Your challenge, with a POD after the fall of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, is for Rome to become a "eternal" empire which collapses several times but always comes back together after said periods of disunity while Han China's collapse is permanent with the various regions of China developing distinct (proto-)national identities of their own and the various dialects of Chinese seen as distinct languages.
AHC: Reverse the fate of Rome and China
- Thread starter Whiteshore
- Start date
You need to butterfly the One China ethos. As I’m not a Sinophile, I’m not exactly sure how to do that, but might be a good starting point.
I don't really see why the Han belief that the Son of Heaven should rule All Under Heaven is any different from the Roman belief that the Emperor (to quote
Ammianus Marcellinus) was orbis terrarum dominus, "lord of the entire world."
It would probably be easier to make the Roman Empire fit the Chinese model than vice versa. For instance, if you butterflied the Arab invasion, it would have been interesting to see how the Roman/Byzantine Empire would have developed. A better relationship between Justinian and Belarius might have made the reconquests even more successful. Or maybe a Roman reconquest some time after the Arab conquests in order to fit the model of an empire coming back after even one more collapse?
Of the later Emperors, Julian seems like a good starting point. He was a reformer in government as well as religious sense, and if given 20-30 years and a hand picked successor, you could have another period of 3-4 "good" Emperors who set up a "tradition" of hand picked successors that strengthens the Empire, avoids the divisions of east and west, and sets up an Imperial ideology.
China is harder due to geography, as in it's all plains and thus few natural barriers. I think Nomads might be the answer. Have them be more disruptive. But that is fairly vague.
China is harder due to geography, as in it's all plains and thus few natural barriers. I think Nomads might be the answer. Have them be more disruptive. But that is fairly vague.
I wonder if we could get a Miao state or a Zhuang state in Southern China from such a scenario.
One problem for the late Roman Empire was religious disagreements. In order to make the Roman Empire more lasting, you would probably need to avoid the disagreements among various Christian groups (Christological controversies) or maybe avoid the empire to becoming Christian in the first place.
This was precisely the right solution, and the Romans darn well knew this, tried their very best, and failed. That's why Constantine tried a new approach, dubious as it was. There was just no alternative but to try to make an accomodation work....
Well, you could have tried religious tolerance, somewhat like Julian the apostate tried.
What about how to break up China in the same way Europe broke up after the fall of Rome?
You would need to preserve the local cultures within China, instead of large-scale cultural homogenisation (Han) to start with.
Maybe the Yue could be the equivalent to the Greeks in this case, so a Yue-speaking southern "Chinese" dynasty could be the ERE equivalent.
Are there some China experts here? There was some discussion about Europe vs. China quite some time ago, unfortunately I cannot recall the thread, but I think one reasson that was mentioned for the divisons in Europe vs. the unity in China was geography, but I guess people with more knowledge about China could give a better answer.
IOTL there were a lot of periods where China was splintered into warring states and there were points where the HRE got pretty powerful. Have China stay split up early on and somehow use the butterflies from that to make the HRE powerful and centralized enough to actually keep making good on its claim to the empire.
But then you have to assume that the HRE is a continuation of the RE, which is quite a dubious claim.
I think it's as good as any candidate for continuation, especially if they can maintain their control of the Italian peninsula. It's not like the Yuan or the Qing had direct governmental links to the empires preceding them and they're all still considered 'China'.
Deleted member 97083
That's an interesting point. Perhaps it's also comparable to some dynasties of Persia like the Afsharids or Qajarids, who were Turkic in origin but had Persianized.
One way for the Roman Empire to survive would be to have them figure out that lead pipes aren't very useful for not poisoning people.
Lead oxidises fairly easily. Lead oxide isn't water soluble.
They need to realise that putting lead into wine to improve it's taste is a very bad idea.
I think they would need to control a lot more of the Roman Empire in order to be compared to the continuity in China. Besides the HRE was mainly focused on Germany, even though it did at times control much of Italy. The caliphate at its peak controlled a lot more of the former RE than did the HRE.
I wonder what would happen to the Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao peoples in such a scenario.