Is there a way to have China colonized/divided by European powers the way India was during the Age of Exploration?
Is there a way to unite most of India and have the resultant state be stable enough to serve as a loose "Qing" analogue in South Asia?
Is there a way to have China colonized/divided by European powers the way India was during the Age of Exploration?
Is there a way to unite most of India and have the resultant state be stable enough to serve as a loose "Qing" analogue in South Asia?
Add in an 18th-century Qing collapse
Which is difficult...
What about a "Second Yuan" formed by Mandukhai Khatun or someone, as opposed to the Manchu? I could definitely see the Mongols using Europeans and/or Jesuits the way they used Persians and other ethnics IOTL...
Before collapsing, allowing for these existing european networks to be used to keep China divided and supine before the might of Company mercenaries.
One needs to fracture China in order or the possibility of colonization. Perhaps only a partial Qing conquest and various Ming claimants? Need some sort of Waring States type period
Alon said:Uniting China under one colonial power, the way nearly all of OTL's India was British, is harder. The reason is geographic. In India, the European powers each had its own ports, and Britain could colonize the entire subcontinent from several directions while Portugal and France stayed in their little enclaves. In contrast, maritime colonization in China has to proceed from east to west, and on top of that, most treaty ports were in the south, where the mountains make overland colonization hard; Shanghai and Qingdao were the only two that open to the North China Plain, so if Britain had Shanghai and Germany had Qingdao, it would be hard for Britain to end up controlling all of China from Shanghai - the a big slice of Shandong and such would remain German.
I find this highly implausible.What is the largest force the Spanish can deploy that far across the globe?Ten thousand or so?Even trying to support this force would be extremely difficult.Most probably wouldn't have survived the trip due to problems like scurvy.It would be a logistical nightmare.If you can make the Spanish stronger and less tied to the continent, and weaken the Ming faster, dividing the land between warlords... perhaps you can have a Spanish Tenja [Tianchao]. A limited one, likely based mostly in the south with the north ruled by Manchus, and insanely long odds, but still.
I find this highly implausible.What is the largest force the Spanish can deploy that far across the globe?Ten thousand or so?Even trying to support this force would be extremely difficult.It would be a logistical nightmare.
You mean like having the Spanish fleet blockade the Yangtze and prop up a Ming Catholic prince as emperor in the south?As I said, insanely long odds. A civil war coinciding with a Manchu invasion, support from the Papacy to start the Far Eastern Rite, a few lucky conversions, and you have Catholic South China and Manchu North China. The former may or may not be under Spanish rule.
You mean like having the Spanish fleet blockade the Yangtze and prop up a Ming Catholic prince as emperor in the south?
India in contrast, had must more secure natural borders - Burma sat between India and Indochina, the Himalyas meant no major steppe tribes, and the Hindu Kush protected from the West.
India is harder to conquer, making it easy to prevent their neighbours just coming along and invading before any Europeans.
How does a Spanish fleet exactly win against the full might of the Qing fleet?