WI Spain tries to invade China in 1570

You're not reading what I'm saying:

"Obviously, it wasn't just the Spaniards and Portuguese who did the fighting, but the same would have happened in China."




Yes, deposing the king of an empire 20,000 kilometres away from you in a geographical area protected by straits and islands very hard to navigate with 16th century technology and logistics is not impressive at all. I want to see Ming China pulling that off.

Correct me if I'm misreading the context here but you're citing the Spanish temporarily disrupting a monarchy already teetering on the edge due to a massive invasion by an aggressive neighboring regional power as proof that the Spanish could do the same to China, an empire many times larger than Cambodia.

I'm not denying that the overthrow was unusual but it's not as impressive as claiming that the whole thing happened in a vacuum. And saying "Obviously it wasn't just the Spanish and Portuguese who did the fighting" is a bit of an understatement when comparing tens and even a hundred thousand soldiers to a couple hundred.

Cambodia were not an empire by this point and that particular kingdom had been battered from warfare and domination by foreign powers. It's more telling of the state of Cambodia that a few hundred Spanish troops could overthrow their king than of the capabilities of the Spanish, who, while impressive during the era, were up against a horrifically weakened nation about to in the midst of their self-proclaimed Dark Ages.

Whether the Ming would or could do the same is beside the matter; I'm not questioning the Ming or your estimates of them, I'm questioning how you're rating the Spanish.

How? To give you an example the Spanish didn't press into the lower Antilles, the Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest nor into Canada, or even Greenland where the Vikings had previously landed. They also didn't conquer the Solomon Islands after an exploratory expedition there went badly. Are the natives of these territories now comparable to Ming China? The explanation instead lies in that the Spanish were occupied with other things, like quelling revolts and fighting other European rivals both at home and abroad in their colonies.
Wait, are you comparing the Ming Empire to those regions or not? I'm saying that the Spanish being occupied elsewhere isn't the only reason they couldn't have gone after China. You're implying I'm comparing the Ming with the Solomon Islands or the New World and also saying the Spanish were too busy elsewhere to conquer someone but not specifying whom. I'm just a bit confused about what's being argued here.

I'm not misrepresenting anything. The Mongols, invading from a country that is a direct neighbour of Japan, were incapable of consolidating anything in Japan. Meanwhile the Portuguese invading from 20,000 km. away, traversing the difficult waters of the Indian Ocean that also weren't charted by Europeans before, established a colonial post in Nagasaki that endured for a century where they traded slaves and many other goods and from which they were able to make alliances, especially with Oda Nobunaga, spread their culture and revolutionise the warfare of the locals. The fact that the Mongols were incapable of doing anything remotely similar in Japan speaks a lot against them.
1. Portuguese invasion? I'd love to see a source refer to the Portuguese warships that invaded Japan in the 16th century.

2.We're comparing the Mongol Empire, a nation with no naval tradition to speak of, intent on conquering as much of the world as possible, trying to cross a storm-prone sea, failing to secure their goals in Japan (total conquest) in the 13th century with Portugal, a coastal kingdom with centuries of experience on the seas and exploration, intent on establishing trade routes, making peaceful contact with Japan in the 16th century and having that comparison speak against the Mongol Empire, which spanned the Yellow and Black Seas, crushed every great empire of Asia, and encroached on Europe and Egypt within two hundred years of being a group of scattered tribes (before returning to that state rather quickly).

Their goals were different from the onset so to compare the results of a failed military expedition to a century of trade relations is a bit like asking why the French failed to conquer Russia when the Eastern Roman Empire did (by trading and getting their imperial bloodline into the Russian monarchy, since apparently that counts as an invasion in some standard).

The Portuguese and Spanish accomplished great feats, I'll not deny that, but marking the Portuguese trade relation with Japan as a colonial invasion and the Spanish intervention in wartorn Cambodia as evidence that Ming China would fall to the Spanish seem to be leaps in logic that don't account for the things you've omitted in this thread.
 
An invasion to china would cause their forces to spread to thin., which would cause the rebels allying with the Dutch to defeat the Spanish in the Philippines.
 
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Vuu

Banned
All of China? Nah, the logistics would be absolutely insane. Plus, China at that time is a whole different beast than the 19th century one where they got beaten around by anyone with a gun.

Best bet would be to do a quick expedition to Beijing and put one of their own as a new dynasty while the rest collapses, then they do what they want
 
Obvious troll is a troll so let's just get back to the original point.

In the previous thread I asserted that they would not go after the Spaniards and attack the Philippines and I still believe so. A punitive expedition, unlikely but I can see that, but fully conquer the archipelago? Emperor Wanli was no Yongle; why would he do that?
 
Upon reading that other thread, still can't shake my head around the fact that some people seriously argued that Spain could realistically conquer a united 16th century China of all thing base on their conquest of two undeveloped empires wrecked by plagues and rebellions who still use stone-age weapons.

I know the majority of this board is from the West and all but the eurocentric mentality here never cease to amaze me.

In the previous thread I asserted that they would not go after the Spaniards and attack the Philippines and I still believe so. A punitive expedition, unlikely but I can see that, but fully conquer the archipelago? Emperor Wanli was no Yongle; why would he do that?

Wanli in this period is still a decent emperor so he wouldn't want to create a precedent in which foreign barbarians could have the audacity to just march to the Forbidden City and 'conquer' China without any repercussion. As such he would seek to set an example for Spain and the other European powers in the region such as the Dutch and the Portuguese that China could and would mess them up royally if they ever try to take up arms against the Empire.

Not to mention it will also deprive Spain of their foothold in Asia to prevent them from trying something like this again.
 

Maoistic

Banned
Upon reading that other thread, still can't shake my head around the fact that some people seriously argued that Spain could realistically conquer a united 16th century China of all thing base on their conquest of two undeveloped empires wrecked by plagues and rebellions who still use stone-age weapons.

I know the majority of this board is from the West and all but the eurocentric mentality here never cease to amaze me.

-Uses the term "Eurocentric"
-After denigrating non-European societies: "two undeveloped empires... who still use stone-age weapons"

Then you take into account that these two empires were on an entirely different unexplored continent by Europeans that was almost 10,000 km. away, and it becomes far more impressive. Then you also take into account they were able to hold land on the other side of Asia, which was even further away from Spain, on empires and polities that weren't "stone-age" for sure, and it becomes almost unbelievable. And despite holding such a vast overseas empire - the first global empire in the world - they were still able to deal devastating defeats to the two strongest European states, the French and the Ottomans, Spain even taking Paris itself during the last stage of the FWOR (and having captured the King of France decades prior during the Battle of Pavia), which cements Spain's position as the first true superpower in history. I love how people also forget that Spain defeated the French during the Italian Wars and cemented its annexation over most of Italy. Or what, are anti-Hispanics here now going to say the French were "stone-age" as well? Seeing how there's much Sinocentrism in AH, I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

I ask again, if today's China resembled India or Nepal (or North Korea if you will) instead of South Korea or Japan, would people overrate it nearly as much?

Correct me if I'm misreading the context here but you're citing the Spanish temporarily disrupting a monarchy already teetering on the edge due to a massive invasion by an aggressive neighboring regional power as proof that the Spanish could do the same to China, an empire many times larger than Cambodia.

I'm not denying that the overthrow was unusual but it's not as impressive as claiming that the whole thing happened in a vacuum. And saying "Obviously it wasn't just the Spanish and Portuguese who did the fighting" is a bit of an understatement when comparing tens and even a hundred thousand soldiers to a couple hundred.

Cambodia were not an empire by this point and that particular kingdom had been battered from warfare and domination by foreign powers. It's more telling of the state of Cambodia that a few hundred Spanish troops could overthrow their king than of the capabilities of the Spanish, who, while impressive during the era, were up against a horrifically weakened nation about to in the midst of their self-proclaimed Dark Ages.

But I never claimed that it "happened in a vacuum". And this Cambdodian non-empire was still about the size of the Korean Peninsula at that point and it would have been like deposing the provincial governor of Guangdong. The only difference is that China was somewhat more stable, but as the initial Spanish landing ships would literally annihilate any junk that dares coming close to them and would then support an army consisting of half a thousand Europeans and probably double the amount of native Asian allies from Spain's surrounding colonies and outposts, all using far superior arquebuses, it's not that hard to see them first taking Guangdong's main ports and then progressively advancing north to overtake the whole of it, either annexing it or forcing the local governor into an alliance against the Ming central government.



Whether the Ming would or could do the same is beside the matter; I'm not questioning the Ming or your estimates of them, I'm questioning how you're rating the Spanish.

It isn't beside the matter because it shows the inferior military capability and infrastructure of the Ming. The Ming simply weren't capable of projecting power like the Spanish Empire could.



Wait, are you comparing the Ming Empire to those regions or not? I'm saying that the Spanish being occupied elsewhere isn't the only reason they couldn't have gone after China. You're implying I'm comparing the Ming with the Solomon Islands or the New World and also saying the Spanish were too busy elsewhere to conquer someone but not specifying whom. I'm just a bit confused about what's being argued here.

My point was that societies escaping colonisation by Felipe II's Spanish Empire don't serve as proof of any military equality between them. They weren't colonised for factors outside of their military capability, which is that Spain was occupied elsewhere, and I do hold that this is the only major reason why Spain didn't colonise any portion of China, which it would have been capable of, especially by the time of Felipe II when Europe, at least Spain, had overtaken the rest of the world in military capability.



1. Portuguese invasion? I'd love to see a source refer to the Portuguese warships that invaded Japan in the 16th century.

2.We're comparing the Mongol Empire, a nation with no naval tradition to speak of, intent on conquering as much of the world as possible, trying to cross a storm-prone sea, failing to secure their goals in Japan (total conquest) in the 13th century with Portugal, a coastal kingdom with centuries of experience on the seas and exploration, intent on establishing trade routes, making peaceful contact with Japan in the 16th century and having that comparison speak against the Mongol Empire, which spanned the Yellow and Black Seas, crushed every great empire of Asia, and encroached on Europe and Egypt within two hundred years of being a group of scattered tribes (before returning to that state rather quickly).

Their goals were different from the onset so to compare the results of a failed military expedition to a century of trade relations is a bit like asking why the French failed to conquer Russia when the Eastern Roman Empire did (by trading and getting their imperial bloodline into the Russian monarchy, since apparently that counts as an invasion in some standard).

The Portuguese and Spanish accomplished great feats, I'll not deny that, but marking the Portuguese trade relation with Japan as a colonial invasion and the Spanish intervention in wartorn Cambodia as evidence that Ming China would fall to the Spanish seem to be leaps in logic that don't account for the things you've omitted in this thread.

Seeing how the Portuguese arrived in Japan with cannonaded ships and armed men, and started a slave post where thousands of slaves were sold to Portuguese colonies, and armed local warlords, the description of it being a colonial invasion is fair. It wasn't a "peaceful" contact at all; even the first interaction in Tanegashima was with Portuguese arquebusiers. The Mongols made use of Korean and Chinese ships, which had an extensive tradition of trading with Japan and nearby islands by the Song dynasty. You talk as if Yuan dynasty had only Mongol engineers and advisors when most would have been Chinese with a good deal of Korean ones as well. Even despite all that, the Japanese kicked them out in both occasions.

And the Yuan dynasty is a fair comparison since it and the other Mongol successor khaganates of Genghis's empire were the leading power of Asia at the time. That this power was militarily incapable of even holding a single outpost in Japan, while Portugal, being far smaller and at the other extreme of Japan, was capable of doing it, practically plundering Japan of much its labour, resources and products, shows the kind of superiority that Europeans possessed over East Asians by the 16th century. The Portuguese were really with the same intention as the Mongols, as they wanted the Japanese market with all its resources and rich civilisation, the difference being that Portugal was far smaller and Japan was the furthest territory from Portugal in Asia, which is why they didn't reduce it to the same level of their holdings in India and had to give it more autonomy.

Finally, it's not defying belief that the Spaniards can take a significant portion of Ming China, which could then lead to its fall by Jurchen incursions from Manchuria like it actually happened, when they have superior arquebusiers, superior ships and had colonies surrounding the Ming where they can recruit necessary reinforcements.
 
it would have been like deposing the provincial governor of Guangdong

The difference is strategic depth. If the Spanish take Guangdong with their one thousand men it isn't going to end there. It isn't like China has now ceased to exist. Suddenly a million men will show up and a few thousand spaniards, even with arquebuses aren't going to beat the Chinese army. They aren't native armericans who run away when gunpowder is used. The Chinese invented gunpowder and know what it is.

It isn't beside the matter because it shows the inferior military capability and infrastructure of the Ming. The Ming simply weren't capable of projecting power like the Spanish Empire could.

So, the Ming can't project power oversees. That is irrelevant to whether they can depend their home soil. The Spanish could send their army across the globe but if they land in China then they will be overrun. The inability of the Ming to project power wasn't because their military was weak, it was because they did not build their army to engage in foreign adventeurism.
 
Then you also take into account they were able to hold land on the other side of Asia, which was even further away from Spain, on empires and polities that weren't "stone-age" for sure, and it becomes almost unbelievable.
The Philippines, whose population numbered no more than 1.5 million total (including the many areas that were never conquered by the Spaniards), were divided into many dozens of small chiefdoms, many to most of which actively cooperated with Spain. The comparison to China is nonsensical.

devastating defeats to the two strongest European states, the French and the Ottomans
What devastating defeat on the Ottomans? Lepanto was not a "devastating defeat" by any measure.

And this Cambdodian non-empire was still about the size of the Korean Peninsula at that point and it would have been like deposing the provincial governor of Guangdong.
One famous seventeenth-century Indian said: "True, the King of Siam may rule over more land than mine [the sultan of Golkonda], but his subjects are swamps and mosquitoes, while the King of Golkonda rules over men." Mainland Southeast Asia was mostly jungle. It's not a particularly astonishing feat to take over a decrepit jungle kingdom which has been already sidelined and bullied by bigger powers for centuries. Per Anthony Reid, Cambodia and Champa put together had less than 12% of Ming Guangdong's 1,200,000-strong population.

the initial Spanish landing ships would literally annihilate any junk that dares coming close to them
This did not happen with the Portuguese in Tunmen and Shancaowan, nor with the Dutch faced against Koxinga.

it's not that hard to see them first taking Guangdong's main ports
The male population of the single city of Guangzhou alone would outnumber your supposed Spanish army by a factor of 100 : 1.

forcing the local governor into an alliance against the Ming central government.
This won't ever happen, first because of Confucian doctrine, second because the governor knows that the Ming will win anyways.

Seeing how the Portuguese arrived in Japan with cannonaded ships and armed men, and started a slave post where thousands of slaves were sold to Portuguese colonies, and armed local warlords, the description of it being a colonial invasion is fair. It wasn't a "peaceful" contact at all; even the first interaction in Tanegashima was with Portuguese arquebusiers. The Mongols made use of Korean and Chinese ships, which had an extensive tradition of trading with Japan and nearby islands by the Song dynasty. You talk as if Yuan dynasty had only Mongol engineers and advisors when most would have been Chinese with a good deal of Korean ones as well. Even despite all that, the Japanese kicked them out in both occasions.
The Portuguese never declared war on a unified Japanese state, unlike the Mongols, and if you had the slightest comprehension of Japanese history you would have known this.
 

Kaze

Banned
There was a Sino-Malay alliance against Portugal under the Zhengde Emperor - where in they defeated the Portuguese fleet twice in naval battle forcing them to negotiate peace.

A better option is not out right invasion, but economics: The Ming currency at the time was backed by silver. The influx of silver from the discovery of the new world caused rapid inflation. But when the silver was cut off, the Ming started to falter. The tax system did not adjust to accommodate the loss of New World silver and still taxed as if the silver was coming in, this gardened much support for a random bandit chieftain named Li Zicheng. Li Zicheng went on to topple the Ming and began the short-lived Shun Dynasty.
 
Why is this even a discussion? We have Europe (mostly Britain) centuries later from much stronger bases taking the fight to China, and while they did win, it was still tough going that didn't lead to (much) conquest.

It follows rather obviously that starting from a weaker base with a lesser technical advantage will see a defeat.

Just the first Opium war took 5k British army plus 14k navy-and-colonial-recruits to fight, and we're proposing Spain does it with just 500 Spaniards. Sounds unlikely.
 
Why is this even a discussion? We have Europe (mostly Britain) centuries later from much stronger bases taking the fight to China, and while they did win, it was still tough going that didn't lead to (much) conquest.

We aren't discussing whether it will succeed or not. It is pretty obvious it fails. What I am interested in is what will the aftermath be.
 

Maoistic

Banned
The difference is strategic depth. If the Spanish take Guangdong with their one thousand men it isn't going to end there. It isn't like China has now ceased to exist. Suddenly a million men will show up and a few thousand spaniards, even with arquebuses aren't going to beat the Chinese army. They aren't native armericans who run away when gunpowder is used. The Chinese invented gunpowder and know what it is.

Of course it's not going to end there, but Guangdong would break off of China, which is significant as it is one of the most important ports and sources of economic income, which means that the Spaniards controlling it can starve much of China. The Ming is not going to send 1 million soldiers. That is a logistical impossibility. It would initially send at most a tenth of that to recover Guangdong, which the Spaniards would quickly fortify, forcing the Ming into a war of attrition and now having a huge portion of its army controlled by the Spaniards. The Spaniards can then progressively decimate the Ming army through siege warfare and slowly advance north. They may not take the Ming dynasty, but they can seriously weaken it, enough that the northern Manchus/Jurchens will start to overrun the Ming at the same time that they face losing territory and defectors from their own military siding wit the invading Spaniards. The process can take about a decade, probably two, ending in a partitioned China.

The point with the arquebuses is that they're superior to any gunpowder the Ming had by the reign of Felipe II. The Spaniards also have superior cannons as well.


So, the Ming can't project power oversees. That is irrelevant to whether they can depend their home soil. The Spanish could send their army across the globe but if they land in China then they will be overrun. The inability of the Ming to project power wasn't because their military was weak, it was because they did not build their army to engage in foreign adventeurism.

It's not irrelevant because it shows the technological inferiority of the Ming. It shows the superior military capacity of Spanish soldiers and their superior ships, which make all but the largest Chinese junks look like overglorified kayaks by comparison. Of course, maybe the Ming can develop such capacity for overseas projection, but fact remains that it didn't and it's not going to suddenly catch up the Spanish Empire just like that.


The Philippines, whose population numbered no more than 1.5 million total (including the many areas that were never conquered by the Spaniards), were divided into many dozens of small chiefdoms, many to most of which actively cooperated with Spain. The comparison to China is nonsensical.

I never compared the Philippines to all of China, I only said that the conquest of the Philippines is underrated by downplayers of the Spanish Empire. And the areas the Spaniards didn't conquer were very small portions in the south, that the Spaniards constantly pacified anyway and which never seriously threatened Spanish rule over them.


What devastating defeat on the Ottomans? Lepanto was not a "devastating defeat" by any measure.

How about yes:

Spain
Strength

212 ships[4]

  • 6 galleasses
  • 206 galleys
28,500 soldiers[7]
40,000 sailors and oarsmen[4]

1,815 guns[8]
Casualties and losses
10,000 dead[9]
17 galleys lost[10]

Ottomans
Strength

278 ships

  • 222 galleys
  • 56 galliots
31,490 soldiers
50,000 sailors and oarsmen

750 guns[8]
Casualties and losses
40,000 dead[9]
200 galleys sunk, burned, or captured

The Ottomans lost four times their men and got almost their entire fleet captured or sunk by a force of about equal numbers. If that is not a devastating victory then I don't know what is. Chinese junks are going to get quite literally annihilated the moment they come close to any Spanish ship.


One famous seventeenth-century Indian said: "True, the King of Siam may rule over more land than mine [the sultan of Golkonda], but his subjects are swamps and mosquitoes, while the King of Golkonda rules over men." Mainland Southeast Asia was mostly jungle. It's not a particularly astonishing feat to take over a decrepit jungle kingdom which has been already sidelined and bullied by bigger powers for centuries. Per Anthony Reid, Cambodia and Champa put together had less than 12% of Ming Guangdong's 1,200,000-strong population.

Because traversing jungles is such an easy feat. And again with ignoring that it was still a sizeable kingdom 20,000 km. away from Spain protected by hard to navigate waters that Europeans were still coming to know. Even if decaying, the logistical feat remains, so it is impressive. The Ming never did anything in their history comparable to that. Guangdong may be big, but that doesn't mean that 1 million people are going to fight the Spaniards, and the forces in Guangdong should have been comparable to those of Cambodia even during this period of decline.

This did not happen with the Portuguese in Tunmen and Shancaowan, nor with the Dutch faced against Koxinga.

The Ming defeated Portuguese junks and caravels that were 4-5 decades apart from the might ships of Felipe II. They still managed to establish an outpost in the Guangdong port anyway. The Dutch would have repelled Koxinga - who took nearly a year to take over Taiwan despite outnumbering the Dutch and having reverse engineered their technology - had the VOC actually sent reinforcements.

The male population of the single city of Guangzhou alone would outnumber your supposed Spanish army by a factor of 100 : 1.

Because every single male will be fighting the Spaniards. All of Guangzhou's men are soldiers. Meanwhile, Spanish arquebusiers combined with cannons, and also cannon fire from ships, would decimate the forces at Guangzhou and cause defectors to join the Spaniards to help them against Ming reinforcements.


This won't ever happen, first because of Confucian doctrine, second because the governor knows that the Ming will win anyways.

Yes, Confucianism is going to win over superior armour, arquebuses and cannons, just like it did against the Manchu when several Chinese defectors joined them. Because we also don't see cases of Confucian scholars converting to Christianity. And no, the Ming will not win. The Ming had trouble defeating Jurchen incursions. It also had trouble defeating the Japanese during the Imjin War. Both of them were militarily inferior to the Spaniards, and while history is not a shonen manga where we can apply A is stronger than B powerscaling (though Spain's downplayers constantly engage in such logic to minimise every Spanish feat), it shows that the Ming are not going to suddenly expel militarily superior Spaniards supported by local allies. By the time the Ming send reinforcements, they will face a large army of defectors protecting fortifications supported by arquebusiers and superior cannons.


The Portuguese never declared war on a unified Japanese state, unlike the Mongols, and if you had the slightest comprehension of Japanese history you would have known this.

That they didn't declare war on an unified Japan is irrelevant. The Portuguese arrival at Japan was an even bigger watershed in Japanese history than the Mongol invasion, and fact is that the Portuguese were able to establish a slave post, export (practically plunder) several commodities and products made in Japan to Portugal and its colonies, spread their culture, revolutionise Japanese warfare and put a Portuguese puppet ruler in power, not to mention that Portuguese presence lasted for a century, a fact often forgotten by Japanese overplayers who say "lol, Japanese were so strong they just needed to ban Europeans from their country". The Mongols didn't do anything close to that, they couldn't even advance beyond Hakata Bay in the first invasion and couldn't even take over Japanese islets in the second invasion, and they were right besides Japan, unlike Portugal which is on the other side of the world and did this without the massive numbers of the Mongols, only hundreds of Portuguese. I think that proving yourself superior to the Mongols in such a qualitative way is an effective refutation to any downplayers saying the Spaniards and Portuguese were going to get annihilated by any Ming or even Japanese force before making any major advancement.
 
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My argument is that the slave trade proves the amount of control the Portuguese held over Japan. Japan had no foreign market of slaves like West Africa had before the arrival of the Portuguese, and yet the Portuguese were easily able to create one and export thousands of valuable Japanese slaves to their colonies in South Asia for about two decades. That requires a large degree of power and influence.

No, it just means they were good customers for slaves. The Japanese would have happily sold them to the Thais , the Chinese or anyone else that was interested. They simply had less need for slaves than Portugal and so paid less.
 
The inly way i can see this happening is if Oda nobunaga and/or Hideyoshi ally with Spain and agree to carve up China. Between the two of them I think they can conquer Korea and at the very least give the Ming one hell of a bloody nose.

Beyond that, well, the Dutch lost a colonial war over Taiwan, Spain's advantages (a greatly superior navy, logistics, perhaps soewhat more advanced gunpowder tactics) simply are not enough to overcome a unified Chinese state.
 
I’ve said it on before and I’ll say it again. Spain takes one coastal city if they are lucky, then proceed to melt before the Ming army. Spain wins most if not all naval engagements but loose eventually due to attrition. China will see this incursion of “sea barbarians” as their wake up call to increase investment into their navy.
 
-Uses the term "Eurocentric"
-After denigrating non-European societies: "two undeveloped empires... who still use stone-age weapons"

Then you take into account that these two empires were on an entirely different unexplored continent by Europeans that was almost 10,000 km. away, and it becomes far more impressive. Then you also take into account they were able to hold land on the other side of Asia, which was even further away from Spain, on empires and polities that weren't "stone-age" for sure, and it becomes almost unbelievable. And despite holding such a vast overseas empire - the first global empire in the world - they were still able to deal devastating defeats to the two strongest European states, the French and the Ottomans, Spain even taking Paris itself during the last stage of the FWOR (and having captured the King of France decades prior during the Battle of Pavia), which cements Spain's position as the first true superpower in history. I love how people also forget that Spain defeated the French during the Italian Wars and cemented its annexation over most of Italy. Or what, are anti-Hispanics here now going to say the French were "stone-age" as well? Seeing how there's much Sinocentrism in AH, I wouldn't be surprised at this point.

I ask again, if today's China resembled India or Nepal (or North Korea if you will) instead of South Korea or Japan, would people overrate it nearly as much?



But I never claimed that it "happened in a vacuum". And this Cambdodian non-empire was still about the size of the Korean Peninsula at that point and it would have been like deposing the provincial governor of Guangdong. The only difference is that China was somewhat more stable, but as the initial Spanish landing ships would literally annihilate any junk that dares coming close to them and would then support an army consisting of half a thousand Europeans and probably double the amount of native Asian allies from Spain's surrounding colonies and outposts, all using far superior arquebuses, it's not that hard to see them first taking Guangdong's main ports and then progressively advancing north to overtake the whole of it, either annexing it or forcing the local governor into an alliance against the Ming central government.





It isn't beside the matter because it shows the inferior military capability and infrastructure of the Ming. The Ming simply weren't capable of projecting power like the Spanish Empire could.





My point was that societies escaping colonisation by Felipe II's Spanish Empire don't serve as proof of any military equality between them. They weren't colonised for factors outside of their military capability, which is that Spain was occupied elsewhere, and I do hold that this is the only major reason why Spain didn't colonise any portion of China, which it would have been capable of, especially by the time of Felipe II when Europe, at least Spain, had overtaken the rest of the world in military capability.





Seeing how the Portuguese arrived in Japan with cannonaded ships and armed men, and started a slave post where thousands of slaves were sold to Portuguese colonies, and armed local warlords, the description of it being a colonial invasion is fair. It wasn't a "peaceful" contact at all; even the first interaction in Tanegashima was with Portuguese arquebusiers. The Mongols made use of Korean and Chinese ships, which had an extensive tradition of trading with Japan and nearby islands by the Song dynasty. You talk as if Yuan dynasty had only Mongol engineers and advisors when most would have been Chinese with a good deal of Korean ones as well. Even despite all that, the Japanese kicked them out in both occasions.

And the Yuan dynasty is a fair comparison since it and the other Mongol successor khaganates of Genghis's empire were the leading power of Asia at the time. That this power was militarily incapable of even holding a single outpost in Japan, while Portugal, being far smaller and at the other extreme of Japan, was capable of doing it, practically plundering Japan of much its labour, resources and products, shows the kind of superiority that Europeans possessed over East Asians by the 16th century. The Portuguese were really with the same intention as the Mongols, as they wanted the Japanese market with all its resources and rich civilisation, the difference being that Portugal was far smaller and Japan was the furthest territory from Portugal in Asia, which is why they didn't reduce it to the same level of their holdings in India and had to give it more autonomy.

Finally, it's not defying belief that the Spaniards can take a significant portion of Ming China, which could then lead to its fall by Jurchen incursions from Manchuria like it actually happened, when they have superior arquebusiers, superior ships and had colonies surrounding the Ming where they can recruit necessary reinforcements.
The Ming werent capable because they werent willing. If they had an Ideology similiar to Europeans, i would think they would be the ones to establish colonies in Europe.
 
Even if you disagree with his view on this calling him a troll for trying to express and argue his opinion is quite impertinent.

This is not the first time Maoistic deliberately leading the discussion off the road with ridiculous agenda and was even kicked for that once before, but ok, I respect your patience.
 
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