1878
Beijing
The Emperor nodded to his advisor's request to put down yet another rebellion in Mindanao. When would these damned people learn?
China had, over the past century, crushed the drug-peddlers of the west, defeated the Russians, put the Viets in their place, conquered the region the Spanish called "Philippines", savaged Nippon (it was not spoken that Nippon eventually forced China to retreat) and stifled any internal dissent. The occasional Christian proselytizing would be stamped out while the much larger Muslim problem was effectively contained after the Uyghurs and other Muslim tribes of the northwest were evicted from Chinese soil and the southeastern Muslims slaughtered en masse.
There were problems, of course. Both the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers had suffered horrendous floods in recent decades but that could be put down to nature, not failure to govern.
China remained the strongest, wealthiest, wisest and culturally most profound nation on earth. The Middle Kingdom only deigned to deal with others when it benefitted China. The rest of the world existed to serve the Empire.
Now, the Peshwa dared challenge Chinese domination over Southeast Asia?
Yes, over the century, the Musselmen of the Mughal Empire had converted Malaya and those islands now controlled by the vile East India Company. But the Mughals seldom sought political control over the region in the way this Hindu Peshwa apparently desired.
The Marathas were forgetting their place. It was time to teach it anew.
Bourbonia
The governor of Bourbonia in 1878 was the Francois, Marquise de Lafayette, scion of the great dynasty dating back to the middle ages. Viewing the reporting hardening of Chinese and Maratha positions by the mid-1870's, Lafayette would request that the King of France augment the naval forces of the great island. Indeed, even accounting for New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Borneo, Sulawesi and other French possessions in Southeast Asia, he could not point to a particularly good harbor from whence the French Navy could defend the region.
Over his long ten-year tenure, Lafayette had become known as a champion of the Polynesian and Melanesian peoples taken from their neighboring islands (many of which now stood empty due to the severity of the defacto enslavement for Bourbonia's sugar fields). So voracious had been French demand for labor that the local islands were "fished out" as was the common slang, this included much of the Solomons. A region of hideous tropical heat, there seemed no real manner to set up a viable naval base to defend the largely lightly populated northwestern Bourbonia.
If the Maratha and Chinese Empires came to blows, would that not endanger Louis' domains?
With most of Bourbonia's population on the southeastern region, the danger was obvious.
Lafayette would even go so far as to discuss the subject with the American Governor of Van Diemensland, a cousin of the current King and nephew of Henry I via one of his sisters. That the man was not referred to as "Prince" as the French Princes of the Blood would was somewhat baffling but Lafeyette didn't care overly much about the matter thus he did not bother to inquire.
However, Lafayette DID want to know what would happen if either or both of these Asiatic Empire threatened American interests as well. Perhaps the limited resources of the two nations in the region may be pooled. Certainly, Lafayette knew that only the Foreign Secretaries of the two nations could determine this but the Governor wanted that conversation initiated as soon as possible. Things seemed to be rapidly rolling downhill.
Viet Kingdom
The King of the Viets, his own family placed upon the throne by Chinese authorities, would ensure the Emperor's embassy that the Viet Kingdom would come to the aide of the Emperor should it be of need.
He really had no other choice.
Kyoto
The Emperor would command every group of ambassadors who landed to leave his shores. Nippon had attempted to modernize and paid for that arrogance with decades of oppression. Only a stubborn partisan campaign had evicted the Chinese and the last thing the young Emperor wanted was to see foreigners walking around his lands.
Nippon was not interested in foreign trade any more than it was in foreign ideas. Nippon needed nothing from gaijin.
Let the rest of the world get by without the Land of the Rising Sun.
Central Africa
The rinderpest plague would be accidentally introduced to Africa in the 1850's. This would kill huge swathes of the cattle population in eastern Africa, leading to great famines. As the cattle died, the grazing land would be replaced by bush which proved ideal hosts for the tsetse fly. This insect carried the sleeping sickness pox which affected many hooved species as well as humans.
Vast swathes of land would be depopulated and replaced by savannah unsuitable for large-scale habitation and agriculture. Later generations would call the tsetse fly the "Best Game Warden In Africa".
By the 1870's, the epidemic would make its way further and further south to the area where the remnants of the Zulu Empire, having been pushed out of their ancestral lands, were trying to conquer the peoples of Mozambique. However, the destruction of the cattle herds which the Africans depended upon would seen the entire regional political and economic base collapse. Huge numbers of people would starve and the complex polities would become extinct for generations.
Eventually, some of the Zulu and affiliated tribes would attempt to migrate further south where the tsetse fly held no sway but were immediately and violently flung back northwards by the East India Company who feared an invasion.
Region affected by Tsetse fly