The Silver Knight, a Lithuania Timeline
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The Rise of Douhang
International Business, Part 1: The Rise of Douhang
Douhang’s logo. It has become quite recognizable in modern times.
Douhang’s logo. It has become quite recognizable in modern times.
In the bygone days of the Han dynasty, an imperial prince pressed soy curds into a mould, squeezed out the moisture, and created one of China’s most iconic foodstuffs. Or, more likely, he didn’t. Chinese chroniclers tended to attribute the inventions of an age to the leaders who reigned at the time, and tofu was no exception. It is thought that the first tofu was made through the addition of seawater to soy milk—the salt served as a coagulant, reacting with the organic molecules in the soy milk to create thick curds of solidified proteins, fats, and oils. Pressing these into moulds would have created rudimentary, semi-liquid antecedents of modern tofu. However, tofu improved and diversified as it spread across an increasingly Buddhist China. The various schools of Buddhism that proliferated in post-Han society mandated vegetarianism for monks and recommended it for the laity, and tofu became a low-calorie and guilt-free source of protein that could viably replace meat in the diet of monks, villagers, and city-dwellers alike. Whether brittle and soft or meaty and extra-firm, it exploded in popularity during the Song Dynasty and maintained it even after the Mongol Conquest. A Ming dynasty treatise on medicine, regarded as one of the greatest scientific achievements of the time, included sections on tofu-making.
In the lead-up to the 20th century, the Yongwu and Shangwu emperors began top-down modernization in Shun China. One of the pioneers who led the bottom-up response was Wei Jiacheng, a native of Nanjing. While studying agricultural science at the University of Bologna, Wei learned of the various industrial methods and practices, such as the introduction of chemical fertilizers and mechanical harvesting, that the Europeans had steadily perfected. His populist inclinations led him to the conclusion that modern agriculture held immense rewards not just for the elite but for the common, tofu-eating man and woman. In 1905, Wei and his Italian-educated associates founded the Soybean Production Company (Dadou Shengchan Gonghang, 大豆生産公行), better known today as the Douhang Corporation.
Wei Jiacheng. Though later leaders of Douhang professed unflinching respect for his business acumen and expansive vision, his activist political views would not be so strictly adhered to.
Douhang’s business model was a resounding success, and it didn’t take local and national authorities very long to catch on. The nascent company’s land acquisitions, grain drills, phosphorus, and sulfur were paid for with assistance from the government in Nanjing, from authorities further inland in Central China (a historical heartland of soy where Douhang’s Nanjing office and rural crop fields were based) and, eventually, from the imperial government. One of the first acts of the Jiaqing Emperor, who ascended to the throne in 1916, was to grant honors onto the “Citizen-Heroes of Diligent Work and Frugal Study,” a category that included Wei Jiacheng.
Over the next few decades, Douhang leaped from strength to strength. The conquest of Mongolia and Xiboliya began in 1919, and was accompanied by the reassertion of control over lands that, fortuitously, proved to be exquisitely fertile ground for the production of soy. When the Imperial Bureau for the Development of the North began the leasing of land in the Jurchen territories to private companies, Douhang eagerly signed up. The company opened up its second office in Haishenwai [1] in 1924, securing a spot in the economic and cultural hub of the Jurchen lands and eastern Xiboliya. Tan Xinpei, Wei’s young wife, had relatives in Guangdong, and used them to seek out vendors who would buy Douhang’s products. Though Shun China was progressive in some respects—the early Shun emperors had frowned upon Ming-style footbinding, and later modernizing emperors successfully banned it completely—China remained a deeply patriarchal society. Tan’s role in Douhang was small in the 1920s, but she was already getting ready to be one of the most vocal exceptions to her society’s rules.
All this, however, was almost put to a stop by the Yangtze flood of 1931. At a stroke, one million lives were lost to the flood and its consequences, and a small push in the form of a French Flu outbreak thrust the nation into an economic crisis. Douhang’s assets in Central China—still the company’s heartland—were almost completely wiped out. Seeking to avoid the future concentration of eggs in a single, vulnerable basket, Douhang spread its wings. The southern offices of the company in Guangdong and Fuzhou had, in conjunction with the imperial government, begun reaching out to Southeast Asia in the 1920s. The Empire of Lusang, eager to continue its own modernization efforts, imported Douhang products as early as 1926, and Joseon Korea followed suit in the same year. During outreach efforts in the lands that would become Nusantara, Douhang noticed the presence of tempeh in Java. While tofu was made from soy milk, tempeh was made by shelling whole soybeans, fermenting them in acid and edible fungus spores, and letting the fungus knit the softened beans together into a solid cake of protein, dietary fiber, and vitamins. By selling Chinese soybeans to tempeh vendors and later buying out the vendors themselves, Douhang sought to diversify its product line by muscling in on the tempeh market. Real diversification would begin in force in 1933, when the aging Wei Jiacheng stepped aside in favor of his son, Wei Xiaowen, who studied chemistry in France.
Wei Xiaowen and Tan Xinpei.
As if anticipating the loss of political dominance over Europe, France used the 1910s to push the boundaries of science. In 1914, Antoine Rocard found that immersing casein, a protein found in milk and cheese, into formaldehyde yielded a new material. It was ivory-white, odourless, insoluble in water, biodegradable, and inflammable. Rocardite [2], as it was later known, was the first of the synthetic organic compounds that came to be known as plastics, and Wei Xiaowen was caught up in the ensuing chemical revolution. His studied were eagerly supported by Tan Xinpei, a doting mother whose advice would be invaluable to her bookish and reclusive son. When Wei Xiaowen returned to China and told Tan of what he had learned, she told him that she was able and ready to hire his chemistry professor and anyone else who could help push Douhang in a new direction. Fuguo Laboratory (Fu Guo Shiyanshi, 富國實驗室) was established by Wei Xiaowen in 1930 in Nanjing as an independent venture, but, after Wei succeeded his father as the chief executive of Douhang, Fuguo became the corporation’s research and development department [3]. French and Chinese scientists at Fuguo found that soy oil made an excellent base for paints, resins, inks, and waxes. Though Douhang’s line of scented candles held a niche appeal at best, their line of paints and inks proved lucrative as supply contracts were signed with construction companies and pen manufacturers. Casein had long been used in France to create nontoxic glues, and these techniques were copied almost wholesale to create soy-based glues and wood adhesives that offered maximal profit with minimal time and effort. It was soon revealed that the proteins in soy could, like casein in milk, be used to produce new plastics. Glycerol and water could make soy protein isolates into biodegradable plastics, but these were at first not very water-resistant [4]. Heat treatments and mixing with other plastic varieties helped fix this, but the results weren't perfect. Still, Wei Xiaowen was able to oversee the release of plastic-based cutlery, tableware, Sengupta casings, and even clothing in not just the Chinese home, but in Lusang, Vietnam, Korea, Nusantara, and other countries where Douhang had a noticeable presence. A large slice of the profits from this venture were plowed back into Fuguo, which commenced experiments with non-biodegradable plastics derived from gasoline. The expansion of Fuguo’s efforts inaugurated a kind of diarchy in Douhang; while Wei crafted long-term plans for new products, he trusted his mother Tan Xinpei to oversee the sales of existing products, and their expansion to new markets.
Tan did not have to search hard for opportunity: the Chinese military buildup that accompanied the formation of the EASA offered one almost immediately. The Imperial army and navy needed nutritious rations, and Yang Long’s government offered Douhang a contract for supplying tofu and tempeh, its traditional mainstays. As tensions with Japan grew, Douhang acquired one of the clothing companies that manufactured uniforms, and soy-based materials started to weave their way into the shirts, buttons, and boots of the Imperial Armed Forces. And even as news of the Sino-Japanese War and the terrible conditions in blockaded Japan washed over the Chinese national consciousness, Tan Xinpei still saw opportunity. Positing that international and national opinion would not permit the Chinese government to avoid fixing up postwar Japan, she predicted that Douhang could secure a share of the Japanese food and construction markets (in which there were, unfortunately, very few competitors) by supplying Douhang’s diverse products as part of a Chinese-led aid and reconstruction effort. But Japan was not the only part of the Pacific world that drew attention. The Tawantinsuyu Empire of South Vespucia sought to develop itself by becoming an agricultural breadbasket, and held territories perfect for soybean agriculture [5].
Douhang had evolved dramatically during the tenure of the younger Wei, and by the late 30s it could no longer be summed up as a simple food producer. Now, as it prepared to straddle an ocean, it stood ready to mutate further still.
[1] OTL: Vladivostok.
[2] OTL: Galalith.
[3] Inspired by Bell Labs.
[4] http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2838&context=etd
[5] Inca lands in the OTL Chaco and Paraguay.
***
Unilever was established by a margarine company and a soap company to build up a supply of animal fat, upon which both of their products depended. Now, soap and food are just two of the myriad products which Unilever sells. (Business Casual tells this story much, MUCH better than I can.) I looked around for another natural material with which a company could carve out a niche in a number of diverse markets, and then use those niches to start innovating and creating entirely new products. Soy turned out to be a perfect fit.
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Well, it's more likely that a clique of generals would overthrow him and surrender afterwards.
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So France became a pioneer of science ?
How are the relation between France and Germania ?
Focus on Chinese multinationals.
No civil war.
Democracy.
A close to OTL population (so more than three times OTL USA).
Leader of the Anti-Unitarian Asia.
One of the biggest military power.
Strategically, probably the best in position to invade Indian Unified State mainland.
Speaking of Xiboliya, I think there's a fairly large chance of it becoming autonomous/independent down the road. I assume that the TTL Shun Dynasty of the 1900s are less brutal or genocidal than the Russian conquistadors of the 1600s and 1700s (and probably place a bigger emphasis on economic exploitation over settler colonialism) so North Asian native populations might be bigger than OTL. The counterpoint to this is that China has a larger population of potential settlers who could still swamp the good parts of Siberia demographically. It's likely that the Far Eastern coast just ends up being a cultural extension of Manchuria, with the Sino-Jurchen hybrid culture of Northeast China being dominant there. However, it's likely that inland regions like Mongolia, Yakutia, or OTL Krasnoyarsk Krai retain majorities of Turkic/Uralic/Mongolic speakers that develop their own national consciousnesses after a while.
So what? Shun China, like OTL China has plenty of minorities in fringe regions and not only there, and there is only rarely secessionism, Tibet being the big exception.
I assume the case that most Chinese minorities are too small (Manchu) too dispersed (Miao/native Yunnanese) or too integrated into the Han cultural milieu (the Hui) for secessionist movements to really take off. Tibet and Xinjiang don't fit any of those conditions, and that's why both have secessionist movements strong enough to provoke reactions from the PRC. The Siberian natives TTL may/may not fit the conditions for a successful secessionist movement (given that they've only been Chinese for a little over twenty years, I'm not sure how culturally integrated Siberia is) but movements for local autonomy aren't beyond the pale (after all, if the Hui managed to get their own autonomous region...). Depending on how inconsiderate Shun economic exploitation is, some kind of Siberian autonomy movement could be intertwined with environmentalism/Buddhism/Volgak missionary Christianity/etc.
Speaking of Manchus (sorry, Jurchens, as Hong Taiji never existed ITTL), I'd imagine they'd be the "Scots" of TTL's China in that while they speak Chinese and are largely Sinicized, they retain their own identity and some elements of their culture (maybe the Chinese spoken in Dongbei and Xiboliya has lots of loanwords from Jurchen).
Maybe xiboliya can become like OTL Nunavut? Apart from what China feels is needed?
If You Are of Stone, I Am of Steel: Persia until 1941
If You Are Of Stone, I Am Of Steel: Persia Until 1941
The Great Mosque (Masjid-e Jameh) of Isfahan. Though its reconstruction was a daunting task, locals and tourists alike think it was worth the effort.
Persia in the 1400s was a majority Sunni land, renowned for its scholarship in the Shafi’i and Hanafi schools of jurisprudence. However, the Safavids, who began their short-lived conquest of Iran at the turn of the 16th century, attempted to make Iran a Shia nation at swordpoint. The Ottomans soon began restoring Sunnism at gunpoint in a campaign of conquest that, after a bloody beginning in the 1550s, ended in 1619 with all of Persia under the rule of the true Caliph. Though the Ottomans patronized traditional Persian culture—Persian calligraphy and miniature-painting heavily influenced the Turkish styles of both arts, and copies of the Shahnameh were sold from Rabat to Herat—Constantinople's policies set Persia on an unforeseen path. The clerics that the Ottomans tasked with restoring Sunni Islam included many who were heavily critical not just of Shia Islam, but of conventional Sunnism as practiced in the Ottoman Empire of the day. Moving troublesome conservative firebrands to Persia was seen as an easy way to get them out of Constantinople’s hair, but in their new home these clerics put down deep roots. Though their influence was limited in traditionally Shia communities among the Kurds and Azeris, Sunni mosques acquired large waqf landholdings in Khorasan and Fars, and followings of villagers and urbanites who saw “true Islam” as the way to peace and good order after decades of war. As Persian nationalists began to emerge in the 1800s and challenge Ottoman rule, the Sunni clergy were powerful and established enough to be an unpredictable wild card, even if their influence was resented by both sides.
Persia was liberated from the Ottoman Empire piece-by-piece by Mughal-assisted rebel groups with mutually exclusive ideologies. Accordingly, the postwar national government in Isfahan was a dizzying mix of democratic liberals, authoritarian ultra-nationalists, clerical conservatives, monarchists, and Mughal collaborators who didn’t really care what the government looked like as long as Delhi got its way and rewarded those who assisted it. Mughal plans to stabilize Persia by installing an Persian-descended Delhi nobleman as Shah were cut short by the 1917 Unitarian revolution of the Nijasure brothers. The newly-independent Afghanistan and Baluchistan blocked the path to Persia, and kept the new rulers of India from immediately taking over old Mughal prerogatives in the area. Recognizing their newfound irrelevance in the central government, pro-Mughal and monarchist politicians were the first to leave Isfahan and return to their home provinces, where friends and allies could be found ruling as provincial governors, landlords, village headmen, merchants, or army commanders. The central government never had time to formally appoint its own provincial governors, and the movements of important figures indifferent or hostile to the central government only pulled the lands of Persia further from Isfahan’s grasp. However, a larger problem loomed—there was no longer any relatively neutral bloc of politicians around to keep the liberals and conservatives away from each other’s throats. In an otherwise conventional speech, Akbar Hashemi, the first Democrat of the Persian Republic, claimed that the conservatives did not support his proposed irredentist war against Khiva (to which the Mughals arbitrarily assigned control of Persian-majority Khorasan, including the city of Mashhad) because they were spineless cowards who pined for Turkish rule. In the charged atmosphere of 1920, the remarks set off a riot in Isfahan that ballooned into an internecine war of vendettas and rivalries. When the dust settled, Isfahan presided over a nation of warlords, with three prominent challengers to the Persian Republic establishing themselves in the north, south, and east.
Persia in 1924. If the civil war before this point was a confused free-for-all, the civil war after 1924 was a nice, simple, four-way affair.
The Isfahan government was the largest and, on paper, the strongest of the four main factions. This liberal-dominated state, a continuation of the postwar national government, inherited international recognition, the majority of Persia’s land, and the corps of ex-Ottoman officers whose education and expertise made them the soul and backbone of the Persian rebellion. However, the lands controlled by Isfahan were primarily either pastureland or desert, and the military governors in charge of the towns and cities stubbornly defended their local autonomy. These problems were familiar to Generalissimo Ali Qayani, who succeeded Democrat Hashemi in 1922 and remade the Isfahan government into a modernizing military dictatorship, where merit counted for more than birth (even if neither counted for as much as loyalty to liberal ideals and Qayani himself). Qayani, though initially controversial, grew immensely popular after the successful subjugation of the Kerman clique of the southeast in 1924. The loose alliance of regional warlords folded before the discipline and arms of Qayani’s troops, and the opinions of the locals swung in favor of Qayani as he proved himself capable of governing. Isfahan gained more than just prestige from the pacification of the southeast— the defeat of the Kermanis gave Isfahan control over Bandar Murad [1], the largest of Persia’s port cities. And with access to the sea came access to friends.
In the 1920s, Europe finally realized that Unitarianism wasn’t about to just go away, and tried to figure out ways to deal with it. Visegrad’s general staff figured that to keep the Union under pressure, they had to deny it strategic depth by propping up Persia as an anti-Unitarian counterweight. Efforts were made to court the Kerman clique, but its replacement by the stronger and more stable Isfahan government made a Visegradian-Persian rapport seem like an even better idea. Persia’s traditional textile industry and its more industrialized offshoots had previously been geared toward Turkish consumption. Now, the cotton of the northwest could be brought to the central cities of Qom and Isfahan, where old Ottoman-built factories and new ones with Visegradian machines made clothes in increasingly profitable amounts— though not as profitable as Persian rugs, an old craft for which demand was building up among Visegrad’s elite. The textile trade made a wealthy port out of Bandar Murad, which supplemented its income by serving as one of the northwest Indian Ocean’s only European-friendly, non-Unitarian ports of call. Qayani, however, was most pleased about the military alliance with Visegrad. He believed that this would be very useful in any future confrontations with the Unitarians, and didn’t yet have any reason to believe otherwise.
Ali Qayani, 2nd Democrat of the Persian Republic.
The Shiraz clique began as an anti-government alliance of the authorities in Ahvaz, Shiraz, and Bushehr, and at first seemed very likely to meet the same fate as the Kerman clique. Its salvation was wheat.
Iran is a harsh land for agriculture. Much of the east and center of the country is covered by the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut, giant salt deserts in which only date palms will grow in abundance. In Khorasan one could grow wheat and barley, but the best lands of that region were tilled by Persians under the Khivan yoke. Food security had been one of the biggest priorities of the Isfahan government— wheat grew in Kermanshah and Hamadan provinces, and barley grew along a belt of territory from Isfahan to Qom, but staving off famine was a demanding task for authorities and farmers. The Shiraz clique, however, exerted solid control over Khuzestan and Fars, which together produced a third of Persia’s wheat. No bread riots broke out in the warlord clique’s cities, and no onerous production quotas (or at least, no more onerous than their neighbors) needed to be placed on farmers. The common people never developed into the sort of pro-Isfahan fifth column that brought down Kerman, and this allowed the Shirazis to survive the short term. Long-term stability was achieved by courting the clerics. The clique, composed of landlords and magnates with local roots, had always been conservative—even Protectionist—in outlook, and it made every effort to protect and restore the waqf landholdings of the mosques and religious endowments in its territory. This steadily ballooned into a full alliance, whereby the clergy—in return for protection and funding—made sure to let the people know that the liberals of Isfahan were one with the Unitarians, that Ali Qayani was an aspiring Kubilay, and that local men of honor, born of the soil and into the religion of the land, represented the best hope for the future. The religious outlook of Shiraz attracted the attention of Egypt’s sultan, who sought an ally in the in midst of Unitarian Asia like Visegrad did but preferred Protectionist Shiraz to revolutionary and reformist Isfahan. The French soon followed the Egyptians in—the possibility of needling Visegrad by backing a rival horse was too good for the French, who still hadn’t gotten over their loss in the Great European War. Though Franco-Egyptian aid never equaled the support Isfahan got from Visegrad, the Shirazis made a pretty penny by courting French archaeologists and making them pay out the nose to take a look at Persepolis and other ancient sites. The illegal artifact trade turned out to be a lucrative one.
Relics of Persepolis adorn the Museum of Ancient History in Paris. The modern-day government ruling Persepolis’s plundered ruins has publicly protested the French retention of “national treasures, mercilessly exiled from their home by traitorous warlords.”
Though the warlords who maintained the clique were grateful for the legitimacy that the alliance with the clergy gave them, they weren’t interested in theocracy. Long-term plans always involved finding some other agent strong enough to provide legitimacy to the clique, but weak enough to avoid seriously disrupting its power. By the late 1920s, the Shah in Herat had become an attractive candidate for such “leadership.”
Shah Ghiyasuddin I, first ruler of the self-proclaimed Asaf Khan dynasty of the “Iranian Imperial State.”
The pro-Mughal monarchists of Persia were not simple Mughal stooges— they only survived as long as they did by being wily operators with a keen knowledge of wind direction. During the collapse of Hashemi’s national state in the late 1910s, monarchist figures made their way to the Mughal-friendly provincial governors of Eastern Persia, a region centered around the city of Herat. Afghanistan and Baluchistan had nation-building of their own to tend to, and didn’t object to the stirrings in Eastern Persia. Instead, they helped set one of the most important stirrings in motion. On December 1, 1921, Ghiyasuddin Ali Asaf Khan left his residence in Kabul and traveled westward to Herat. In the next year, the former Mughal nobleman was crowned Shah of Iran on Nowruz [2].
Shah Ghiyasuddin had been one of the Mughals’ candidates for Shah of Persia. He was an educated man of high standing in Delhi culture, but he never forgot the blood of Persian nobility that ran in him. He wrote Persian poetry skillfully, at a time when most Mughal poets wrote in Urdu to reach a bigger audience. In the chaos of the Indian Revolution, many of the candidates had disappeared or renounced their claims. Ghiyasuddin, however, refused to let go, and he was joined in Herat by others who made similar choices. In its early days, the “imperial court” in Herat was essentially a recreation of the bygone Mughal government, where many of the movers and shakers were exiled Mughal loyalists who saw a little of Babur in Ghiyasuddin, and had nowhere else to go in any case.
The monarchists’ policy for survival after 1925 could be summed up as Cautiousness and Culture. The greatest threat to the monarchist government was Isfahan, but Isfahan’s core lands lay far to the west. To get to Herat, Qayani would have to march his troops through the treacherous Dasht-e Lut, which even today is an mostly uninhabited region due to its sheer inhospitality. The Shah and his advisors knew that Qayani would not tax the patience of his army—the keystone of his power—by sending them through that desert. In the end, they were right— Qayani sent only small raiding parties across the Dasht-e Lut, and the monarchists could defend against these relatively easily. This is not to say that the monarchists had no plans for expansion—they sought, sometimes successfully, to foment pro-Shah rebellions in Isfahan’s cities. From 1928 onward, the monarchists sought out an alliance with Shiraz. Communications were slow—Isfahani agents could intercept the Sengupta transmissions, and the Dasht-e Lut killed many carriers of written letters—but both sides kept at it. Shah Ghiyasuddin was eager to broaden his appeal in Persia as a whole, while the Shirazis were eager to accept a possible postwar ruler who promised to be more generous in victory than the vengeful Isfahanis. By 1931, the Herat government and the Shiraz clique, though still acting as two different and uncoordinated entities in practice, had in theory become a single unified government, with all members of the clique granted titles of governorship and hereditary nobility by Shah Ghiyasuddin. The monarchist-Shirazi alliance hoped to conquer Kerman and Bandar Murad, blocking Isfahan’s Republicans from the sea. Plans like this, however, did not interfere with the monarchists’ understanding of their own relative weakness—an awareness that allowed the make-believe court of an Indian pretender to make the right choices, and gradually become real.
Ghiyasuddin’s shahdom, though militarily unremarkable among the Persian factions, was far ahead of its time in cultural matters. Herat, once called the “pearl of Khorasan” by Rumi, became the site of a Persian Renaissance that the monarchy, seeking to shed its Indianness, eagerly patronized. Traditional plays and music performances offered Heratis a well-deserved diversion from the work of reconstruction and defense, and some of these employed revolutionary techniques in storytelling and composition. New technologies like the camera were experimented with by people who had, in better times, been fans of the strange new “films” that appeared in Europe’s theaters. All of this could be pursued safely, because the Herat Gendarmerie, based on Shah Ghiyasuddin’s recollections of the French police force during his time in Paris, was the most effective urban police force in contemporary Persia. Artistic innovation spread to the highest ranks of the monarchy. Shah Ghiyasuddin was an accomplished calligraphist who could sometimes be seen hand-painting road signs while guarded by a large retinue. However, his grounding in history and literature led him in more interesting directions. Familiar with European and Indian studies on the ancient Aryans, Shah Ghiyasuddin announced that he was not merely the ruler of “Persia,” a name that came from the Greek term for Fars Province, but of “Iran,” the authentically native name for the Land of the Aryans in its entirety and majesty. He also commissioned the best calligraphers of his kingdom for one last love-letter to the medieval and early-modern traditions of bookmaking: the production of a new, scholarly edition of the Shahnameh, the centuries-old “Book of Kings” by Ferdowsi of Tus, with expositions of real historical findings in the footnotes. The Asaf Khan Shahnameh is still remarkable to this day for the love and toil with which it tells the mythological and real story of an ancient nation.
Herat enjoyed a deserved reputation for cleanliness, low levels of crime, and— despite lingering poverty— a spirit of levity that couldn’t be found in bigger, more repressed, and unsafe cities like Isfahan, Shiraz… and Tehran.
Rustam Rashti, Aryamehr of the Tehran Government.
The extremism of the Tehran government made Shah Ghiyasuddin’s dabbling in the pre-Islamic past look amateurish. In the late 1800s, the study of the Shahnameh and pre-Islamic history was popular among all Persian nationalists, but one subset, the Aryanists, came to controversial conclusions. The Shahnameh features two notable antagonists who seek to make the Persian nation a slave to evil. One is Dahhak, a prince of Arabia who rules Persia for one thousand terrible years, harvesting the brains of Persian civilians to feed the snakes sprouting from his shoulders. The other is Afrasiyab, a lord of Turan who, like Dahhak, is a servant of Ahriman, the evil god of Zoroastrianism. The conflicts of the Shahnameh are a clash of the Aryan, the noble, the authentically human, against the irrational and unpleasant Semitic and Turkic servants of destruction. Despite its heretical conclusions, Aryanism retreated underground and pulled together a rough coalition of followers ranging from skeptics, atheists, linguists, tenant farmers, and urban workers. The movement was especially strong in the Caspian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran, where the rural population saw the Ottoman-imported clergy as exploitative and lazy. In Tehran, the Aryanists became a kind of support group, helping young and promising Aryans compete in business and political life against privileged Turkish and Azeri rivals. The Aryanists were therefore already quite prepared to strike out an independent path. Rustam Rashti, an Aryanist supporter of Hashemi who ran afoul of Qayani and was forced to return to his home in Gilan, started them along that path.
Rashti’s old Aryanist colleagues barely recognized the man who returned from Isfahan. He had always reserved words of contempt for the “Din-e Arab” (he never called it Islam, only “The Faith of the Arab”) but he now returned with angry diatribes about how Qayani was a new Dahhak, a false king who would suck the life and spirit from Persia to feed his insatiable greed, while the then-new pretender Shah in the east wasn’t of Persian descent at all, but rather a Turkish son of Afrasiyab. This new, angry, vengeful Aryanism, though disconcerting, proved to be a hit in Gilan and Mazandaran. The locals had expected the downfall of all the pillars of Ottoman rule when the Great European war ended, and Rashti seemed ready to deliver that. Though Rashti initially went only by the title of Democrat, the conquest of Tehran in 1923 changed things. Rashti, drunk with pride, began to refer to himself as the “Aryamehr,” [3] and his soldiers as “the Immortals of Darius.” Though their borderline-apostasy earned them no friends in the rest of Persia, Volga Russia wasn’t particularly put off. Volgak settlers in the steppes of Central Asia were in need of cheap timber, and the forests of the Caspian Hyrcanian forests had plenty of cheap timber to offer. Caspian commerce grew a little busier after the Aryanists hired Russian interpreters, and Volgak munitions held Isfahan at bay.
The closest cousin to the Tehran Government’s ideology, with its authoritarianism and obsessive focus on a legendary national past that justified chauvinism in the present day, was Lithuanian Revivalism. Unlike the Revivalists, however, the Tehran Government would not survive the 1930s.
Persia in June 1936, stuck between a rock and a very, very hard place.
The first signs of disaster came in May, when India launched its invasion of Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Shah Ghiyasuddin learned from those fleeing into his realm that India sought a land border with Turkey, and to be living in any of the three countries directly between the two Unitarian powers meant destruction. The Shah was advised to flee to Khiva with all his belongings, but he refused. For several tension-wrought weeks, the royalist troops fought delaying actions against the numerically superior Indians, all the while sending Sengupta messages and horsemen westward to warn the other factions. Finally, the Shah was forced to flee north to Khiva with his court, belongings, and hundreds of his subjects as the Indians closed in on Herat from the southeast. Shortly after the start of the Indian campaign, the Ottomans struck the Tehran government, seizing Zanjan and Qazvin. The Aryamehr knew exactly how dangerous the situation was and, reasoning that even the demon Dahhak triumphed over the forces of the Aryans briefly before his ultimate defeat, he contacted his Volgak associates and let them know that he would either arrive on the northern shore of the Caspian Sea or disappear entirely from the earth. He did the former. Ali Qayani, however, had no such routes of easy escape. As it turned out, he didn’t want any. Isfahan lay far inland, and the Unitarians closed in from all sides, but the old soldier Qayani knew how to hold a fort.
He held on as Isfahan was surrounded.
He held on as street-by-street warfare pushed Unitarian losses into the thousands, far more than the Indians and Turks had planned to lose.
He held on as he was forced to retreat into the Great Mosque of Isfahan, and Unitarian troops leveled enormous sections of the mosque to get at him.
He held on until he was pulled from the rubble, and his gun was wrenched from a grip of death’s rigor.
The Shah fought bravely, cut his losses, and survived, allowing the ideology of Iranian conservative monarchism to do the same. But Persian liberal republicanism lived on as well, because through the stories of his deeds Ali Qayani became immortal.
Such immortality would elude the Shiraz clique. Though the clerics knew full well what would happen to them and their followers under the Unitarians and though they harangued the warlords to resist by any means, their cries fell on deaf ears. Some of the warlords stayed and fought. Some stayed, but did not fight. Most of the former “Protectionists” abandoned the very thing they were tasked with protecting—they surrendered to the Union and became its honored guests for as long as it took to drop them off at the Egyptian border. By June 1939, the forces unleashed during the struggle for Persian independence had all been snuffed out. The Unitarians began collectivizing the agricultural holdings, assumed control of the warlord states’ economic assets, and forced whatever private enterprise remained to hand over all profits except those required for maintenance and minute investments. Meanwhile, refugees from all parts of Persia, recognizing that the southern sea held nothing but Turkish submarines, trekked north past the mountains and salt plains. Most settled in the parts of Khorasan controlled by Khiva, where they could be among Persians but still safe from the Unitarians, who seemed intent on ignoring Central Asia until victories were achieved elsewhere.
In the madrasas of Mashhad (Khiva still lacked a European-style secular education system) and the impromptu schools set up to educate the children and adults in the refugee camps across Khorasan, Persians met Persians. The various boundaries the warlords set up gave way, replaced by a new national consciousness based on all-consuming confusion over one question: why us? Why did the Persians seem condemned to a present of war and conquest, and a future of ruinous desolation? Gradually, a consensus was reached among a critical mass of the dispossessed: a better future could only be built through faith, but the Persians had entrusted the protection of faith to self-serving beasts of men who were addicted to their own delusions of glory. The only true glory, this critical mass concluded, is God’s. And the only legitimate rulers are those who honor Him, who do not abandon Him, and who rule by the law of His word, as elucidated by the Prophet and his favored companions.
A railway station near Herat, 1941
Ey Irān ey marz-e por gohar / O Iran, o bejeweled land
I learned how to make the best pilaf in Khiva. The women of that land know the art of cooking like few others do, it’s tremendous.
Ey xākat sarčešme-ye honar / O, your soil is the wellspring of virtues
That said, I didn’t like the place much. It didn’t like me either. So I went around with my pilaf until someone said to me, “Stop right here and make more for my friends.” I replied that I would love to work with him and his friends.
Dur az to andiše-ye badān / Far from you may the thoughts of evil be
There are ten friends in total, and they oversee this railway station. It was built, like many other stations stretching west to east, to deliver aid to thousands of needy and deserving friends across the desert. Their camaraderie is infectious, and I cannot help but laugh along at the jokes which they do not know I can understand.
Pāyande māni to jāvedān / May you remain lasting and eternal
The last train before lunch rolls off. I think that too many have described such things as a metal snake. For me, they are as a needle doing embroidery. They stab and poke through the fabric, but the whole thing will look very nice later on so it’s all right.
Ey došman ar to sange xāreyi, man āhanam / O enemy, if you are of stone, I am of steel
A friend of the man who invited me to this place taps his gun menacingly, then returns to his post. I wave back, smiling. There are small tomatoes in my right hand.
Jān-e man fadā-ye xāk-e pāk-e mihanam / May my life be sacrificed for the pure soil of my motherland
As the tomatoes cook, their skin weakens, releasing juice that seeps into the rice. I toss in the fruits in my left hand. Their skin weakens, and their juice seeps out. Such is family: no matter how different two members are, they will find some common ground in the end.
Mehre to čon šod pišeam / Since your love became my calling
I have not seen my family in two years. I think they’re all dead, I know it. I know of many things now. I know of women and children buried in mass graves, a distance away from the same railroads that they gave their lives to complete. I know of a war in which the human spirit is a resource to be hoarded, spent wisely, and destroyed so that the enemy doesn’t make use of it. I know of nightshade, which grows in the east of Persia. I learn to pick its fruits with my non-dominant hand, the one that I do not eat with.
Dur az to nist andišeam / My thoughts are never far from you
I stare intently at the clock. It has been twenty minutes since lunch. Soon, the man and his friends will begin to suffer, and I must leave so that they do not pin the blame on me. I know, however, that they will be suspicious of me no matter what. They who seek to unify humanity hold every individual human in the deepest suspicion, and evidence has nothing to do with it.
Dar rāh-e to key arzeši dārad in jān-e mā / In your cause, when do our lives have value?
The tree next to me splinters, the excitable wood scrapes slivers of skin from my face, and I give a great whoop as I jump over a large rock. One of the soldiers must have realized what happened to him. He must have realized what I had done, and what I deserved to experience. But there was something that neither he nor his friends would ever know.
In heaven, I will be rewarded for my valor. On earth, the Jund will find ten women to replace me.
Pāyande bād xāk-e Irān-e mā / May the land of our Iran be eternal. [4]
The White Banner of the Jund-e Khoda (The Army of the Lord).
[1] OTL: Bandar Abbas. Bandar Abbas is named after the Safavid Shah Abbas the Great, whose dynasty was not very great TTL.
[2] The Iranian New Year.
[3] Persian: Light of the Aryans. OTL, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi used this title along with the more famous “Shahanshah” (king of kings).
[4] The italicized parts are a verse of Ey Iran, a popular patriotic song of OTL.
Persia now hosts a dangerous new alternative to mainstream Fatahism, born of repeated humiliation and desperation. Unlike the Fatahists, who are willing to accept and even preserve heterodoxy and differences in Quran/Hadith interpretation (they see themselves as fighting for the good of all Islam) the Jund is heavily influenced by the clerics that accompanied the Ottoman conquest. Many of these clerics spoke out to the luxury and excess they saw in Constantinople. They reserved especially caustic words for discussing inequality of wealth, and the willingness of the elite to spend money on a painter who profanes God by creating images of humans instead of spending it on the simple laborers and farmers who prop up the moneyed classes' frivolous lifestyles. These clerics have left for Persia a way of thinking about religion that is populist, sectarian, self-assured, confrontational, and as as suspicious of “innovations” in the faith as it is of luxury (a term that, when defined loosely enough, can encompass any example of seemingly undeserved prosperity). The Jund is a mix of the Taliban and the Hashashin— a movement of the disillusioned and disappointed, it recruits heavily from displaced people ready to “take their country back” through assassinations and asymmetrical warfare in the service of an extremist ideology.
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Depends on how the War of the Danube ends. Many Persian political movements have escaped to or formed in exile, but they're all pretty aware that their fate is largely outside their own control and hinges on the war's outcome.