fashbasher
Banned
"Warming?" Surely cooling was the intent. And you get much better nuclear winter with burning cities than boiling water...
Mental typo...oops! Guess I just destroyed civilization again.
Map Thread XV
- Thread starter rvbomally
- Start date
- Status
Mental typo...oops! Guess I just destroyed civilization again.
'Nother Question:
Should this nation take neuchatel or not?
Only Neuchatel? Go with Mussolini's thoughts on Switzerland and divide it into its corresponding linguistic communities as the "unnatural" state it is.
It just seems so....natural.You know, this is the first Franco-Polish wank I've ever seen. Indeed, I don't think it has ever occurred to me that there could be such a thing.
Alright. What about replacing the Japanese threat with European powers?
I think it might have been inspired by that, but the POD is so early that that situation is butterflied away.
Sorry, I'll try to change it. Those are the colors I use on the template for making these keys and I forgot to color those two (which, incidentally, I added after all the others).
I know. There's a reason why the Gambia doesn't control the whole river.
Obergruppenführer Smith
Banned
Not sure if that would change anything drastically. Given that you have pushed the Jurchen's rise by at least a century, that buys Joseon enough time to modernize on its own terms with possible shipwrecked Europeans such as was the OTL case of Jan Jansz. Weltevree. It was to the point that the Koreans contributed greatly to fighting the Russians in the 1654-1658 "Russian conquests".
At least in that point of history, if both Japan and China were being dismantled by the European powers, Joseon would be like Siam in terms of having that extra space to start developing. I'm not seeing how the Jurchens/Manchus would grow without their Chinese conquests to strike south.
*points at signature* When that progress map leans to become finished, prepare yourself to get an overflow of informational texts and maps in one post.Demonic Megaustria
(according to my mapping speed, expect it somwhere between easter and end of may)Also, if you're interested in participating in the development of that timeline, PM me
Current Opinions:
Take Neuchatel: 2
Don't take: 1
I'll guess I'll look up how it looks. maybe I'll add it, maybe not.
Also, Switzerland should stick with independence - Let the swiss live in peace!
Why Germany doesn't take Switzerland will be explained in the finished TL.
The Italian States on the other hand claim the entire southern Switzerland up to lucerne.
Why respect the Vienna agreement (assuming this takes place in your Timeline) only to a point. I might be a little biased here as a local of the area in question, but dont slice the Swiss pls
Current Opinions:
Awesome maps, @Valdore Javorsky , I would like to contribute if possible and I put my vote into taking Neuchatel.
Tbh it also looks a bit weird on the map.
While it looks extremely ugly on the Qbam, It's not that bad on the europe map but it's still irritating.
EDIT:
On the other hand, it looks quite ordinary on the V-BAM map, the map I'm making just for this timeline.
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(You speaking german?)
No, the Swiss won't be sliced. but they will slice themselves (Swiss Demonic Civil War)
At least they get Valtellina after that.
HarrisonBergeron
Banned
Kick
Sick of this nonsense being the foundation for discussion. The exact opposite is being seen worldwide. The Sahara is greening, for fuck’s sake. And “given current agricultural practices”, huh? So just end the fucking subsidies for shit crops we don’t actually need and let farmers grow what IS needed. Never mind that the only real threats to agriculture are the phosphorus crisis and business practices like Monsanto’s.
002. Bod rGyal Lo
dA link.
Tibet in our timeline has a complicated history, but then again, who doesn’t? Tibet’s history doesn’t get any more complicated than the short time she flirted with independence from its declaration in 1912 to the seizure of her sovereignty by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950. In order to secure Tibet (aided by hostile maneuvers from the British, Sikh, and Nepali Empires, and furthered by the declining fate of the Manchu Dynasty to which Tibet owed fealty) a place for herself among the international order an alternate historian ends up with a tough job: deal Tibet a good hand, and then trust that she can play her cards right.
In this scenario, to vastly oversimplify, we can dump that responsibility on four Tibetans and two Brits.
In our time line, Ernest Shackleton was fascinated by exploration to the far corners of the world, eventually zeroing in on the navy and Antarctic exploration. In this timeline, he prefers land-based exploration, is stationed in Darjeeling and is put on Younghusband’s expedition to Tibet in 1904, meeting Ugyen Wangchuk (the soon-to-be First King of Bhutan, on the mission as a translator) and, once the British enter Lhasa, Thubten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (who in this timeline does not flee to Mongolia at the advice of his Buryat advisor, Dorjiev).
The relationship between His Holiness and Shackleton, who is stationed in Tibet, and records his experience into a very popular journal, becomes instrumental in developing British (and future Indian) policy towards Tibet. In 1906, at the behest of his journal’s publisher, Shackleton is encouraged to run for the 1906 General Election. Instead of the 13% of the vote he received, his journal and thrilling exploits of planting the Union Jack on the Roof of the World propel Shackleton to 40% and a seat in Parliament. One Mr. Churchill will run in Dundee in 1908, but the seat will remain in Liberal Union hands.
The man that Shackleton passed by on his way out of Tibet, Sir Charles Bell, meanwhile is meeting regularly with the Dalai Lama. The Qing Ambans are upset about this whole arrangement the British seem to be setting up for themselves in Tibet, but there’s little they can do. The Forbidden City has their own problems, so anything on the other side of the world is going to have to wait. “Butcher” Zhao Er Feng still goes on his rampage through Kham, and the Revolution in both Tibet and China still happens in 1911, but a new level of groundwork is laid out by Shackleton and Bell concerning British interests on in the Land of Snows.
The revolution in 1911 sees His Holiness escape to Sikkim with Sir Charles, where they are able to prosecute the War in Lhasa and Bell helps the legal aspect, funneling funds and weaponry to the Lhasa War Council to make sure the brutal Lhasa Revolution goes even better than in our time line. In 1913, His Holiness returns to the Potala, and his first act as the reinstated spiritual and temporal leader of his nation is to issue the Tibetan Declaration of Independence from China. (All according to plan…)
Tibet’s legal difficulties aren’t fully cleared up yet. In our time line, Tibet, China, and Britain met in the Indian hill town of Simla to bang out a deal regarding where exactly the borders of Tibet were, and what the relationship between the three countries would be. Naturally, China assumed Tibet was very small, and under the full control of Beijing. Tibet, on the other hand, believed Tibet was very large, and basically independent. Britain tried to walk a tight rope between securing themselves an insurance policy in Tibet, while not offending the Chinese. Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa (author of the quite detailed Tibet: A Political History), known to history by his title Tsepon Shakabpa, was the finance minister of the Tibetan government and a member of the Simla Delegation. The Chinese delegates went to Simla confident that they would simply collude with the British about the border between their country and India while the Tibetans were put in their place. The Tibetans, carrying volumes of tax and tribute payments going back centuries were able to prove that outlying areas of the Tibetan Plateau (most contentiously in Kham/Sichuan) had owed their allegiance to Lhasa and not Beijing. With their intense documentary evidence and a small groundwork laid out by both Shackleton and Bell, the British offered the Chinese some territorial concessions, and began to discuss the concept of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. This results (as IOTL) in the Chinese walking out of Simla. The final copy of the Simla Treaty is signed by the British and Tibetan delegation, now with an added clause (thanks to Bell and Shakabpa) that confirms Tibetan sovereignty and the unmarked eastern frontier in the absence of a Chinese signature.
The legality of Tibetan statehood now finalized, Tibet now has to go about keeping it. Tibet’s infrastructure is nearly non-existent, and her social fabric is ancient. His Holiness declares his intention to modernize the country, especially making full use of the newfound alliance with Britain. He tasks Tsepon Dorje Tsegyal Lungshar with finding a class of eight boys and two girls (in our time line, it was only four boys and no girls) to take to Britain to receive modern educations. In 1916, a second class of boys and girls will be sent to England, and in 1917, the experiment will be copied, but with a group of youths sent to Japan. Tibet would continue to send classes of students to Britain on even years, and Japan in odd years.
When the Great War begins, Tibet offers Britain to send a thousand soldiers to the battlefields of France (as in our time line). As opposed to telling them “Thanks, but we’re good for now,” Britain accepts the offer, and a thousand of Tibet’s new modernized warriors are shipped to the French countryside in 1916. They’re mostly put to work for recon and surveillance, but in their years in Western Europe, the Tibetan soldiers learned a lot. Upon returning to Tibet, they become the core of Tibet’s new army.
In the 1920s, the Russian Revolution hits and Tibet’s collusion with Russia (rumors of which poisoned Tibet’s relationship with Britain in our time line) is formally at an end. Most notably for inland Asia is the bloody, meteoric rise of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, so called “The Bloody White Baron.” The man, whose biography makes for some… interesting reading, was fascinated by mystical strands of Buddhism, combining them with his pre-Fascistic, pro-Aristocratic ideals that led him to rape and murder thousands in a bloody trail from Austria-Hungary to Mongolia. He allied with the Mongol Khaan, killed many a Communist, many a Jew, and before the Bolshevik Revolution hits Mongolia, he flees south to Tibet where he becomes the Vlad the Impaler to the Thubten Gyatso’s Pope Pius II.
The Tibet that the Bloody Baron arrives in is significantly improved from our Tibet c. 1930, or in this world’s Tibet just a few years earlier. She’s experiencing the first early benefits from her Study Abroad candidates: Lhasa has its electric light infrastructure set up, it has a British-trained, Tibetan-born legal scholar beginning to catalog and codify a Tibetan common law system, and Tibet’s vast area and natural resources are being surveyed. Just to name a few. Tibet’s army, modeled after the British, engaged on a campaign shoring up their eastern border in Kham and makes extensive (controversial) use of von Ungern and his irregulars to shatter the Ma Clique, and take control of Amdo.
By the end of 1933, the “Great” Thirteenth Dalai Lama is on his deathbed. He gives a warning to his countrymen: China is in civil war, but never lose sight that the Chinese will come for them. He dies on December 17, having secured not Reting Rinpoche and the Conservative faction, but Tsepon Lungshar and the Modernists. Lungshar keeps his eyes, keeps the Tibetan Army in top shape, makes peace with Shakabpa (the new leader of the Conservatives in the Tibetan Kashag), and keeps the study-abroad programs going (until war in the Pacific makes trips to Japan untenable).
Tibet continues this path of growth, development, and connection, rather than stagnation and decay. Some of the Tibetan women who experienced British modernity have infected Tibet with a whole new vocabulary of social progress, equal rights, emancipation, and suffrage. Printing presses and modern concepts on the goods of literacy and sedentary agriculture are all the rage in Lhasa (not so out in the periphery, and certainly not in Shigatse).
Outside Tibet, dramatic things are taking place. World War II erupts as scheduled and the United States passes Lend-Lease soon enough. The difference here is that a “Defeat Japan First” policy is adopted instead, leading to the early defeat of Japan (with the Soviets jumping on the Tokyo train in 1944 rather than at the eleventh hour), the development of a strong supply train to Chiang Kai-Shek, and the continued bleeding of Russian blood in the Ukraine. By the time the Allies land in France, the Nazis and Soviets are bleeding dry and the drive to Berlin is so easy, the Allies make it all the way to Warsaw where they shake hands with the Red Army.
The Tblisi Peace Conference (feat. Prime Minister Shackleton, Stalin, and President Roosevelt), made just prior to the French landings, sees the Soviet Union making the same gains she’d agreed with under Hitler, and the agreement to create a string of “Neutral” Eastern European nations: Poland, Hungary, and Romania. As for Asia, Japan and Korea will both be cut in half (given that Russians had invaded Japanese soil) along the 38th Parallel, with a Russian occupation zone of Tokyo carved out. Stalin, miffed that he’s been negotiated out of Europe decides to hell with Ice Man and Professor X and gives the Red Army the go ahead to just take all of Korea. At the time, no American ships were nearby, so they took Jeju Island, set up their own government, and called it fait accompli.
Now almost completely surrounded and contained, the Stalin regime decides that its only strategy for expansion is one of subversion and espionage. The United States goes on the defensive, developing three broad alliances to contain Soviet influence in the three spheres of anti-Communist global defense: an Atlantic Ocean Defensive Organization, an Indian Ocean Treat Pact, and a Pacific Ring Defense Pact.
Tibet is keen on joining the new world order now embodied in the United Nations. An admission that is supported by Britain and rejected by the Republic of China: now in control of all mainland China, most islands, and half of Inner Mongolia. Manchuria under the Communist dictator Mao Zedong, ironically has positive relations with the State of Tibet (anything to piss of Chiang). She seeks to make herself known as a state that can carry its own, but also as a peacemaker. Tibet, unable to join the UN, still makes her presence known. For example opening personal relations with Eleanor Roosevelt while she was touring Latin America in support of the “South American Human Rights Council.” (Former First Lady Roosevelt was found murdered under mysterious circumstances when helping Peruvian lawmakers draft anti-business legislation. OSS involvement is still under “independent” investigation.)
India under goes a much smoother transition from Raj to being split into eight states: Baluchistan, Panjab (with a passage to the seat) Rajastan, Marathastan, Greater Tamil Nadu, New Magadha, Assam and Burma. The former seven, plus Afghanistan and Nepal, are joined into a Subcontinental Customs Union. Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet soon grow interested in joining, but are worried that more economic ties to India amidst their own currency issues and India’s (though not quite so bloody… still bloody, but not quite so) Balkanization, might push China to invade.
While the Chinese Civil War never really ended (OTL Panmunjeom got nothin on TTL Beijing) a nervous cease-fire was established, two central Asian states become Soviet puppets, and one – huge – dominant player is allied with the United States. That leaves Tibet with two scary options: ally with the Soviet Union, risk being overtaken by the Communists, and see their way of life crumble beneath the fires of Bolshevik Revolution, or move to the other side, be subsumed by the Republic of China, and watch Modern Confucianism and pro-Colonial Chinese general swallow their country, as they had tried to in 1908 under the Butcher Zhao.
The Dalai Lama’s reincarnation was located in the late ‘30s, and going into 1950 was due to be enthroned in Lhasa. Lungshar, old, but still in control, is much like a Tibetan godfather. He leads the Dalai Lama’s education, making sure he has a healthy dose of modernity and a love of the West. It is under Lungshar’s insistence, and the young Dalai Lama’s first taste of politics when he declares that slavery and serfdom (different from Western forms, and known in Tibetan “Zap” and “Drap”) are anti-Buddhist and sins, breaching the Precept that a good Buddhist must “not take what is not given.”
This will lay the groundwork for complete emancipation in the future, but there won’t be time for that in the ‘50s. The event makes sure the Panchen Lama can’t return to Shigatse as his supporters engage in brawls with supporters of the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama, already having fled to China, takes this time to call upon Chiang Kai-Shek for help in returning him to Tashilhunpo. Chiang hasn’t been to war in almost a year now that the situation to the north has settled into an uneven truce. And the Republic still claims all of Tibet. On October 1, Chiang sends a messenger to Lhasa to issue a cease-and-desist to His Holiness and the Kashag. The Dalai Lama (/Lungshar’s) response is simple, “We’ve done nothing. The Panchen can return at any time.”
Of course, this is just a ruse. The Republican Army has already crossed the Tibetan border in five locations…
Artistic Notes: This map is illegal in the (actual) People's Republic of China for two reasons. (1) It displays the Tibetan National Flag, which was an artistic choice of mine, not a political one. And (2) it's alternate historical, which isn't REALLY illegal, but it's KIND OF illegal. For exactly this reason (it might present a world in which the PRC isn't nearly as glorious, dominant, or powerful
). The side image is a painting from the Norbulingka (Summer palace) in Lhasa of Tibetan peasants building the Jokhang (Tibet's first Buddhist temple). The silken fabric usually reserved for hanging thangkha paintings were from a thangkha painting of Guru Rinpoche. The flags of Xinjiang and Mongolia were taken from Victoria 2's deep files (they have so many fantastic interpretations of potential flags!) and the red seal below the title is the red seal used by the independent Tibetan government in Tibetan, Khotan, and Phagspa scripts in use IOTL until 1959.
dA link.
Tibet in our timeline has a complicated history, but then again, who doesn’t? Tibet’s history doesn’t get any more complicated than the short time she flirted with independence from its declaration in 1912 to the seizure of her sovereignty by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950. In order to secure Tibet (aided by hostile maneuvers from the British, Sikh, and Nepali Empires, and furthered by the declining fate of the Manchu Dynasty to which Tibet owed fealty) a place for herself among the international order an alternate historian ends up with a tough job: deal Tibet a good hand, and then trust that she can play her cards right.
In this scenario, to vastly oversimplify, we can dump that responsibility on four Tibetans and two Brits.
In our time line, Ernest Shackleton was fascinated by exploration to the far corners of the world, eventually zeroing in on the navy and Antarctic exploration. In this timeline, he prefers land-based exploration, is stationed in Darjeeling and is put on Younghusband’s expedition to Tibet in 1904, meeting Ugyen Wangchuk (the soon-to-be First King of Bhutan, on the mission as a translator) and, once the British enter Lhasa, Thubten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (who in this timeline does not flee to Mongolia at the advice of his Buryat advisor, Dorjiev).
The relationship between His Holiness and Shackleton, who is stationed in Tibet, and records his experience into a very popular journal, becomes instrumental in developing British (and future Indian) policy towards Tibet. In 1906, at the behest of his journal’s publisher, Shackleton is encouraged to run for the 1906 General Election. Instead of the 13% of the vote he received, his journal and thrilling exploits of planting the Union Jack on the Roof of the World propel Shackleton to 40% and a seat in Parliament. One Mr. Churchill will run in Dundee in 1908, but the seat will remain in Liberal Union hands.
The man that Shackleton passed by on his way out of Tibet, Sir Charles Bell, meanwhile is meeting regularly with the Dalai Lama. The Qing Ambans are upset about this whole arrangement the British seem to be setting up for themselves in Tibet, but there’s little they can do. The Forbidden City has their own problems, so anything on the other side of the world is going to have to wait. “Butcher” Zhao Er Feng still goes on his rampage through Kham, and the Revolution in both Tibet and China still happens in 1911, but a new level of groundwork is laid out by Shackleton and Bell concerning British interests on in the Land of Snows.
The revolution in 1911 sees His Holiness escape to Sikkim with Sir Charles, where they are able to prosecute the War in Lhasa and Bell helps the legal aspect, funneling funds and weaponry to the Lhasa War Council to make sure the brutal Lhasa Revolution goes even better than in our time line. In 1913, His Holiness returns to the Potala, and his first act as the reinstated spiritual and temporal leader of his nation is to issue the Tibetan Declaration of Independence from China. (All according to plan…)
Tibet’s legal difficulties aren’t fully cleared up yet. In our time line, Tibet, China, and Britain met in the Indian hill town of Simla to bang out a deal regarding where exactly the borders of Tibet were, and what the relationship between the three countries would be. Naturally, China assumed Tibet was very small, and under the full control of Beijing. Tibet, on the other hand, believed Tibet was very large, and basically independent. Britain tried to walk a tight rope between securing themselves an insurance policy in Tibet, while not offending the Chinese. Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa (author of the quite detailed Tibet: A Political History), known to history by his title Tsepon Shakabpa, was the finance minister of the Tibetan government and a member of the Simla Delegation. The Chinese delegates went to Simla confident that they would simply collude with the British about the border between their country and India while the Tibetans were put in their place. The Tibetans, carrying volumes of tax and tribute payments going back centuries were able to prove that outlying areas of the Tibetan Plateau (most contentiously in Kham/Sichuan) had owed their allegiance to Lhasa and not Beijing. With their intense documentary evidence and a small groundwork laid out by both Shackleton and Bell, the British offered the Chinese some territorial concessions, and began to discuss the concept of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. This results (as IOTL) in the Chinese walking out of Simla. The final copy of the Simla Treaty is signed by the British and Tibetan delegation, now with an added clause (thanks to Bell and Shakabpa) that confirms Tibetan sovereignty and the unmarked eastern frontier in the absence of a Chinese signature.
The legality of Tibetan statehood now finalized, Tibet now has to go about keeping it. Tibet’s infrastructure is nearly non-existent, and her social fabric is ancient. His Holiness declares his intention to modernize the country, especially making full use of the newfound alliance with Britain. He tasks Tsepon Dorje Tsegyal Lungshar with finding a class of eight boys and two girls (in our time line, it was only four boys and no girls) to take to Britain to receive modern educations. In 1916, a second class of boys and girls will be sent to England, and in 1917, the experiment will be copied, but with a group of youths sent to Japan. Tibet would continue to send classes of students to Britain on even years, and Japan in odd years.
When the Great War begins, Tibet offers Britain to send a thousand soldiers to the battlefields of France (as in our time line). As opposed to telling them “Thanks, but we’re good for now,” Britain accepts the offer, and a thousand of Tibet’s new modernized warriors are shipped to the French countryside in 1916. They’re mostly put to work for recon and surveillance, but in their years in Western Europe, the Tibetan soldiers learned a lot. Upon returning to Tibet, they become the core of Tibet’s new army.
In the 1920s, the Russian Revolution hits and Tibet’s collusion with Russia (rumors of which poisoned Tibet’s relationship with Britain in our time line) is formally at an end. Most notably for inland Asia is the bloody, meteoric rise of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, so called “The Bloody White Baron.” The man, whose biography makes for some… interesting reading, was fascinated by mystical strands of Buddhism, combining them with his pre-Fascistic, pro-Aristocratic ideals that led him to rape and murder thousands in a bloody trail from Austria-Hungary to Mongolia. He allied with the Mongol Khaan, killed many a Communist, many a Jew, and before the Bolshevik Revolution hits Mongolia, he flees south to Tibet where he becomes the Vlad the Impaler to the Thubten Gyatso’s Pope Pius II.
The Tibet that the Bloody Baron arrives in is significantly improved from our Tibet c. 1930, or in this world’s Tibet just a few years earlier. She’s experiencing the first early benefits from her Study Abroad candidates: Lhasa has its electric light infrastructure set up, it has a British-trained, Tibetan-born legal scholar beginning to catalog and codify a Tibetan common law system, and Tibet’s vast area and natural resources are being surveyed. Just to name a few. Tibet’s army, modeled after the British, engaged on a campaign shoring up their eastern border in Kham and makes extensive (controversial) use of von Ungern and his irregulars to shatter the Ma Clique, and take control of Amdo.
By the end of 1933, the “Great” Thirteenth Dalai Lama is on his deathbed. He gives a warning to his countrymen: China is in civil war, but never lose sight that the Chinese will come for them. He dies on December 17, having secured not Reting Rinpoche and the Conservative faction, but Tsepon Lungshar and the Modernists. Lungshar keeps his eyes, keeps the Tibetan Army in top shape, makes peace with Shakabpa (the new leader of the Conservatives in the Tibetan Kashag), and keeps the study-abroad programs going (until war in the Pacific makes trips to Japan untenable).
Tibet continues this path of growth, development, and connection, rather than stagnation and decay. Some of the Tibetan women who experienced British modernity have infected Tibet with a whole new vocabulary of social progress, equal rights, emancipation, and suffrage. Printing presses and modern concepts on the goods of literacy and sedentary agriculture are all the rage in Lhasa (not so out in the periphery, and certainly not in Shigatse).
Outside Tibet, dramatic things are taking place. World War II erupts as scheduled and the United States passes Lend-Lease soon enough. The difference here is that a “Defeat Japan First” policy is adopted instead, leading to the early defeat of Japan (with the Soviets jumping on the Tokyo train in 1944 rather than at the eleventh hour), the development of a strong supply train to Chiang Kai-Shek, and the continued bleeding of Russian blood in the Ukraine. By the time the Allies land in France, the Nazis and Soviets are bleeding dry and the drive to Berlin is so easy, the Allies make it all the way to Warsaw where they shake hands with the Red Army.
The Tblisi Peace Conference (feat. Prime Minister Shackleton, Stalin, and President Roosevelt), made just prior to the French landings, sees the Soviet Union making the same gains she’d agreed with under Hitler, and the agreement to create a string of “Neutral” Eastern European nations: Poland, Hungary, and Romania. As for Asia, Japan and Korea will both be cut in half (given that Russians had invaded Japanese soil) along the 38th Parallel, with a Russian occupation zone of Tokyo carved out. Stalin, miffed that he’s been negotiated out of Europe decides to hell with Ice Man and Professor X and gives the Red Army the go ahead to just take all of Korea. At the time, no American ships were nearby, so they took Jeju Island, set up their own government, and called it fait accompli.
Now almost completely surrounded and contained, the Stalin regime decides that its only strategy for expansion is one of subversion and espionage. The United States goes on the defensive, developing three broad alliances to contain Soviet influence in the three spheres of anti-Communist global defense: an Atlantic Ocean Defensive Organization, an Indian Ocean Treat Pact, and a Pacific Ring Defense Pact.
Tibet is keen on joining the new world order now embodied in the United Nations. An admission that is supported by Britain and rejected by the Republic of China: now in control of all mainland China, most islands, and half of Inner Mongolia. Manchuria under the Communist dictator Mao Zedong, ironically has positive relations with the State of Tibet (anything to piss of Chiang). She seeks to make herself known as a state that can carry its own, but also as a peacemaker. Tibet, unable to join the UN, still makes her presence known. For example opening personal relations with Eleanor Roosevelt while she was touring Latin America in support of the “South American Human Rights Council.” (Former First Lady Roosevelt was found murdered under mysterious circumstances when helping Peruvian lawmakers draft anti-business legislation. OSS involvement is still under “independent” investigation.)
India under goes a much smoother transition from Raj to being split into eight states: Baluchistan, Panjab (with a passage to the seat) Rajastan, Marathastan, Greater Tamil Nadu, New Magadha, Assam and Burma. The former seven, plus Afghanistan and Nepal, are joined into a Subcontinental Customs Union. Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet soon grow interested in joining, but are worried that more economic ties to India amidst their own currency issues and India’s (though not quite so bloody… still bloody, but not quite so) Balkanization, might push China to invade.
While the Chinese Civil War never really ended (OTL Panmunjeom got nothin on TTL Beijing) a nervous cease-fire was established, two central Asian states become Soviet puppets, and one – huge – dominant player is allied with the United States. That leaves Tibet with two scary options: ally with the Soviet Union, risk being overtaken by the Communists, and see their way of life crumble beneath the fires of Bolshevik Revolution, or move to the other side, be subsumed by the Republic of China, and watch Modern Confucianism and pro-Colonial Chinese general swallow their country, as they had tried to in 1908 under the Butcher Zhao.
The Dalai Lama’s reincarnation was located in the late ‘30s, and going into 1950 was due to be enthroned in Lhasa. Lungshar, old, but still in control, is much like a Tibetan godfather. He leads the Dalai Lama’s education, making sure he has a healthy dose of modernity and a love of the West. It is under Lungshar’s insistence, and the young Dalai Lama’s first taste of politics when he declares that slavery and serfdom (different from Western forms, and known in Tibetan “Zap” and “Drap”) are anti-Buddhist and sins, breaching the Precept that a good Buddhist must “not take what is not given.”
This will lay the groundwork for complete emancipation in the future, but there won’t be time for that in the ‘50s. The event makes sure the Panchen Lama can’t return to Shigatse as his supporters engage in brawls with supporters of the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama, already having fled to China, takes this time to call upon Chiang Kai-Shek for help in returning him to Tashilhunpo. Chiang hasn’t been to war in almost a year now that the situation to the north has settled into an uneven truce. And the Republic still claims all of Tibet. On October 1, Chiang sends a messenger to Lhasa to issue a cease-and-desist to His Holiness and the Kashag. The Dalai Lama (/Lungshar’s) response is simple, “We’ve done nothing. The Panchen can return at any time.”
Of course, this is just a ruse. The Republican Army has already crossed the Tibetan border in five locations…
Artistic Notes: This map is illegal in the (actual) People's Republic of China for two reasons. (1) It displays the Tibetan National Flag, which was an artistic choice of mine, not a political one. And (2) it's alternate historical, which isn't REALLY illegal, but it's KIND OF illegal. For exactly this reason (it might present a world in which the PRC isn't nearly as glorious, dominant, or powerful
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*Pol-offtopic drift*
Just wanting to say that if there's a mod coming on you'll all have trouble, so pls jsut stop it for your own sake
Tbh it also looks a bit weird on the map.
While it looks extremely ugly on the Qbam, It's not that bad on the europe map but it's still irritating.
EDIT:
On the other hand, it looks quite ordinary on the V-BAM map, the map I'm making just for this timeline.
Just a thought, since it's a demonic timeline, shouldn't Transylvania be its own special autonomous province?
Due to the Ethnic complexity in that area (just open A-H ethnic map), they decided to stick with the large land and recall it "Transdonauland" (Transdanubia[land] - Which is both a tribute to "transsylvania" and the other areas which are gerneralized to "danubia")
I have drawn the same region of the Baltics so many times I think I'm starting to see it in my sleep. However, I am trying out a new style after a period of hiatus so why not use familiar ground.
The map itself is based off of a successful Germanization of the Baltic Duchy in Kaiserreich, so no real territorial changes. Unless you count the Soviet Republic next door as a change.
I don't exactly know. From what I know a hypothetical V-BAM World map would surpass 43.000 pixel in width and Worlda is ~1200px, I'd say 40 times approximately.
edit: *length-and-width-wise. for area, idfk
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43000/1200 ~ 36
36*36 = 1296
Which means that 1 pixel in Worlda is 1296 pixels in V-bam
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