子曰道不行, 乘桴浮于海。
The Master said: My doctrine makes no way. I will board a raft, and set to sea. – Confucius
This timeline will be about the Chinese founding a colony in North America. The idea is not a new one. It's one of the standard alternate history what-ifs that people have been asking for years. The problem with the idea is that roughly every single one of the timelines or stories centered around this premise use the same point of divergence, that being the voyages of Zheng He in the early Ming period. Based on what we know about the Ming treasure fleets, I've always found the idea of Zheng He finding North America to be unlikely in the extreme. That argument's for another thread, though.
Our scene for this timeline is set in the late 17th century, at the end of the Ming-Qing transition period, which in real life lasted fully fifty years. The Ming Dynasty had been in decline for decades, but the 1630s proved to be the breaking point. Peasant rebellions swept the countryside, and north of the Great Wall the Manchus built their strength. Finally, in 1644, a rebel army led by Li Zicheng sacked Beijing. The Manchus entered China proper and pushed aside the poorly-organized warlords that had risen up against the Ming. Meanwhile, the Ming court fled south of the Yangtze River and attempted to reorganize the dynasty at Nanjing. Over the next twenty years, these Ming remnants were exterminated by the Manchu conquerors. Ming pretenders popped up and were eliminated in a game of dynastic Whack-a-Mole.
Yet even as the Manchus extended their rule across mainland China, Ming loyalism continued to flourish. In 1661, loyalist troops under the command of Zheng Chenggong retreated to the island of Taiwan. They invested the Dutch fortress in southern Taiwan and forced its surrender after a lengthy siege. Zheng Chenggong died the following year. His son Zheng Jing succeeded him and continued his father's anti-Manchu rhetoric, though it was not initially backed up with military action. Instead, the younger Zheng focused on maritime commerce. His fleet of junks dominated the shipping lanes in the East and South China Seas, conducting trade and, in our alternate history, discovering a rather interesting morsel of information . . .
April 15, 1670
“ . . . And that's all I've been able to work out,” said Liu Guoxuan as he concluded his monologue. Liu hoped the King would be pleased. He’d better be pleased, said a little voice in the back of his mind. I mean, come on, mountains of silver! But one never knows how a king will react – inscrutability being one of the prerogatives of royalty – and so Liu Guoxuan nervously watched his king think about what he'd just been told.
The King had been writing poetry on and off throughout the audience. Now, finally, he dropped his brush on the table and stood up.
“It's a fairy tale,” he said, then paused for a second to scratch his nose. “New worlds and mountains of silver! What a bunch of utter rot.”
Then, he smiled. “So, how do you get there again?”
Liu smiled in relief. In truth, he hadn't really been expecting any other reaction. The King was a crotchety bastard, but also a curious one. The study showed it, crammed as it was with countless scrolls that rolled about on the floor now and then when a breeze blew through the window.
“You'd start by going to Nagasaki,” said Liu, beginning his explanation, “and then continue north. A couple of weeks, maybe.”
The King raised an eyebrow. “You're not exactly the picture of specificity.”
“Do you want to hear how to find the new world and its mountains of silver or not?”
“Ahem,” said the King, narrowing his eyes.
“I mean, do you want to hear how to find the new world and its mountains of silver or not, Your Majesty?” Liu said, by way of amendment.
“Since my tea has gone cold, I suppose you might as well.” The King looked around in mock puzzlement. “Or you could pour me another cup.”
It's exhausting when your sovereign is a twelve year-old in disguise. Liu soldiered on like the soldier he, in fact, was. “Then you go east, with the currents, for . . . a long time,” he said. “Two or three months, maybe, until you run into the new world. But you have to go south for a while before you find the mountains of gold.”
“I thought it was mountains of silver?”
“Gold, silver, whatever,” said Liu, flicking away one of the mosquitoes that seemed to be everywhere. He still hadn't really gotten used to this island, even after eight years. “Mountains of something good. Anyway, they chart a southern course back to Luzon, so as to follow the winds.”
“Well, it's certainly a good story,” said the King. He stood up and shook the dust off his robes. “And you are to be commended for spending so much effort and energy in solving this mystery.” A note of formality crept into his voice as he pronounced this last sentence, a clear signal that the audience was over. Liu bowed and backed out of the study.
Liu thought of the hours upon hours he'd spent in filthy taverns with stinking barbarians and the yokels with incomprehensible accents who called themselves Chinese, pumping them for information. He'd been fascinated by the stories of giant ships stuffed with silver from lands beyond the sea ever since he first journeyed to Manila, that grubby town hiding in the shadow of its walls, in 1663 on a diplomatic mission.
Back in the study Zheng Jing, King of Taiwan, stared at the wet leaves in his empty tea cup and thought of new worlds. He'd make a note of what Liu had said, of course, file it away both on paper and in memory, another item on the cluttered shelves of his study and the even more cluttered shelves of his mind. Maybe he'd never think about it again. It was a good piece of information to have, though. You never know when you'll need a new world.
* * * * * * * * * *
The final period of conflict came in the 1670s, as several military governors of southern provinces who had previously defected from the Ming to the Qing rebelled against Manchu authority. Zheng forces on Taiwan joined the fighting, and at one point the rebels controlled almost half of China. Yet the Manchu military machine won out in the end, isolating and destroying the fragmented rebels one by one. The naval invasion of Taiwan in 1683 removed the final challenge to Qing authority.
* * * * * * * * * *
TEN YEARS LATER
Zheng Jing, as far as he knew still King of Taiwan, stared into the depths of an empty wine jug and hiccuped. He tried to count the ways in which everything had gone to shit. They'd been kicked out of China. The troops were demoralized. The other rebels on the mainland had been comprehensively defeated. The Manchu devils had their sights set on Taiwan, and there was no negotiating to be done anymore.
It was after the defeat on Xiamen, during the retreat from the mainland back to Taiwan, that the full force of how completely fucked he was had crashed into Zheng like a rogue wave. He'd shut himself up in the palace with his women and his wine, trying as hard as he could to think about absolutely nothing at all. With a little luck either his liver would give out or he'd screw himself to death before the Manchus figured out how to build a boat.
Not everyone else had given up, which annoyed Zheng more than anything else. Couldn't they see how hopeless it was? Just the other day, Chen Yonghua and Feng Xifan had come with a proposal to invade Luzon and rebuild the nation from there. He'd pretended to listen for a few minutes before dismissing them in disgust. As if the Manchus wouldn't simply follow them to Luzon, and destroy them there! They'd have to go to the other side of the world –
– and then, in a flash, he knew.
* * * * * * * * * *
This timeline will focus on Zheng Taiwan and its expeditions to North America. I think the Zheng regime is fairly well-equipped to face the challenges that come when sailing from East Asia to the New World. First, let's consider capability. The Zheng family regime on Taiwan was built on maritime trade and commerce. They maintained a fleet consisting of more than a thousand ships that sailed throughout the East and South China Seas. Now, of course sailing from Taiwan to Thailand is a lot easier than sailing from Taiwan to California, but the point remains that the Zheng regime had access to lots of large seaworthy ships and trained crews to sail them.
Next, let’s consider motive. This is generally one of the hardest parts of any Chinese-in-the-Americas AH scenario, since there’s no compelling reason for China to bother investing the resources necessary to “discover” North America and found a colony there. But for the Zheng family regime on Taiwan in 1680, there’s a very compelling reason: the Zheng troops have been decisively defeated on the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is about to be invaded by angry Manchus, who will bring the family’s twenty-year rule on the island to an unceremonious end.. The fat lady, as they say, is beginning to sing. In real life, the regime basically collapsed at this point. Though Zheng Jing’s advisers suggested an invasion of Luzon as a way to evade the Manchus and rebuild the dynasty, the advice didn’t take. Zheng Jing more or less gave up and drank himself to death, after which a succession crisis erupted. Clearly, the idea of a retreat to Luzon didn’t appeal to Zheng Jing. But what about a retreat to the New World?
Of course, IRL the Zheng regime wasn’t aware there was a New World, at least as far as I know. But there’s an obvious vector for the knowledge to make its way to them - Manila. For about ten years, between the mid-1660s and the mid-1670s, multiple junks sailed from Taiwan to Manila on trading voyages every year (23 junks during the years 1664-1670 alone). The town of Manila at this point is heavily dependent on the eponymous galleon trade; one or two ships arrived from Acapulco every year with silver and another departed from Manila laden with Chinese goods.There are no secrets in a town full of sailors, and the presence of a large ethnic Chinese community in Manila makes the spread of knowledge to the Zheng traders even less of a stretch. For the purposes of this timeline, we’ll imagine that a particularly inquisitive captain of a Zheng trading junk saw one of the Manila galleons in port, or met someone who been a crewmember on one, or just wondered where all the silver that the Spanish were trading came from, and started making enquiries. The rest is alternate history. I’ll be the first to admit this is a pretty low-probability series of events, but I don’t think it’s all that implausible, and the idea will be a lot of fun to explore.
NEXT: The first expedition to the New World. Place your bets on where landfall will be made! I guess that’s a bit of a spoiler, but if landfall isn’t made then this isn’t much of a timeline.
The Master said: My doctrine makes no way. I will board a raft, and set to sea. – Confucius
This timeline will be about the Chinese founding a colony in North America. The idea is not a new one. It's one of the standard alternate history what-ifs that people have been asking for years. The problem with the idea is that roughly every single one of the timelines or stories centered around this premise use the same point of divergence, that being the voyages of Zheng He in the early Ming period. Based on what we know about the Ming treasure fleets, I've always found the idea of Zheng He finding North America to be unlikely in the extreme. That argument's for another thread, though.
Our scene for this timeline is set in the late 17th century, at the end of the Ming-Qing transition period, which in real life lasted fully fifty years. The Ming Dynasty had been in decline for decades, but the 1630s proved to be the breaking point. Peasant rebellions swept the countryside, and north of the Great Wall the Manchus built their strength. Finally, in 1644, a rebel army led by Li Zicheng sacked Beijing. The Manchus entered China proper and pushed aside the poorly-organized warlords that had risen up against the Ming. Meanwhile, the Ming court fled south of the Yangtze River and attempted to reorganize the dynasty at Nanjing. Over the next twenty years, these Ming remnants were exterminated by the Manchu conquerors. Ming pretenders popped up and were eliminated in a game of dynastic Whack-a-Mole.
Yet even as the Manchus extended their rule across mainland China, Ming loyalism continued to flourish. In 1661, loyalist troops under the command of Zheng Chenggong retreated to the island of Taiwan. They invested the Dutch fortress in southern Taiwan and forced its surrender after a lengthy siege. Zheng Chenggong died the following year. His son Zheng Jing succeeded him and continued his father's anti-Manchu rhetoric, though it was not initially backed up with military action. Instead, the younger Zheng focused on maritime commerce. His fleet of junks dominated the shipping lanes in the East and South China Seas, conducting trade and, in our alternate history, discovering a rather interesting morsel of information . . .
April 15, 1670
“ . . . And that's all I've been able to work out,” said Liu Guoxuan as he concluded his monologue. Liu hoped the King would be pleased. He’d better be pleased, said a little voice in the back of his mind. I mean, come on, mountains of silver! But one never knows how a king will react – inscrutability being one of the prerogatives of royalty – and so Liu Guoxuan nervously watched his king think about what he'd just been told.
The King had been writing poetry on and off throughout the audience. Now, finally, he dropped his brush on the table and stood up.
“It's a fairy tale,” he said, then paused for a second to scratch his nose. “New worlds and mountains of silver! What a bunch of utter rot.”
Then, he smiled. “So, how do you get there again?”
Liu smiled in relief. In truth, he hadn't really been expecting any other reaction. The King was a crotchety bastard, but also a curious one. The study showed it, crammed as it was with countless scrolls that rolled about on the floor now and then when a breeze blew through the window.
“You'd start by going to Nagasaki,” said Liu, beginning his explanation, “and then continue north. A couple of weeks, maybe.”
The King raised an eyebrow. “You're not exactly the picture of specificity.”
“Do you want to hear how to find the new world and its mountains of silver or not?”
“Ahem,” said the King, narrowing his eyes.
“I mean, do you want to hear how to find the new world and its mountains of silver or not, Your Majesty?” Liu said, by way of amendment.
“Since my tea has gone cold, I suppose you might as well.” The King looked around in mock puzzlement. “Or you could pour me another cup.”
It's exhausting when your sovereign is a twelve year-old in disguise. Liu soldiered on like the soldier he, in fact, was. “Then you go east, with the currents, for . . . a long time,” he said. “Two or three months, maybe, until you run into the new world. But you have to go south for a while before you find the mountains of gold.”
“I thought it was mountains of silver?”
“Gold, silver, whatever,” said Liu, flicking away one of the mosquitoes that seemed to be everywhere. He still hadn't really gotten used to this island, even after eight years. “Mountains of something good. Anyway, they chart a southern course back to Luzon, so as to follow the winds.”
“Well, it's certainly a good story,” said the King. He stood up and shook the dust off his robes. “And you are to be commended for spending so much effort and energy in solving this mystery.” A note of formality crept into his voice as he pronounced this last sentence, a clear signal that the audience was over. Liu bowed and backed out of the study.
Liu thought of the hours upon hours he'd spent in filthy taverns with stinking barbarians and the yokels with incomprehensible accents who called themselves Chinese, pumping them for information. He'd been fascinated by the stories of giant ships stuffed with silver from lands beyond the sea ever since he first journeyed to Manila, that grubby town hiding in the shadow of its walls, in 1663 on a diplomatic mission.
Back in the study Zheng Jing, King of Taiwan, stared at the wet leaves in his empty tea cup and thought of new worlds. He'd make a note of what Liu had said, of course, file it away both on paper and in memory, another item on the cluttered shelves of his study and the even more cluttered shelves of his mind. Maybe he'd never think about it again. It was a good piece of information to have, though. You never know when you'll need a new world.
* * * * * * * * * *
The final period of conflict came in the 1670s, as several military governors of southern provinces who had previously defected from the Ming to the Qing rebelled against Manchu authority. Zheng forces on Taiwan joined the fighting, and at one point the rebels controlled almost half of China. Yet the Manchu military machine won out in the end, isolating and destroying the fragmented rebels one by one. The naval invasion of Taiwan in 1683 removed the final challenge to Qing authority.
* * * * * * * * * *
TEN YEARS LATER
Zheng Jing, as far as he knew still King of Taiwan, stared into the depths of an empty wine jug and hiccuped. He tried to count the ways in which everything had gone to shit. They'd been kicked out of China. The troops were demoralized. The other rebels on the mainland had been comprehensively defeated. The Manchu devils had their sights set on Taiwan, and there was no negotiating to be done anymore.
It was after the defeat on Xiamen, during the retreat from the mainland back to Taiwan, that the full force of how completely fucked he was had crashed into Zheng like a rogue wave. He'd shut himself up in the palace with his women and his wine, trying as hard as he could to think about absolutely nothing at all. With a little luck either his liver would give out or he'd screw himself to death before the Manchus figured out how to build a boat.
Not everyone else had given up, which annoyed Zheng more than anything else. Couldn't they see how hopeless it was? Just the other day, Chen Yonghua and Feng Xifan had come with a proposal to invade Luzon and rebuild the nation from there. He'd pretended to listen for a few minutes before dismissing them in disgust. As if the Manchus wouldn't simply follow them to Luzon, and destroy them there! They'd have to go to the other side of the world –
– and then, in a flash, he knew.
* * * * * * * * * *
This timeline will focus on Zheng Taiwan and its expeditions to North America. I think the Zheng regime is fairly well-equipped to face the challenges that come when sailing from East Asia to the New World. First, let's consider capability. The Zheng family regime on Taiwan was built on maritime trade and commerce. They maintained a fleet consisting of more than a thousand ships that sailed throughout the East and South China Seas. Now, of course sailing from Taiwan to Thailand is a lot easier than sailing from Taiwan to California, but the point remains that the Zheng regime had access to lots of large seaworthy ships and trained crews to sail them.
Next, let’s consider motive. This is generally one of the hardest parts of any Chinese-in-the-Americas AH scenario, since there’s no compelling reason for China to bother investing the resources necessary to “discover” North America and found a colony there. But for the Zheng family regime on Taiwan in 1680, there’s a very compelling reason: the Zheng troops have been decisively defeated on the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is about to be invaded by angry Manchus, who will bring the family’s twenty-year rule on the island to an unceremonious end.. The fat lady, as they say, is beginning to sing. In real life, the regime basically collapsed at this point. Though Zheng Jing’s advisers suggested an invasion of Luzon as a way to evade the Manchus and rebuild the dynasty, the advice didn’t take. Zheng Jing more or less gave up and drank himself to death, after which a succession crisis erupted. Clearly, the idea of a retreat to Luzon didn’t appeal to Zheng Jing. But what about a retreat to the New World?
Of course, IRL the Zheng regime wasn’t aware there was a New World, at least as far as I know. But there’s an obvious vector for the knowledge to make its way to them - Manila. For about ten years, between the mid-1660s and the mid-1670s, multiple junks sailed from Taiwan to Manila on trading voyages every year (23 junks during the years 1664-1670 alone). The town of Manila at this point is heavily dependent on the eponymous galleon trade; one or two ships arrived from Acapulco every year with silver and another departed from Manila laden with Chinese goods.There are no secrets in a town full of sailors, and the presence of a large ethnic Chinese community in Manila makes the spread of knowledge to the Zheng traders even less of a stretch. For the purposes of this timeline, we’ll imagine that a particularly inquisitive captain of a Zheng trading junk saw one of the Manila galleons in port, or met someone who been a crewmember on one, or just wondered where all the silver that the Spanish were trading came from, and started making enquiries. The rest is alternate history. I’ll be the first to admit this is a pretty low-probability series of events, but I don’t think it’s all that implausible, and the idea will be a lot of fun to explore.
NEXT: The first expedition to the New World. Place your bets on where landfall will be made! I guess that’s a bit of a spoiler, but if landfall isn’t made then this isn’t much of a timeline.
