Famous People in Alternate Realities (1871 Edition)

Tsao

Banned
I have seen a great number of these done, but most of them have been post-1900. So, I have decided to start one with a POD within or after 1871.

Most of you should know the rules, and they are pretty simple. You write a brief biography and description of a famous person that lived IOTL (or an analogue of that person) as if in an alternate TL, and create some difference between their OTL self and this ATL personage. All these people will have come from the same ATL.

There are only two rules:

1. All PODs must be after January 1st, 1871.
2. There must be no ASB entries.

I will start us off with these fellows:

Colonel Josef Conrad (1857-1916):

Polish-French adventurer and author, who, after his failed attempt at suicide in 1878, rashly decided to join the French Foreign Legion, where he has many adventures in French Indochina, Senegal, and Algeria. He was briefly involved in the Foreign Legionnaire attempted filibuster Free Republic of Luang Prabang, which eventually fell to Siamese troops. Armed with nothing but a revolver, a knife, and some bits of rope, he managed to escape the massacre at Luang Prabang when the Free State fell in March of 1887 and reached Hanoi in late August, much to the amazement of the local authorities. On his return, he was hailed as a hero in France, and thus managed to avoid a court-martial from his own involvement in the ill-fated republic. Serving with distinction in France's central African colonies after the incident, he retired from the FFL in 1896 and wrote several novels and short stories based around his many exploits and adventures. He died of malaria in 1916, while fighting the Germans in the Kongo.

George Sun (1866 - 1938):

A famed Chinese-American writer and later supporter of the Reformist cause in China. Born Sun Zhongshan in a relatively poor farming family in 1866, Sun received an education from a local schoolmaster in his early years, and traveled to Hawaii in 1880 to live with his elder brother Sun Mei. After falling out with his brother in 1887, Sun moved to San Francisco the following year to join his childhood friend and later fellow Reformist Lu Haodong. Sun soon found a job with a local newspaper in the West Coast city, and was converted to Christianity by a local pastor who had earlier been a missionary in Hong Kong, and took on the English name George.

Railing against racial inequality in the city and writing several novels that became popular amongst the young intellectual Chinese population of the city, Sun quickly became involved in the early Chinese Reformist movement among the Overseas Chinese, who supported the reforms of the Zaitian Emperor and the radical ideologue Kang Youwei, who called for 'A Hundred Days of Learning and Growth' in China. In 1904, Sun traveled back to Guangdong and met Kang Youwei. After Duan Qirui's reactionary militarist coup in 1907, Sun was again forced to flee to America, where he campaigned for the return of the exiled Kang and the continuation of the August Reforms. The restoration of the Emperor by Cai E the following year was met with approval from Sun, who had by then returned to his favorite pastime: writing. By the time of his death from kidney cancer in 1938 in his home in Palo Alto, Sun had written over fifty works, many of which inspired a whole generation of Chinese writers such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Sun Guangyuan. His most famous works, Once Upon a Time in Guangzhou and The Unfortunate Exploits of a Manchurian Bandit, are still read today.

Mikheil Djugashvili (1875 - 1916)*:

A famed Georgian poet and writer, known for his translation of the works of the 19th-century poets Rustaveli and Melikiants into Russian and Armenian, as well as his participation in some of the various radical Marxist and Anarchist movements that operated in Russia at the time. Born to a prosperous Georgian cobbler in the Kartli town of Gori in late 1875, young Mikheil was noted for being a rebellious child, going against his father's wishes for him to be a craftsman as he was and attending the local church school with his mother's approval. Mikheil (known now as 'Misha' to his friends) attended the Tiflis Seminary after completing his education in Gori, and it was there that he became acquainted with Marxism and other radical ideologies.

Djugashvili wrote his first collection of poems in 1903, titled Fire in the Hills, shortly before he moved to the frontier oil town of Batumi, where he incited strikes and excited the suspicions of the Okhrana. Djugashvili would take on the alias of Vasiliev, and over the next decade would travel Europe, gathering support for the Georgian Socialist-Federalists (initially supporting Jordania's Mensheviks, Djugashvili soon became disenchanted with Noe Ramishvili and his radical ideals and turned to the popular Georgian SFs) with his childhood friend Josef Davrichewy (later Foreign Minister of the Democratic People's Republic of Georgia) denouncing the majority Great-Russian Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ulyanov in Petrograd and the Jewish Bundists led by Lev Bronstein in Odessa. Finally caught by the Okhrana while visiting his mistress in Vologda, Djugashvili was sent into Siberian exile in 1914. He was conscripted in the desperate days after the first German offensive into Belorussia in 1916, and was shot in the neck while scouting out the German positions near Minsk in September. He died soon afterwards in a field hospital, not living to see the end of the war nearly a year later and the successful establishment of a democratic Georgian republic in 1918.

Today, Djugashvili is remembered as a hero in the Republic of Georgia, and considered one of the founding fathers of the Georgian independence movement. His grave can be found in a Orthodox cemetery in Gori, where his old brother-in-arms Davrichewy had his body moved in 1922.

*IOTL, Vissarion and Ekaterina Djugashvili had two children before Josef, both of whom died early. ITTL, their firstborn, Mikheil, survives. Thus, the OTL Josef V. Stalin does not exist ITTL.
 
Yan Xishan 1883-1974.

Also known as 'The Model Governor', he came to prominence in the Warlord Period when he declared himself Governor-General of Shanxi, in defiance of the restored Empire and Cai E. Defeating imperial forces in battle, his rebellion sparked twenty years of virtual anarchy, with republican and imperial forces battling for supremacy. When Chiang Kai Shek's forces stormed north in 1927, he captured Wuhan and forged an alliance with the Sichuan Military Clique; his control of the western territories was instrumental to the suppression of the Chinese Communist Party, whose base at Jianxi was destroyed by aerial bombardment. He served as Minister for Industry and Inspector General in Chiang's Republican government from 1931-1947, commanding nationalist forces in the north during the war with Japan. In 1936 Joseph 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell was attached to his forces as an American advisor; the two did not get along but Stilwell's positive impression of the General was crucial to his procurement of American material, including the extension of lend-lease to China in 1941. With Japanese defeat in 1944, he served as Vice President in the National Provisional Government before launching a coup against Chiang in 1947. Following this, he ruled autocratically until his death. His legacy was of agricultural reform, especially of massive irrigation projects in the Yellow River Valley, coupled with industrialisation which began in the 1950s. His procurement of American and Japanese investment earned him the enmity of extreme nationalists, but his opening of China to trade was instrumental in its economic boom which made it the world's biggest economy in 2011.
 
Last edited:

Tsao

Banned
Adolf Hiedler (1889 - 1923):

Austrian artist, soldier, and politician. Born in the German town of Ranshofen in 1889, Hiedler had a troublesome childhood, marred by violent disagreements with his father and troubles with his teachers at the small Catholic school that he attended. In 1900, his father Alois sent him to a technical school in Linz, where he graduated from in 1905. Hiedler moved to Vienna that same year, and rented an apartment in the poorer areas of the city, living off a small salary as a janitor at the Academy of Fine Arts and support from his mother Klara. It is here where he began to show an interest in painting and a strong belief in the superiority of the 'German' race, disdaining Jews and the other ethnic groups that inhabited the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. He became increasingly destitute and turned to alcohol, often frequenting the many cafes and taverns of Vienna and drunkenly singing 'Deutschland Uber Alles' with his German friends and colleagues in the streets. To make ends meet, he began selling his watercolors and sketches to passerbys in the street, and was moved into a workhouse in early 1909.

As a Viennese cafe drifter with no money and no real future in the city, Hiedler moved to Drava in 1910 to stay with his childhood friend and colleague in Linz August Kubizek. At the outbreak of the war, Hiedler was an unshaven vagrant of twenty-five who made his living selling landscape paintings and doing various minor errands in the city. Seized by a patriotic fervor to defend Austria from the 'Slavic hordes of the East', Hiedler joined the Austrian army and saw combat in Galicia and Byelorus. Hiedler received an Iron Cross Second Class for his bravery, but was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia after the fall of Minsk in September 1916. He served with the Conservative Whites during the Russian Civil War in Siberia, and managed to make it to Cracow (now in the newly independent Republic of Poland) in 1919, from where he caught a train to Vienna. At this time, Austria was a powder keg of political factionalism and popular dissent, giving rise to parties on both extremes of the political spectrum. Hiedler, as a distinguished veteran and fervent nationalist, was able to make his way up the ranks of the Deutsch Volkspartei (German People's Party), an ultranationalist party with its base in the middle class German population and a notably anti-Semitic platform. Hiedler made a name for himself as a popular orator, and was one of the leaders of the attempted Steidle Putsch of March 1922. He was forced to flee after the new left-center coalition government outlawed the DV and prosecuted the members of the aborted putsch. Hiedler was shot dead outside his apartment in Paris on June 1st, 1923 by an embittered young Austrian socialist named Hubert Sternberg who had actually been aiming for Richard Steidle, who had been visiting Hiedler at the time. Steidle escaped unharmed, but Hiedler died from internal bleeding and was buried in a Paris cemetery.
 
Top