Will Kürlich Kerl
Banned
Yep, you read it: The challenge is to put a Hapsburg in the Forbidden City.
Yep, you read it: The challenge is to put a Hapsburg in the Forbidden City.
The French under a sucsessful Napoleon III carve out a Chinese state in the alt-1890s,putting a Habsburg in Power as Emperor of China.
Well I never said it would work,and I actually presumed it would turn out with the French evicted,probably after 10-20 years.Only to see it backfire horribly some years later, I guess.
Seriously, an individual Hapsburg family member might conceivably have a very bizarre life that finally sees him leading a succesful dynasty change in China after he somehow had gone native there.
It's not easy to see exactly how, but I guess it is not ASB territory though very unlikely.
I offer a not-so-wildly-inplausible variant of the above: young Habsburg princess travelling by sea, either pregnant or with a baby. Her ship is captured by Barbary pirates. Fearing for the life of her offsrping, she conceals her true identity so she cannot be recognized for ransom and ends sold as a slave in, say, Egypt, and from there to a port where a Malay slaver can find her and bring her to the Far East.
Some adventures and some handwavium, and she finally ends in the Forbidden city as a concubine, with her son with her. She's learned to be a schemer at this point and works her way through the years to succession for her son (not without some assassination to ease things I suppose) that after some point is actually believed to be the true father.
Well I never said it would work,and I actually presumed it would turn out with the French evicted,probably after 10-20 years.
Yep, you read it: The challenge is to put a Hapsburg in the Forbidden City.