Rediscovering Hendoustan - a TL
"In the past, the three countries of the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan were all very powerful. They conquered as a matter of course in times of war; to the west they subjugated India, to the east they struck Korea, to the north they reached the Amur River...and today my country is their equal."
So declared Hung Taiji, ruler of the small Manchu realm on the fringes of civilization, in 1638. To many it would have seemed a grandiose boast at best. The Ming empire was still alive - it had in fact recently seemingly resolved its rebel problem - and the Chinese had shown that they could still inflict defeats on the armies of Hung Taiji. So even if luck was on their side,
could the Manchus conquer the totality of the richest nation on earth? Ruling half of China would be challenging enough, so did the Manchu state really have the capacity to subjugate all of that vast realm? After all, Kubilai Khan had taken many years of grueling war to conquer the Southern Song, and the Mongols had had far greater resources than the Manchus while the Song had access to only half of China. Clearly, many Manchus must surely have thought, a full conquest of China would be impossible.
And India? Certainly the Khitans and the Mongols - if never the Jurchens - had gone to the borders of India, but even Chinggis Khan had never fully conquered it. The Manchus knew little about the realities of India beyond what Buddhism had told them, but they did know vast distances and mighty peaks lay between India from China. Even
if China was fully subjugated, how on earth would the Manchus exert influence on such a faraway and such a mysterious land as India? India, at least, must be a pipe dream.
Yet the speed and scale of the Manchu enterprise would exceed most expectations. Within ten years of 1638 the Manchus had conquered most of China. And a century or so later, the descendants of both Hung Taiji and his Chinese foes were knocking at the gates of India itself. Hung Taiji had been proven right, after all.
But India was no longer the country of Buddhist mythology that the Manchus knew best. It had, in fact, changed beyond recognition - literally. The High Qing empire faced the task of
rediscovering the subcontinent; it would do so with eagerness.
This is the story of that process, and of how this process changed China, India, and the world.