Rediscovering Hendustan - a TL

Interesting. Taking on the Durrani empire may be logistically a bridge too far for the Qing right now, but the Chinese have an advantage in durability - China is going to remain coherent and strong for a while yet, while the Duranni Empire OTL went into swift decline. (That might be butterflied, but long-term stability isn't probably the way to bet at this time). Even if they get a bloody nose, the Qing might be in a position to extract some tasty crunchy revenge 20 years down the line or so.

Hm. I'm a little skeptical that the Chinese wouldn't figure out that the British are the same groups. If nothing else, they could ask the Jesuits at Court, no?

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Generally IOTL connecting dots from disparate frontiers (i.e. Tibet and the coast) was rarely the Qing court's strong suit, because Qing policy between the decimation of Dzungaria up to the early 19th century was mostly a frontier policy where the security of each frontier zone was considered largely separately. They had a lot of data but not enough synthesis, so to speak. There would be major synthesis only for a perceived major potential threat, and currently the Afghans are that threat, not the Franks nor the English. No need to waste time investigating the Jesuits about Franks when they might not even be Europeans (their "king descends from the Pandava") and will probably collapse anyways since they lack Confucian benevolence.

Also from a narrative viewpoint (since after all this is fiction) I thought it would be neater to have the British unwittingly blow their own cover by mentioning that they own territories in India.
 
Now that is some cool stuf, Bengal as a Qing tributary, even if the Chinese are unwilling to have a military alliance, it will be very interesting culturally. I wonder how the two will influence each other, perhaps a Chinese - merchant minority settles in Bengal ala South East Asia, or perhaps some forms of archaic Hinduism/ancient Indian traditions gain some rekindling of interest from the Chinese Buddhists, I'm really enjoying this TL.
 
Among the items that the Bengalis had brought to Beijing, a map of India, including of Afghanistan and Burma, caused great interest among court scholars. In particular, it was noted that the Bengali maps generally agreed with European maps of India. From the Indian viewpoint this was not surprising; mostly accurate maps of the subcontinent had not been uncommon since Mughal days. But to the Chinese, this seemed to verify the validity of European cartography. As senior cartographer He Guozong noted, "the map of Mir Qasim and the map of d'Anville [a French geographer] is for the greater part the same."

Especially, the Bengali map was incompatible with the Qing court survey map's distorted portrayal of Tibet. The Kangxi court survey map's section on Tibet had been hastily made and was consequently distorted. Previously, cartographers had preserved the distortion even though it clashed with the most recent European maps. Would the Qing preserve the distortion even now, when a map from a local source proved the Europeans right? No, the Qing would not. In 1764 cartographers Mingghatu and He Guozong were assigned to revise the survey map with regards to Tibet and other places suspected to have been distorted in earlier versions, using Jesuit maps as a guide. Mingghatu commented: "In the past we could not be sure of the validity of the maps of the Jesuits, but having seen the Bengali map, all is made clear." The court had accepted the basic validity of European world maps when it came to much of Asia. But doubts remained. The emperor commented that "While the Europeans are certainly right about much of the contours of the world, it is debatable if they should be completely correct about the entire world.....the Europeans regard only their own views as the sole truth and denigrate the views of others." Mingghatu also noted: "The Jesuits claim there are five continents, but simply by looking at their own maps one can see that through evidential reasoning there should be only two[1].....Therefore we may conclude that not all that the Jesuits say are trustworthy."

Nevertheless the court trusted European cartography much more than it had before, and this confidence in Jesuit maps gradually trickled down to the general literati society. Chinese geographic agnosticism[2] was becoming history.

---

[1] Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. Mingghatu defined a continent as an area of land separated by great seas. Since Asia and Europe were joined together they had to be one continent, and the Mediterranean and Red Seas were too slender to justify Africa being its own continent. Therefore it was unjustifiable to claim that Afro-Eurasia was actually three continents. Likewise, the Americas were one continent. Mingghatu also believed there were two more continents (probably due to Buddhist cosmology) and noted that there were probably two continents in the far north and south, with this hypothetical southern continent being Terra Australis in European maps.

[2] Much Chinese geography was agnostic in the sense that they represented conflicting worldviews without conclusively stating one conception of the world to be more right than another.
 
Also your update on the 2nd page said that Abdali defeated the foremost power in India. Were you saying that in context of the Marathas? Cause they ruled most of the subcontinent at the time of Abdali's invasions. And yes , Marathas were not the subjects of the Mughals but (de facto not de jure) the inverse.
 
Also your update on the 2nd page said that Abdali defeated the foremost power in India. Were you saying that in context of the Marathas? Cause they ruled most of the subcontinent at the time of Abdali's invasions. And yes , Marathas were not the subjects of the Mughals but (de facto not de jure) the inverse.

While de facto the inverse (at times), de jure it was the opposite, and that matters when it comes to symbolic authority. The Marathas derived their formal authority from the Mughal Empire- this never disappeared, and there was no watershed moment where they 'declared independence'. However, obviously in practice they were independent and they did exercise control over the Mughal Emperor at various points, especially when the Scindia became Amir al-Amara.

The decentralisation of the Mughal Empire is certainly interesting and I see that this TL will have to play with that extensively, especially when most of India fell under this de jure imperial system, all the while being split into functionally independent states.
 
Goodie, a Qing TL. Keep up the good work, it's been an amazing read so far. But there's the future problem of how IOTL Qianlong managed to use up the treasury. It'll probably be hard to maintain the scale of spending Qianlong is at, especially with the Indian adventures. Hopefully trade can make up for this.
 
Now we must return to Central Asian developments, where the geopolitical situation was growing tenser by the day.

Finding allies in the Muslim Regions

With an enemy as powerful as Ahmad Shah Durrani, Sultan Shah - ruler of Badakhshan - was right to be worried. And not only were the Afghans troublesome enough on their own, but now Khoqand and perhaps even the Qazaqs were their allies…..All this was dutifully transmitted to the Qing authorities in Yarkand and Ili, and in 1762 Mingrui, the leading representative of Beijing in northern Xinjiang, requested 20,000 soldiers to be sent to the area as reinforcement. He also asked permission to seek out allies in the “Muslim Regions.” The emperor responded positively to both demands.

Mingrui first sought to assure Qazaq loyalty to the Qing primarily by using Chinese commercial clout; the price of Chinese products, including coveted silk and cotton, would be lowered by 5% for as long as the Qazaqs maintained their neutrality. All who joined the Qing in any Central Asian campaign would receive Chinese goods for free, depending on their rank. The Qazaq khans were swayed, but Ahmad Shah immediately responded in a letter that if the Qazaqs did not accept “the obligation of holy war” in return for infidel trinkets they would be no better than apostates and called for a pan-Islamic trade embargo. After arduous negotiations both Qazaq hordes finally announced their neutrality in 1763, although their true loyalties remained unknown. The Qazaqs had been able to negotiate even better trade deals - the prices of Chinese goods would be cut by 8% until 1763 then by 6% for perpetuity unless they supported Qing enemies. Beijing was displeased by this deal, but the support of the Qazaq hordes was too important to neglect.

Similar negotiations were carried with Khoqand, another Islamic khanate - if more settled than the Qazaqs - that was interested in Chinese goods. But there was also a territorial element to the relationship with Khoqand.. Recently Irdana of Khoqand had invaded and annexed the city of Osh and ousted its Qirghiz ruler, Hajji Bi. But Hajji Bi was a Qing tributary, and he appealed to the Chinese to pressure Khoqand to give up its conquests. Realizing that Irdana was far more important than Hajji Bi, Mingrui accepted his demands and also conceded to a clarification of the Qing border that favored Khoqand. But this may have weakened the perceived authority of Beijing in Islamic Central Asia in the long term, and despite these concessions Irdana made no promise one way or another. Still, Ahmad Shah could not afford to ignore the Qing courting of Khoqand.

Bukhara was a formidable khanate in the center of Central Asia and another nominal tributary which, however, did not border the empire directly. Mingrui still managed to send an envoy to it, hoping that its many and bitter territorial disputes with Ahmad Shah would make it a loyal ally of Beijing. However, Abu’l Ghazi Khan, khan of Bukhara, refused to give a definite answer in public. “I am Abu’l Ghazi, so how should I join with infidels” he would say, punning on the meaning of ghazi as ‘holy warrior.’ But in 1763 Mingrui reported that “Bukhara [.....] is mostly reliable,” so it appears that there was some clandestine communication that Islamic sources do not report.

Ahmad Shah was greatly disturbed by Qing activity and moved around 30,000 soldiers north in 1762, forcing him to take a light hand in India. To his annoyance, the menace the Qing posed made him unable to launch a large-scale campaign in the Punjab and the Sikh revolts continued. In 1763 Nasir Khan, the most powerful chieftain in Baluchistan, took advantage of the chaos in the north to revolt from Afghan suzerainty and invade Sindh. The Afghans’ grip on India seemed to be crumbling. So events in India may have, in fact, motivated Ahmad Shah to finally go to war.

The path to Irkeshtam

In August 1764, the stench of death rose high above the snow-topped mountains of the Pamirs. The swift waters had not, as of yet, managed to cleanse the Kirzlesu River of its tinge of red, and tens of thousands of corpses - the representatives of two great empires - lay prone in the hills. This was the first legacy of the Battle of Irkeshtam, one of the great battles of Central Asian history. But could it have been avoided?

Perhaps not. By 1764 the rulers of both sides wanted war. Ahmad Shah felt constrained by the menace of Chinese invasion and feared doing nothing would only cost him allies, and he appears to have been preparing for war as early as 1762. As for Beijing, the story was somewhat more complex. In late 1762 Niyas Beg, a Kashmiri, announced to the Qing authorities in Xinjiang that “if [the Qing] gave him a few troops, he would consult with the ruler of Ladakh and the people of Kashmir, take Kashmir, and offer it to the emperor.” The Qianlong emperor was enamoured with this plan to conquer Kashmir, unlike almost the entirety of his government. One official memorialized that there were “five insurmountable issues with the conquest of Kashmir.” First, Ahmad Shah had already dispatched a tributary envoy, so Kashmir had already seen the light of imperial grace even without having been conquered. Second, Ahmad Shah had displayed restraint and not deposed the Mughals, suggesting he was, in fact, a righteous ruler. Third, Niyas Beg was an untrustworthy men with untrustworthy credentials. Four, Kashmir was far from the Chinese administrative centers in either Xinjiang or Tibet, but close to potential enemies in Hindustan. Fifth, it would drain the treasury for nothing but prestige. The emperor should therefore show restraint worthy of a sage ruler. The emperor could find nothing of fault in the memorial, and the conquest of Kashmir was discounted. But Kashmir seems to have been always in his mind; in response to Mingrui’s memorial, he sent 5,000 more men than Mingrui had requested and in 1764 he sent 10,000 soldiers for unknown reasons.

This finally convinced Ahmad Shah to move, and in the early spring of 1765 Irdana and he overran Badakhshan and killed Sultan Shah. Since Badakhshan had a defense alliance with the Qing, Mingrui was bound to act. After filing a report to Beijing, he moved west with around 30,000 soldiers he could call from throughout Xinjiang as General of Ili. The Afghan-Khoqandi army was camped in the north of Badakhshan, just west of Kashgar. When they heard news of Mingrui’s march they began to advance east as well. By mid-July the Afghan army of some 40,000 troops, of whom about two-thirds were Ahmad Shah’s men, were camped in the village of Nura on the Kirzlesu River. A few days later the Qing troops camped further along the Kirzlesu about ten kilometers east. In between the two armies was the lakeside village of Irkeshtam.

It is said, according to oral histories from Badakhshani villagers, that Ahmad Shah made a speech the day before battle began:

All must perish, save God - all beings in this transitory world of matter is mortal, and to be immortal is to be God. One day your flesh shall rot and be meat for the worms and the rats, and in this world there shall remain of all of you naught but a name. It is better to perish with a good name than to live with a bad one.
[.....]
Tomorrow we adjoin battle against the armies of the infidel realm. It has been set by Him so that the dead tomorrow will be martyrs of the gardens of Paradise, and the living will be holy warriors in the forest of courage. Tomorrow we shall surely achieve victory, as victory was achieved against the Hindus at Panipat, as victory was achieved against the idolaters of Mecca many centuries ago. Take God's Word in your hand. By it, by the Holy Qu'ran, swear you shall not desert, that you shall live or die with your faces to the east. And remember that he who seeks to die shall live, and he who seeks to live shall die.​
 
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But there's the future problem of how IOTL Qianlong managed to use up the treasury. It'll probably be hard to maintain the scale of spending Qianlong is at, especially with the Indian adventures. Hopefully trade can make up for this.
Well, the treasuries in the Board of Revenue had over 80 million taels in the 1770s and there were as much as 60 million taels left even at the end of the Qianlong reign. It was only the White Lotus revolt - which took 120 million taels to suppress - that really devastated the Qing treasuries. A Qing-Durrani war will be extremely costly, but the Qing can most likely afford it. For reference, here are the approximate costs of Qianlong-era wars:

First Jinchuan war (1747-1749): 10 million taels
Conquest and genocide of the Dzungars, suppression of the Afaqi khwajas (1754-1761): 33 million taels
Burmese wars (1767-1769): 13 million taels
Second Jinchuan war (1771-1776): 70 million taels just to subdue squabbling mountain tribes
Lin Shuangwen's revolt (1787-1788): 10 million taels
Vietnam war (1788-1789): 1.3 million taels
First Gurkha war (1788-1789): 1 million taels
Second Gurkha war (1791-1792): 11 million taels

Even if Beijing fights a Central Asian war, as long as it avoids the pointless second Jinchuan war the treasury shouldn't be too affected.
 
Where did you get all that information so quickly? Could I know what books/ websites can come in handy?
 
Where did you get all that information so quickly? Could I know what books/ websites can come in handy?

The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William Rowe is where my statistics for the treasuries come from, it is an exceptional English-language introduction to Qing history. The specific numbers for the Ten Great Campaigns is from The Chinese State at the Borders by Diana Lary but it seems her statistics for the second Jinchuan war may have been somewhat exaggerated (other Google Books results suggest taels in the lower 60 millions).
 
Ahmad Shah was greatly disturbed by Qing activity and moved around 30,000 soldiers north in 1762, forcing him to take a light hand in India. To his annoyance, the menace the Qing posed made him unable to launch a large-scale campaign in the Punjab and the Sikh revolts continued.

Interesting in seeing that the second Sikh holocaust has been butterflied away thanks to the Ahmad Shah Durrani going to war with the Qing Dynasty. Wonder how this would affect the growth and development of the Sikh Confederacy with a larger population.

Besides that it would also be interesting to the ramifications of Ahmad Shah Durrani Empire dying 8 years earlier than OTL, and how this would affects the policies of the Marathas and Europeans
 
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