- Location
- Western New York
Today, the seeds of a new AH story started sprouting in my brain. The basic POD is that during the Taiping Rebellion, the Taiping forces manage to break north and storm Beijing. The Emperor is slain (either by his own hand or by the Taiping - historians differ on the subject in TTL) and his brothers are either killed or flee into Manchuria. The Taiping success is fleeting, though, as the Hunan and Anhui armies soon arrive on the scene and take the capital back from the rebels. There, after much internal debate, Zong Guofan issues a proclamation that the Qing have lost the Mandate of Heaven and that he, reluctantly, will take their place. Zeng Guofan becomes the first emperor of the Yan (Flame) Dynasty, pledging to 'burn away the corruption and false teaching that have poisoned China' and taking the era name Jiande (Establishing Virtue).
Naturally, this change in dynasties makes the second half of the 19th century a golden age for China and it reaches superpower status by 1900.
Wait, no, it still has very serious internal and external issues to contend with and while it does fare better than OTL, Yan China lags behind Japan and the West. They're at least able to keep the Japanese out of Korea and Taiwan. Only during the 1920s, though, does China catch up with Japan. After that point, it lurches its way onward and upward, and by 2019, Yan China is about as prosperous and powerful as OTL China, if not a little more so. It's a mostly free constitutional monarchy, but the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities is not that great. Also, it probably has 200-300 million more people as it didn't suffer the demographic effects of the warlord era, the Japanese invasion and Maoism. Mongolia (all of which remained Chinese here), Xinjiang and Tibet are most likely all being flooded with Han settlers; possibly Outer Manchuria as well, but I suspect it ended up in Russian hands just like in OTL. The current emperor is the Tielong Emperor, born in 1940 and about to celebrate 50 years on the throne.
(Against that backdrop, my very vague notion of the actual story is that it centers on a developing friendship and then romance between two Beijing residents - one is Taam Jidaan, a police officer from Guangzhou, the other is Nicole Lee, an American exchange student studying at a local university. It's a little thin, I know.)
Naturally, this change in dynasties makes the second half of the 19th century a golden age for China and it reaches superpower status by 1900.
Wait, no, it still has very serious internal and external issues to contend with and while it does fare better than OTL, Yan China lags behind Japan and the West. They're at least able to keep the Japanese out of Korea and Taiwan. Only during the 1920s, though, does China catch up with Japan. After that point, it lurches its way onward and upward, and by 2019, Yan China is about as prosperous and powerful as OTL China, if not a little more so. It's a mostly free constitutional monarchy, but the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities is not that great. Also, it probably has 200-300 million more people as it didn't suffer the demographic effects of the warlord era, the Japanese invasion and Maoism. Mongolia (all of which remained Chinese here), Xinjiang and Tibet are most likely all being flooded with Han settlers; possibly Outer Manchuria as well, but I suspect it ended up in Russian hands just like in OTL. The current emperor is the Tielong Emperor, born in 1940 and about to celebrate 50 years on the throne.
(Against that backdrop, my very vague notion of the actual story is that it centers on a developing friendship and then romance between two Beijing residents - one is Taam Jidaan, a police officer from Guangzhou, the other is Nicole Lee, an American exchange student studying at a local university. It's a little thin, I know.)