AHC/WI: A personal union between Japan, Korea and China?

Your mission won't be easy, you will have to create a personal union between Japan, Korea and China. But, as I am nasty, you can't use Mongol invasions :cool:

This is virtually impossible for various reasons, given that either Japan or Korea would eventually have to be sidelined. I'll detail some of the issues below.

I've been developing my own ideas for a similar concept. However I long abandoned the idea of including China without the use huge amounts of force.

There was a time when Korea and Japan were quite close culturally (Buyeo cultures in ancient Korea), and a PoD far in the past could butterfly away the drift between the South Japanese Islands and what would become Goguryeo.

Say there is a royal marriage between the Japanese Mikado and a Korean queen, which results in cross-straights unified kingdom. Silla becomes more of a Daimyo under the Emperor, and from there we get a joint Koreo-Japanese country.

You'd have to be more specific. Gaya, Baekje, and Goguryeo (in that order) all had close diplomatic ties with Japan, but they were mostly comprised of trading relations, not to mention that political fragmentation within both Korea and Japan would have forced each to focus more on domestic issues over the short term in order to provide stability.

See below.

possible, have baekje win the war against silla and then go on to defeat goryeo and unite korea. Have the Japanese crown prince be married to the baekje princess to solidy ties between the two. Then have the baekje ruler die without any heirs. This leads to the Japanese prince now Emperor becoming the emperor of Korea. Then have him sue for peace with an angry China through marrying one of his eldest sons with one of the Chinese emperors daughters. Then have the Chinese emperor die without a legitimate heir. Have this son of the emperor travel to China to learn and study.

This heir soon makes friends with some prominent nobles and generals within China. Then the emperor dies and this son remains the rightful choice to become emperor of china. His support among the nobles propels him to the position after he makes concessions. Then the Japanese emperor dies and this son succeeds to the thrones of Baekje, China, and Japan.

Tada POD complete, its highly unlikely but still retains a small probability of occurring.

Any unified "Korean" entity would have a population double or triple that of Japan by the mid-5th to 6th centuries, making it much more likely for the former to vassalize or colonize its neighbor. To put this in perspective, before the Sui invaded Goguryeo in 598, Goguryeo, Silla, and Baekje each had a population of around 4-5 million, while the Japanese archipelago as a whole had a similar amount. The three (along with Buyeo and Gaya earlier) had continuously been at war with each other for over three centuries, not to mention that Silla had very hostile diplomatic relations with Japan until the 7th century or so due to occasional wokou raids for around five centuries, while Balhae later conducted cordial diplomatic ties with Japan, but never considered much closer ties due to various reasons. In any case, any state firmly controlling both Southern Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula would be much more concerned about ties with China, which would only have amounted to a heqin relationship at best, due to China's political ideology.

It was not until the Mongol invasions that Japan's population overtook that of Korea, not to mention that Goryeo and Japan remained politically distant for various reasons.

Japan didn't support Baekje, Baekje supported Japan. And Silla only became an ally with the Chinese halfway when they were having a hard time dealing with Baekje.

It's much more complicated than that. Kim Chunchu (who later became Muyeol of Silla) went to Goguryeo as an ambassador in 642 to negotiate an alliance with Yeon Gaesomun. However, this came to naught because the latter requested Silla to hand over its northern regions (which had been conquered almost a century earlier), forcing Silla to conduct ties with the Tang instead. While either Silla or Baekje could have theoretically conquered the other after one managed to ally with Goguryeo, forcing the remaining two to square off with each other, this would also have required Goguryeo to continuously conduct cordial relations with the Tang. This never occurred IOTL because Yeon Gaesomun staged a coup in order to mobilize more troops for the ongoing civil war with Silla and Baekje, along with strengthening troops and fortifications along the border with the Tang in anticipation for an invasion. In any case, China would eventually have become involved as long as it was not plagued by civil strife or tied down in major campaigns elsewhere.

I'll concede that I was being unnaturally harsh in commenting that way. However, Baekje was the most decentralised nation out of all 3(4) that existed. Even when the country was going down, local rulers were still trying to dislodge centralisation efforts by the king. Also, they were so (lazy)inefficient in their bureaucratic system that during the rule of Gunchogo, the greatest monarch in Baekje, about 60% of his rule had went unrecorded in history.

Not really. To begin with, there were five major entities (Buyeo, Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla, and Gaya), of which the latter three absorbed various competing statelets. Gaya was also far more decentralized, as the main capitals all struggled to gain dominance. In addition, Goguryeo split off from Buyeo presumably due to a political dispute, which in turn decided to establish several major capitals, suggesting a largely decentralized political system. While Baekje did gradually expand further south, especially under Geunchogo, his reign is significantly more detailed than that of Gwanggaeto and Jangsu of Goguryeo, who collectively accomplished the greatest expansions during the Three Kingdoms Period. However, the Samguk Sagi is extremely terse when detailing the exploits of both rulers, as the vast majority of fortresses involved in the former's conquests have been obtained from the Gwanggaeto Stele, which was intended as a work of propaganda, while his son is recorded as continuously paying tribute to the Wei for decades, but very little else.

Significant amounts of Goguryeo and Baekje's records were destroyed during invasions from China, while those of Silla were also eventually affected due to the Later Three Kingdoms Period, not to mention countless succeeding invasions (along with the Japanese occupation), so very little of the sources depicting details from the era remain extant.

They almost were, and they almost did. Problem was, Baekje did try to destroy Sillla OTL. And they got fucked in the process - that was the reason why they were destroyed by the Sino-Silla alliance.

IOTL, Silla defeated Baekje in 660, then Goguryeo in 668, both with Tang assistance. However, Baekje came very close to conquering Silla's capital after Uija seized various fortresses from 642 (hence Silla's diplomacy above) to 659, which had originally been part of Gaya, and would have essentially crippled Silla had it been accomplished. Had Goguryeo not provoked the Tang into restarting the war and concurrently invaded Silla from the north, Goguryeo (more territory) and Baekje (higher population) would have been held to a stalemate, which might have been broken had China and/or Japan eventually decided to interfere, although the latter would generally have had a minimal effect.

This idea is basically impossible. The concept of personal unions didn't exist in East Asia, and even if it did, the succession in Japan, Korea, and China is all based on patriline (in Japan and Three Kingdoms Korea, this extends to female rulers too). Also unlike in European countries where there's a strict order of succession, succession in East Asia is generally a bit more fluid and sometimes determined by various other factors (support of nobles, of bureaucrats, age, ability, etc). Because families are generally pretty large, there will basically always be an heir, and no possibility that some foreign noble can just jump onto the throne.

This too.
 
Top