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The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William Rowe is where my statistics for the treasuries come from, it is an exceptional English-language introduction to Qing history. The specific numbers for the Ten Great Campaigns is from The Chinese State at the Borders by Diana Lary but it seems her...

Well, the treasuries in the Board of Revenue had over 80 million taels in the 1770s and there were as much as 60 million taels left even at the end of the Qianlong reign. It was only the White Lotus revolt - which took 120 million taels to suppress - that really devastated the Qing treasuries. A...

Now we must return to Central Asian developments, where the geopolitical situation was growing tenser by the day. Finding allies in the Muslim Regions With an enemy as powerful as Ahmad Shah Durrani, Sultan Shah - ruler of Badakhshan - was right to be worried. And not only were the Afghans...

Not quite. British India was largely unknown in Beijing even in the 1780s, as the Qing would first have significant contact with the Company state in Bengal only during the Second Sino-Gurkha War. In fact, Beijing does not seem to have been informed even of the Gurkha conquest of the Kathmandu...

Thank you! And to answer your other question, yes, the reference is indeed to the Third Battle of Panipat. May I ask where you are from? :)

Among the items that the Bengalis had brought to Beijing, a map of India, including of Afghanistan and Burma, caused great interest among court scholars. In particular, it was noted that the Bengali maps generally agreed with European maps of India. From the Indian viewpoint this was not...

Thanks for the feedback. :) Generally IOTL connecting dots from disparate frontiers (i.e. Tibet and the coast) was rarely the Qing court's strong suit, because Qing policy between the decimation of Dzungaria up to the early 19th century was mostly a frontier policy where the security of each...

Ming Zen never reached Bengal. He was intercepted in Kathmandu by an embassy ordered by Mir Qasim, the nawab of Bengal, who was secretly looking for ways to oust the British from his realm. The Bengalis convinced the Chinese of the nefariousness of the British and persuaded the moralistic Ming...

From the Jahangirnama: It was on Rabi' II 1176 that Ming Zen and his several dozen Chinese and Tibetan men came down to Kathmandu. From there they wished to proceed to this country and sent forth riders to inform my father of their arrival. My father was then preparing to break free of the...

Thanks for the feedback! :D Just on logistics, I haven't done enough research into this. There's time left though, since based on chronological reasons there will be a section on Ming Zen in Bengal before war breaks out between China and the Afghans. But basically the Qing had amazing...

No feedback?

We must now leave Ming Zen in Tashilhunpo Monastery with the Panchen Lama and go back a few months in time, because groundbreaking events were occurring in Central Asia throughout the early 1760s. Some background is necessary. There was no one hegemonic power in all of Central Asia of the...

I'm not voting on this because the answer is simple: there are too many variables to know. Why are there no Qing, and who replaces them? If we have an autarkist government unable to conquer Inner Asia rather than the High Qing of OTL, then I would suspect that not having the Qing would be a...

Thanks for the catch! Well, the expedition to Kashmir in 1860 was actually planned by the Qing IRL but was scrapped because they realized Hindustan was in total chaos. The POD here is that the Qianlong emperor realizes early on that Hindustan is India, so the possibility of getting envoys...

The Panchen Lama in his court While Sukh Jivan's Kashmiris were being carefully interrogated, the Qianlong emperor decided to order another expedition into Hindustan, this time from Tibet to Bengal. This was a controversial move. Officials memorialized that these Indian expeditions were wastes...

Hmm. Probably not - the Qianlong emperor knows (and cares) a lot more about Central Asia and Tibet than the sea. The Qing also don't have an effective navy for operations in open sea, so it wouldn't express the "awe of the state" well enough whereas Qing power is widely known in Central Asia and...

Here's a very simple map of Ming Zen's little stroll, 1760 - 1761. Please don't take it as gospel, it's really hard to find a good map of 18th-century Central Asia so I had to draw points and lines on a borderless map. I'm sure some of those lines go through mountains or glaciers, but it's just...

Hopefully the new update clears things up :D

The first Qing attempt to contact Hindustan/India was made in 1760, the very year the Qianlong emperor wrote his essay. In the 3rd month of that year, two tribute missions in Beijing - one from Badakhshan and another from Khoqand - were set to return to their Central Asian homeland. The emperor...

That part is actually directly from an essay the Qianlong emperor actually wrote on India also titled "An Examination into Mistakes Concerning India," although in the OTL essay the Qianlong emperor mistakenly argued that Hindustan was actually a country north of India. In it he says that...