PROLOGUE (OOC):
Note from the Author:
So I think most people are going to be wanting an explanation for this given that this is literally a timeline I am already and currently working on at the moment. Well let me talk a bit about that TL and why this is happening right now. When I started the TL I had just finished reading John Keay's excellent book on China:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/China-History-John-Keay/dp/0007221789 (A bit long but worth a read)
Anyway I went in thinking 'It shouldn't be too hard to get my head around the Eighteen Kingdoms' considering that Keay more or less skimmed over it and didn't put that much emphasis on an exact breakdown of the entirety of the period (206-200 BCE) and to be fair I think I did that rather well. What I didn't do so well was two things:
1) Appreciating China, by which I mean I sort of failed on the demographics and geography of China- The Guanzhong debate between me and Darthfanta on the original TL is really only one example of this.
2) Much more critically, I didn't really organise myself very well and this led to some problems. In all honesty the Xiongnu should probably have made their presence known much earlier than they did in my TL which I sort of just hand-waved so I could continue on with what I was going with. Again this is only one example but what effectively happened was I ended up sort of just shooting in the dark at what is plausible to have happened without actually thinking critically enough to organise what might have or probably would have happened.
Along with a few thoughts I have been having recently on how I want to do this timeline and how I want to address the history I am trying to explore and talk about, I've decided that I'm going to rewrite the TL from the beginning. I'm not going to go back and simply make some edits to the other TL because I want to do this properly and I want to do it justice and because it feels honestly wrong for me to keep going with the TL when I feel that what I'm stumbling into is complete guesswork.
So what is this TL really going to be about? The POD and premise is the same and in all honesty the direction I've taken of proliferating the title of King-Hegemon is going to be pretty similar and of course there will be some similarities especially at the beginning. The difference, then, is how I am going to approach this- Much more rationally, in a much more organised way and I'm going to talk more about other aspects as well as politics and military matters, for example economics, trade, culture, society all of which have got to play a part in China and I can't just go through 60 years of history without at least addressing these topics. I am also going to bear in mind other things such as geography (which I did have in the back of my mind but probably should have focused on more personally) and demographics (because with such a big population in China this is important).
So from here on the TL can begin and I hope anyone who read the original is interested in seeing how I tackle it this time (because it is going to be different).
RiseofBubblez
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