers, dissidents and the wealthy 'middle classes' - conjured up distant plans and wrote down their dreams for further integration, of some representation in the vaunted parliaments of Lhasa. Pamphlets were published and discussion groups formed; students pounded their fists on tables and argued with their teachers. Although there was little action on the issue on the 1830s from the highest levels of government, there was to be much more than just talk.   Comparisons were made, not entirely without basis, to the North Ulaqui Mission, where less than 50,000 bureaucrats attempted to hold in their fist a territory an ocean away from the Tsalagi metropole and the size of the entire Japanese archipelago - revolts in Catalonia and Occitania soon broke out and led to fighting in the streets and on the roads, with Mahuasetepec and half a dozen other cities under a bloodletting [Footnote 4].  Much closer to Tibet, rumors abounded over the Republic of Wu's invasion of the smaller kingdom Ning and the possible acquisition of all of Jiangxi. After months of border clashes and a breakdown of relations, the Wu armies moved across the border in what soon became known as the Gan Expedition [Footnote 5].  Wu was the other great republic of the region, and easily the most powerful of the states that arise in the collapse of the Jin and Tibet's later retreat from China after the death of Gesar Lasya. The Tibetans reacted to the rise of Wu with a mix of barely-concealed admiration - Minister Qi Shanlan was the object of obsessive press overage - and also shock and suspicion. For further details on the history of Wu, please see the next chapter.  In the first months of 1836, Tibetan armies moved within the internal frontier and to suppress the Burmese rebellion.   As Tibet busied itself with internal strife, regional rivalries and old suspicions moved, independent of Tibet's interests. The Republic of Gujarat and the Sacred Hierarchy were opponents over borders and influence within South Asia. The years since 1820 had some consolidation of smaller states following Tibet's interventions in the region - but medieval polities and princelings still sat cheek by jowl along great powers and colonial empires and republics.  Continuing to foreign affairs. In the starting months of 1836, the diplomatic service of the Majapahit Empire took a decidedly more hostile tone against the Tibetan Republic.  This frosty turn in relations may have had several causes - the movement and conduct of Tibetan Armies as they moved further south, fears of a contest over the buffer states in the region - the Shan state of Hsipaw, the Champa - the coveted Malay peninsula especially, and of the Majapahit empire's suspicion of being destabilized and overthrown by a firebrand republic.  Great powers have no lack of reasons for competition - one of these may have been the cause of colonial expansion and the redrawing of territorial borders. That would be the case of the Purépecha Empire and Carantania.  The Purépecha held on to their entrepôts on the Itarhian peninsula, and the fears and concerns of a native power further inland.   Still another cause would be competition over valuable trade routes. The Egyptian kingdom held multiple treaty ports stretching from Vũng Tàu in the south to Port Ismail in the north, and the local state of Yue coveted further control over the valuable routes of the South China Sea.  With the age of republics and empires, there was still the mercilessness of shifting power politics. Case in point, the long-standing contention between Egypt and Anatolia.  Over Mediterranean trade, territorial disputes, and a host of other causes, the great Republic of Anatolia capitalized on the own interests, and drat any neighboring state that would move in the way of the popular republic.  The Anatolian Republic was still a bastion of military might, a pivot across the entire continent; even smarting from a loss in the Congo River campaigns, it would still depose monarchies and even humiliate the Tibetan Republic in the 1780s.  The Burmese had marched the Tibetans on an open field; the early stages of drill and Abateid warfare. What would be later eulogized gallantry as part of an incipient Burmese nationalism was also at the time regarded as tactical stupidity. [Footnote 6 With the defeat of Chan (Chandra) Min's armies, organized Burmese resistance ceased. As the Tibetan armies moved through villages, past the silent phaya and jedi, there was nothing left in opposition.  Soon, Tibetan armies occupied much of the Irrawaddy river basin, with some scattered resistance near the Myitkyina.  The Sikyong would not live to see their military triumph completed and order restored, and died after a short illness.  A placeholder Sikyong was hurriedly appointed. Anuradha Bhandari, was a compromise candidate for the rural elites and conservative voters. The National Alliance, first borne out of grand ideals, was soon on its last legs.  The Gan Expedition came to a rapid conclusion by the late spring of 1836.  Wu was at this point the most populous state on earth, and now in possession of major cities along the Gan River, cotton plantations and fertile rice fields, and manufactures in glass and porcelain. easily pre-eminent in any claim to unite the Han peoples, and as its capabilities grew, suspicion of those actions also festered in the Tibetan view.  A few weeks later, the Tibetan Republic declared that the Burmese revolt was suppressed.  The domestic situation was not resolved after the death or exile of the leadership of the Burmese kingdom- only that violence ceased on an organized scale on two sides. It was not in the act of battle or the maneuvers of armies, but an extended period where violence and the will to it was sufficiently known. Tax offices burned, officials ignored or vanished.  tension was localized within the rebellious provinces, and any 'restoration' of order would be a massive sink of time and resources, and the Republic portrayed itself as a source of order.   Outside of these areas, the republic at the time became more secure. The defeat of the rebellion, recast as the defeat of the forces of reaction and hierarchy, were cast as a hurrah for the republic - with freedom of the press and assembly guaranteed and the ancient system of rites and brutal privileges left in the distant past.  Such freedom of expression also however gave way to the long shadow of expansionism in Tibetan history - the Red Mountain faction and their allies made the argument, in guarded terms, that the republic would have to expand against its neighbors in order to survive, and Tibet's defeats at the hand of Wu was a source of painful resentment - as nationalism is often borne of resentment and coveting of another country's wealth or strength.  With peace asured, the government spent its efforts on construction projects; on enclosures, on expanding those areas where the government had a monopoly; some mines were expanded, and the state acted, as a guarantor to private enterprise.  Middle class and aristocrats alike reacted with shock to the lurid stories of the Tsalagi cracking down further on their holdings in distant Awiropa, their borders snaking around distant Hualanitstlan [Footnote 7]  and this bloody suppression brought about suspicion and reaction - not from the Anatolian Republic, as would be first assumed, but instead the Majapahit.  It was over. By the elections at the end of the year, despite the success of the military action, the economy was still in dire straits and the alternative factions were too popular. The National Alliance of May 1756 was thrown out of power in a humiliating rout, and the Red Mountain Party won a majority of the seats in the Kashag.  The new Sikyong, Amar Singh, was at first a bureaucrat and had risen up through a cycling of separate ministerial positions. He was appealing to the party for providing the aura of stability and an air of personal integrity, and as a Bön gentleman, he would be expected to hold a modest touch over the Republic. The policies of industry and commerce at this time followed a simple model. There were manorial or monastic holdings, which in turn paid their taxes to the state. In a word, genteel. The order was not yet entirely overturned by the world of bulk processing and industrialization.  All this was appealing to the party rank and file; they were closing ranks and secure in their own power, with little need to demand any sweeping changes.  Tibet's diplomatic isolation at this time was profound. While the Republic enjoyed freer trade and lower tariffs with the smaller states to the south, none were willing to enter an open alliance. Not even Delhi, one of the closest of Tibet's sister republics, was amenable to discussion. For the last years of the 1830s, Tibet was well and truly alone.  The news of Majapahit landings and some inconclusive naval battles off the coast of Lissabon was a curiosity, something for conversation, not a matter to be involved.   But even so, the old systems began to crack and shift. The latter 1830s saw the more rapid use of the steam engine (for further detail, see pg. 59 on the Wu economy and the use of shaft mines in Shaanxi and Hebei). The increased profitability of coal mining meant only that the use of steam engines became more widespread.  If the Republic had any direction at all in the late 1830s, it would be to remain 'steady as she goes'. Steady harvests and stable food prices meant that the worst of the economic crisis of the 1830s was over, and there was a broad feeling of contentment. Taoist principle of governs least; avoiding a heavy hand meant at least an avoidance of the worst forms of tyranny.  Was the republic at risk of backsliding so far that it would become a monarchy - would that ghost be made to walk again? By the 1830s, this at most idle dinner talk among some aristocrats, and a few monastic heads might have complained after a few cups of wine, but there was no organized movement to restore the monarchy as late as 1840. Party elites, and businessmen - felt content with the current arrangement of a republic, felt their own positions were secure, and saw no need to risk losing the estates and palanquins. letter to a colleague: 'why risk bringing back a Lasya the Holy, who would entomb us alive'?  Some maneuvers towards open conquests only fizzled out, like black gunpowder splashed in water. The Otgonbayarid Khanate, the successor to the Mongolian Khanates of the past centuries, made threatening gestures to the Chahar Mongolian hordes [Footnote 8], and then retreated in shame after the Korean republic guaranteed their independence. Even in semi-nomadic polities, the old norms of warfare were worn away, as stone inscriptions were blasted away by sand and wind.   The progress of society, to say nothing of scientific advancement, is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of posing of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems. Cheap coal meant more steam, more steam engines required more parts, more parts required a machining industry precise enough to make them. Milling machines, shapers, metal planers, lathes. All these meant standard parts beyond what the artisan could make by hand. All these meant more precise measurements and better parts for more tools. This is not to say that a type of industrialization had already taken place - the printing of cloth had been long established in Bengal, for example - but further processes, more materials, more complicated chains. The move away from biomass and towards fossil fuels had truly begun. Yet Tibet was not always on the vanguard of industrial technology and the use of energy. Far from it. There was a pronounced delay in adoption of the railroad - why bother to hoist beams and iron bars up three kilometers? Who would dig up the passes when the animal tracks were narrow enough as is? It was thought of as a trinket or curiosity on the plateau. But in the south as well as in Sichuan, there were anxious comparisons to the stories of Java and the Yangtze Valley - a need to move faster, to not be left behind.   Yet the remoteness of the mountains was not always a guard against the sweep and furor of history. Chachapoya, after a few months of clashes aong the border, they had seized the city and mines of Potosi, and so gained an advantage relative to most of its neighbors.  In February 1840, the Majapahit ended their military campaigns against the North Ulaqui Mission. While it may be assumed, as contemporary authors had opined, that this was a temporary end to the great power wars, and that most disputes would peter out. As for Tibet, the republic sleepwalked into the next decades. THE WORLD: 1840  ====== 1. The other cities, besides Shigatse, of course would be scattered along the Collao, and would include Patamarka and Potosí. 2. The discovery of his tomb by farmers in Shaanxi last year has brought the old legends to popular attention. 3. An older yet respectful term dating from the Buddhist period of Tibetan history before the Second Tibetan Empire. 4. A major trading port during the time of the Triple Alliance. Recent archaeological discoveries have shown the city's continuous habitation for over two thousand years. 5. Gan coming from the Gan River 赣江, which is a metonym for the entire region. 6. The 1962 docudrama, Chan Min, produced for Burmese television, is still regarded as a raw and piercing look at the events of the Tibetan Burmese War. The use of Tibetan army soldiers and Burmese villagers as extras produces a serious effect of observational cinema despite a limited budget. 7. From the Classical Nahuatl, which is used as a formal and literary language in the region today. 8. Horde here is derived from the political unit 'orda' and not used in the lightly derogatory sense. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 16:47
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I love the way each update has its framing, and this academic Marxist historical one is no different.
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Aug 17, 2023 17:52
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Hell yes. I've been playing a lot of vicky3 lately and I mostly play countries like Ottomans and Sokoto so I'm just seething with jealousy over starting with a republic with slavery banned and agrarianism.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:50
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Let’s loving goooooooo!!!!!
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Aug 17, 2023 19:22
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Awesome, our journey to the Cool-Shades Pyramid flag begins! (fake edit: touch-screen keyboard tried to betray me...)
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Aug 17, 2023 19:36
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Yaaay.
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Aug 17, 2023 20:28
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lmao @ tibet starting at 60% market access, I can tell already this is gonna be a Suffering campaign
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Aug 17, 2023 23:15
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:lmao @ tibet starting at 60% market access, I can tell already this is gonna be a Suffering campaign 
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Aug 17, 2023 23:18
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Praise Lasya, it returns!
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Aug 17, 2023 23:19
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Good update
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Aug 17, 2023 23:21
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railroad magnates gonna have a field day also: what culture traits do tibetan and nepali have? same as base?
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Aug 17, 2023 23:25
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:railroad magnates gonna have a field day Nepali has Himalayan and Tibetan Language Tibetan has Himalayan, East Asian Heritage, Tibetan Language, and Tibetic group, which is for Tibetan, Yi, and Sichuanese. Han has been broken up into several cultures and these share most but not all traits
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Aug 17, 2023 23:39
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Kangxi posted:Han has been broken up into several cultures and these share most but not all traits Well then. What are the African ones like? "African heritage" is an insane trait in vanilla.
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Aug 18, 2023 00:05
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Kangxi posted:Nepali has Himalayan and Tibetan Language I know what i'm voting for
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Aug 18, 2023 00:19
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Tulip posted:What are the African ones like? "African heritage" is an insane trait in vanilla. I kept most of the vanilla traits but I did end up changing a lot of the religious traits; to give an example many of the East African culture are Hindu now
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Aug 18, 2023 00:22
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Anyway thank you all for being patient. It took a while for this to get back up, but it's been lot of fun to write and I'm glad to hear you all enjoy it
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Aug 18, 2023 00:48
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Kangxi posted:I kept most of the vanilla traits but I did end up changing a lot of the religious traits; to give an example many of the East African culture are Hindu now Lol nice Kangxi posted:Anyway thank you all for being patient. It took a while for this to get back up, but it's been lot of fun to write and I'm glad to hear you all enjoy it I mean, we love it, this LP rules and you rule and it's all very fun to read
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Aug 18, 2023 01:16
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Presumably there's no Victoria to bestow her name on the era, so what would the historians of this world call this time of revolutions and trains?
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Aug 18, 2023 01:45
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