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.
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.