AH Challenge: Dominion of Dahainan

Your challenge, with a PoD after 1405, is to have a Dominion of Dahainan (yes, it is British-controlled but can be autonomous).

Bonus points if Zheng He's voyages still end after 1435.
 

Hendryk

Banned
The Chinese name for OTL Australia (or "the land beyond the South Sea").

Not anything like "Aozhou", like our resident Chinese Ozzian has been demonstrating to us ? :confused:
The Chinese name for Australia in OTL is indeed Aozhou 澳洲, a simplified form of Aodaliya 澳大利亚, the phonetic adapatation of Australia into Mandarin.

The word Dahainan 大海南 exists in OTL (or should I say the three characters that make up the word are found together), but to my knowledge it doesn't refer to Australia. That was something I made up years ago in my TL "The Chinese discover America in 1435".
 
I'll change it to a Dominion of Aozhou then...

OK, Hendryk, I will change it to Dominion of Aozhou.

The challenge rules remain the same, though.
 

Hendryk

Banned
OK, Hendryk, I will change it to Dominion of Aozhou.
If your intent is to have Australia discovered and settled by the Chinese, then by all means keep Dahainan as a name. Aozhou would only make sense if it was named Australia first.
 
The Chinese name for Australia in OTL is indeed Aozhou 澳洲, a simplified form of Aodaliya 澳大利亚, the phonetic adapatation of Australia into Mandarin.

The word Dahainan 大海南 exists in OTL (or should I say the three characters that make up the word are found together), but to my knowledge it doesn't refer to Australia. That was something I made up years ago in my TL "The Chinese discover America in 1435".
Your terms and place names are becoming common place. :)
 
Even with the end of the Ming voyages you can still have merchant activities in the south seas. Actually I'm pretty sure there were. You could then have a non-state backed colony in the 15th century.

However such a POD would likely change Ming government policy toward SE Asia in due course, significantly altering Chinese history. Even if it does not, and this Chinese Australian colony develops in isolation, it would eventually attract so many immigrants (and absorb more modern Dutch technology) to make later British control unlikely.

The best bet would be a much later POD. Say around the early 18th century when considerable numbers of Chinese migrated to the Dutch East Indies. Batavia (Jakarta) alone had over 100,000. Some of them could have set up a settlement in Perth or some such area. In the 1730's there was a massacre of the Chinese known as Batavian Fury, in which the Dutch tried to seize the businessholdings of wealthy Chinese and deport the poor to Ceylon for slave labor. This incident caused the Indonesian Chinese to scatter throughout the East Indies. Had there been a small colony in Australia, certainly a large number would have sought sanctuary there.

By early 19th century the British could claim the continent along with the Chinese colonies and bring in British settlers.
 

Hendryk

Banned
By early 19th century the British could claim the continent along with the Chinese colonies and bring in British settlers.
In fact, with Chinese already present, the British may well have decided to run Australia as a plantation colony, using coolie labor to exploit its resources, and possibly using New Zealand instead as a penal/settlement colony. So they'd just have brought in more Chinese, as they did in Malaysia. Some Indians would have come in as well just as in other parts of the British empire, as traders and low-level civil servants. By the second half of the 20th century Dahainan may come to resemble a larger Singapore...
 
The Chinese name for Australia in OTL is indeed Aozhou 澳洲, a simplified form of Aodaliya 澳大利亚, the phonetic adapatation of Australia into Mandarin.

The word Dahainan 大海南 exists in OTL (or should I say the three characters that make up the word are found together), but to my knowledge it doesn't refer to Australia. That was something I made up years ago in my TL "The Chinese discover America in 1435".

That clears it up, thanks.
 
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