Prologue
DESCENDANTS OF THE DRAGONS AND FAIRIES
Prologue
Vietnam as a country has quite a significant position in the history of the world, something that could be attributed to its geographic location, culture and proximity to many great powers. The South China Sea, where Vietnam is located west of, is among the most contested regions in the world, and the volume of traffic moving through its water is estimated to be valued at three trillion dollars. Southeast Asia is densely populated, and its metropolitans are among the largest in the world, though not in terms of GDP. Vietnam, in particular, has multiple deep sea ports directly in contact with the South China Sea, which means economically, it is convenient to build manufacturing centers and urban areas in such places. And its major deltas - Mekong Delta and Red River Delta - produce a significant amount of foods to sustain nearly one-hundred million people, and manage to compete with Thailand in terms of total rice output.Prologue
History has shown that the Viets, given their geopolitically decent location, have suffered from constant conflicts. In fact, the nation has experienced just slightly more than 700 years of peace, while three times as long of that was spent on conflicts, or to defend the nation as the Viets have always proudly put it. The Chinese had always wanted to annex Dai Nam ever since the Han Dynasty reached Tonkin, and for thousands of years, repeatedly invaded the Viets, more than perhaps any other of their neighbors. Even as China declined in the 19th Century, the Viet did not catch any break, when the French became interested in Indochina. French involvement in Indochina during the mid-19th century sparked an intense and bloody era of wars a century later, in which their desire to regain control for Asian colonies backfired massively in the First Indochina War. The Americans, in their geopolitical analysis about the importance in controlling Indochina, took over the French, but failed to defeat the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War and subsequently no longer got a strong foothold on Vietnam. The country has since still had tensions, not with the West, but with China, mostly disputes over controls in the East Sea that sometimes escalate to violations.
Being somewhat of an odd one out in Southeast Asia for its strong adherence to Confucianism and a high degree of Sinicization, while its geography is rather convenient for trades, Vietnam has endured many struggles to retain its identity and independence. Yet, it does seem that Vietnam is somewhat overlooked in many alternate histories, being relegated to a role of minor importance despite the history could tell otherwise. To take this with a grain of salt, this is more of a combination of my own national bias and limited scope on AH literatures that I have read, so I apologize in advance if anyone feels awkward or uncomfortable by my poor and ignorant judgements.
I have always thought which path in history could my nation take to become an industrialized nation, much like Japan, by around the 1850s. Then, I realize that the period which I consider to play the major role in permanently establishing the fate of Vietnam in the 19th and 20th centuries was the era of late Trinh-Nguyen War, in which the downfall of the prosperous Dang Trong caused much upheavals for nearly four decades. After such period, the Nguyen returned to take back their rightful Kingdom. Unfortunately, the new Dynasty slowly sank under conservatism and continued to uphold the backward Confucian institutions, which could be partially sympathized if one were Gia Long (the first Nguyen Emperor), whose nation’s suzerainty was increasingly being challenged by the French already by the 1820s. I also realized that the cause of Dang Trong’s downfall was actually quite pin-pointed, and with my friends, I then asked the question - “What if Dang Trong had continued in peace, where subsequent chaos was prevented?”
It is also my desire to craft a timeline in which the Viets could find themselves as neither another minor country nor pawn of other Great Powers, but rather a major player in world history, where the nation could punch beyond its weight, much like Japan following its Meiji. This project will roll out the potentials of Vietnam as a rich source of PoD, and how its rise to prominence will permanently shape the world’s history. With such a notion in mind, the TL will feature careful examinations of Dai Viet as the nation unfolds over the course of history, and detailed updates for the rest of the world. Butterflies will be considered logically as I move the timeline forwards, but expect a lot of changes after several decades. After some point, when the divergences have mounted up so much, I will use randomness to decide the fates of certain swing countries. The style will mostly be encyclopedic and chronological, with some semi-narrative writings scattered over the TL to give a first-person, close up view of history, and supplementary thematic updates to cover various non-political, non-cultural topics such as science and technology.
On a final note, the title Descendants of the Dragons and Fairies is the literal translation of the proverb which Vietnamese usually refer to themselves.
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