AH Challenge : An Indian or SE Asian dynasty, in China.

[Axeman]

The Mongols and Manchus both conquered China and impose their ruler over China, before being absorbed and becoming Chinese themselves *The Borg have nothing on China*, but your challenge is to have a Qing analogue come from Southeast Asia or India *Tibet is ok too*. Anytime after the establishment of the Han Dynasty will suffice, the later you get it to happen *reasonably* the more e-points you get.

Have at it!

 

[scholar]

You do realize the historical implausibility of this? Southeast Asia rarely had fully functioning empires, and when it did, they were normally just stretched to capacity keeping control over their large, multi-ethnic, and religiously diverse territory. The odds of a Kingdom uniting all of India or Southeast Asia to take on China is... preposterously unlikely. It would be akin to saying: "what-if... the Armenians after world war one combined in Syria to take over the Middle East or the Maghrebs in Algeria combined and takes all of Africa, every last territory, from the European powers."

The only real plausibility of this occurring, at all, would be with Tibet, during the time of the Tang, when the two nations were rival empires in terms of size. Population and resource wise it would be nearly impossible for them to take on a functioning empire. Which would lead to a powerful Tibet taking advantage of a fractured China (assuming it avoided it's own fracturing problem and it's crushing defeat by the Tang) and later moving itself to Chang'an or Xi'an or perhaps even Luoyang to manage the empire. Even this, would be nearly impossible. The Qing and Yuan Dynasty only were able to complete their conquests of China by employing the Chinese themselves. The Mongols were having trouble with the southern Chinese and required many northern Chinese defector generals to lead the advance south under Mongol leadership. The Qing were similarly helped along. Also here's a kicker, the Chinese troops that conquered themselves were kicked out of China by Kublai Khan and used in Persian and Arabian campaigns, to great success.

So: You can't conquer China without the Chinese.

And despite saying all of that against this. You can count on my submission.

 

[Axeman]

Never said it was going to be easy

 

[8Deer]

Tibet should be possible. They could conquer China around 800 AD, which IIRC was when they were at their height. Maybe they get some kind of Alexander/Genghis Khan figure. Of course, they would become assimilated just like the Mongols did.

In OTL they conquered the Tang capital (Changan?), I believe, but were defeated soon after. Their goal was to install a puppet emperor, not conquest though. This might have been during the An Shi rebellion. My memory is a little sketchy, since it's been a while since I read about this but I believe I found it on Wikipedia as well as in a book I have about Tibet. I'll see if I can't dig it up.

 

[maidros]

The Mongols and Manchus both conquered China and impose their ruler over China, before being absorbed and becoming Chinese themselves *The Borg have nothing on China*, but your challenge is to have a Qing analogue come from Southeast Asia or India *Tibet is ok too*. Anytime after the establishment of the Han Dynasty will suffice, the later you get it to happen *reasonably* the more e-points you get.

Have at it!

How much of China do you want an Indian empire to take? It would be an extreme stretch, but between the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing, there was a period in which Chinese navy was non-existent. A powerful Indian maritime empire might (just might, even though it would stretch their resources to the extreme) take Hainan and Taiwan. But that is about the limit of what an Indian empire could take from the Chinese.

Actually, a better way would be for the Nan Zhao (they were more south east Asian - Burmese, than Chinese), who already ruled Yunnan and Guizhou in the ninth century to win the war against the Tang, and take over Sichuan and maybe some adjacent areas like Guangxi.

Finally, if the Champa had managed to obliterate the Dai Viet, they might have taken Guangxi, and colonised Hainan and Taiwan since they had a considerable maritime power.

That is all I can think of at the moment.

 

[Flocculencio]

Tibet's your best bet- during a period of fragmentation, Tibet conquers part of Western China and consolidates and advances from there. It takes fifty years but when the dust from the fragmented states settles, the Tibetan state, by now rapidly Sinicising, comes out on top.

 

[scholar]

The challenge is to have a complete and total conquest of China as well has expanding it's borders significantly. Not have a country make small gains inside China, though, this could be a beginning step to a conquest of China. You're supposed to become something like the Qing Dynasty, uniting your ethnic cousins in a charge into China taking over the country in decades.

It is also not time transfixed. This can be anywhere from the Western Han till the PRC's establishment using nothing but Indian and Southeast Asian Kingdoms.

The Tibetans, while they had success, they were no where near significant enough to significantly influence the entirety of China. In fact their influence promptly stopped in Western China, when the Tang retook their western lands to punished the Tibetans severely capturing most of their populated lands leaving the Tibetans to the sparsely populated regions to their south. After the Tang's decline they expanded but they could never pose a serious threat to China again. Tibet was also not a completely unified country throughout it's history, there were lots of independent Tibetan princes through most of it's history.

 

[tormsen]

I think it could be done. I think it would be all a matter of timing. Having a period of Chinese weakness and disorder is of course necessary. Perhaps a Timurlane type conquerer who rules from northern India but is stomping around Central Asia decides to push east (as Timur wanted to do OTL).

The thing is, this is probably not a scenario you could get from a single PoD, but rather a rather very fortuitous set of circumstances.

A Southeast Asia state with a sufficiently aggressive navy might be able to do what the Manchu did OTL with cavalry armies, but only if they were very, very lucky.

 

[Midas]

It's actually somewhat surprising to me that some of the northern tribes in Burma were unable to occupy southern China during large periods of strife. While it's probably merited by a myriad of factors too long to discuss here, in short terms if the Tai Shan get their shit together and form a large Mongol-like horde there's a pretty damn good chance they could conquer China from the south-up if aggravated. In their disunified state they wreaked havoc along Irriwaddy/Mekong rivers and were a constant threat in Yunnan and on the western borders of the Laotian kingdoms.

Indians conquering China is less likely, but I don't see it impossible that some Indian Gurkha-analogue developing out of Rajisthan could emerge to conquer/lead some Central Asian tribes. These would be Turkified Indians by and large (sort of reverse Mughals) but given a more successful Chinese Central Asian presence in the pre-Mongol period- might give them enough infrastructure to push raids deep into China, perhaps unseating whatever emperor is there long enough to establish a brief dynasty. Not that it's impossible for an Indian ethnic/religious group to conquer China, but it's hard given that India has plenty of China's appeal but is much closer to... Indians haha.