Colombo or thereabouts? I think it’s supposed to be Tamils forced to Sri Lanka going thassalocrat. The lack of presence in the Malay peninsula is what’s putting me off Majapahit. Malacca is their heart, there’s no way they’d let anyone else hold one side of the strait.
Perhaps it exists in the context of a land-based Indochinese hegemon, like the Thai or the Khmer. The Majapahits are unable to overpower them and take the other side, maybe due to bad luck or bad leadership at crucial moments, and so they've reached some diplomatic arrangement to settle the issue while they expand elsewhere. Most of their other possessions are small coastal territories, which might indicate that they still reserve most of their strength close to home to fend off the Thai/Khmer/Burmese/whoever.
It's just a wanked Dutch colonial empire. I assume dark green is the oldest territory, light green is more recently gained, and yellow is claimed territoy (that would explain Belgium being yellow-- it has seceded, but the Dutch still claim it).
I don't see how they'd have the population for this compared to the Asian territories. But we don't have a time frame for this state, so who the hell knows. It might even be some weird alternate future for all we know.
The outward leaning Chinese must have ended up in Taiwan, first they corralled overseas Chinese in SEA into a ruling class for that region, and then began expanding out to more trading sites.
Everywhere else seems to be control over the mouths of rivers, ideal trading sites but hard to control if you aren't able to outfight the locals.
Not every AH is a Sinowank, you know. It would take a long time to establish an empire as far-flung as this one, so are we expected to believe that a tiny Chinese backwater managed this, overpowering much more populous Southeast Asian states in the process, and yet the government in Beijing has done nothing to reassert control in all this time? Even though doing so would be extremely profitable? The Ming/Qing courts were conservative, not brainless.