MoF 06: Southern Song Industialises

This map challenge was suggested by Aranfan:



The Rules: No set location or era for the map, you just have to depict the results of Industrialisation by the Southern Song Dynasty.

Bonus links: Technology of the Song Dynasty
History of the Song Dynasty

The contest ends on the 25th of October 10 am GMT.

All map discussion is to take place in the discussion thread. This is for maps only.

China in 1250 A.D. The Mongol Empire has recently conquered the Jurchen dynasty of northern China, leading the Southern Song to undertake a campaign of technological development, especially in military hardware. Gunpowder bombs and "fire lances" (primitive blunderbusses), wide-scale use of wind and water power via windmills and water wheels, and large engineering projects, such as the system of highways, canals and border forts depicted on the map, have all been developed to hold back the Mongol horde. For now the Song Dynasty holds back the might of the world's largest empire through its miraculous technology, and word of its great inventions have begun to trickle even to distant Europe.

[All Chinese is courtesy of Google Translator and might not be accurate. The labels are supposed to read "Korea", "Mongol Empire", "Middle Kingdom" (in Song China), "Song Dynasty" (right of Song China), "Taiwan" and "Lin'an" (the capital city).]

A joint effort by Iori and I. A rare pinyin translation of a chinese textbook.

When the Alterna-Time Inc. explorers entered this world, it did not seem to differ significantly from the bulk. Europe was a mess of feudal states, the Byzantine Empire's power was waning, the Reconquista was proceeding.
...And then they went to the East.

Here's my attempt, using a diffent point of view. I've assumed a rather Merchentile Song here.

Ok, once again into the breach with the standard map...

The Sung/Song, through cut-and-try methodology and good record-keeping manage to develop steam-powered machinery and organized mass production in time to stave off the Mongol invasion (still takes decades and leaves them very mongol-phobic), but don't really develop an organized scientific method and scientific world-view for some centuries after (the sheer variety of intellectual speculation in the Four Oceans era sometimes threatens to drownd science in a sea of brilliant but technologically useless philosophies.

As of 1702, theoretical science has managed to get roughly where it was OTL in the 1930s. Technology is an odd mix, with some aspects of mechanical engineering being ahead of OTL 1930s after centuries of practice (the Chinese states are good at deep oil boring and mining, even at depths where the workers must wear a form of spacesuit due to the heat), every river bigger than a trickle is dammed, solar furnaces are ominpresent and several states have put rockets in orbit. After half a millenium of industrial development and the burning of coal and more lately oil, the piper has arrived to be paid: coal and oil are growing harder to extract, the climate has become unstable and drought-prone (OTLs Sahel and central Asia have been devastated) and an overpopulated homeland has broken into three regimes. Radical rebellion has broken out in many lands, and the neolegalists of the new Empire have plans to depopulate SE Asia to make room for Chinese settlers...

The Great Republic (not that it is called a republic: just the closest OTL equivalent to its political system) of Amo Ji Lia is less hard hit than other lands, a strong government, a varied climate, a relatively low population density and the world's most advanced science having combined to allow it to ride out the worst of it. The government struggles to combat the chaos that threatens to engulf All Under Heaven, and will ally with Yin He and Nan Si Jou and Nippon and the Northern Domain, and even the barbarian nations of Europe [1] in the forthcoming struggle against war, famine, tyranny, drought, resource depletion and religious fanaticism.

And in the Academy of 10 Thousand Wisdoms (near OTL San Francisco) Ho Wen has just realized what those Uranium atoms are doing...

Bruce

[1] Europe had its own Chinese-stimulated industrial revolution in the 1500s, although they're currently lagging in modern science.

My entry for this round:

The invention of the steam engine was not enough to save the Southern Song from destruction by the Mongols.
As they had done with many other technologies the Mongols adapted the steam engine themselves, thus spreading the Mongol domain even further.

The map shows trade in the Mongol world between the 13th and 17th Centuries.

So here's my take on the Southern Song challenge, actually finished it last week bar some translations (thanks Hendryk!). I need to head off this weekend before the deadline so there is still some unfinished bits – the tablet was going to have some cool buttons and I was going to name all the little Malay states (sorry Ridwan!).


Anyway onto the thinking behind the map – this is future era again so I can use those satellite base maps I enjoy so much. The PoD is the Jin being too cowardly to move their capital leading to no Mongol invasion of China (instead they get up to stuff in the west as the map shows). Hence the Song survive and prosper. However a great deal of what push Europe ahead in the OTL technological revolution was the competition between established and sovereign states, and to reproduce that I've got the Song evolving the Dazhu (Great Pearls) system. In essence an Emperor got tired of mercantile squabbles and regulating sea trade whilst he was trying to defend the northern border and issued a series of decrees that bound any individual merchant group to one of several specific coastal cities, gave those cities reduced taxes in exchange for defending the coast, and told them to do whatever they wanted in the wider world provided they shut the hell up within China. He thus produced a bunch of aggressive profit seeking city-states embedded in the coast of China, each protected from dominance by the others not by actual geography as in Europe, but the political geography of the emperors will. In a century or so the Dazhu had wrapped up trade in the Pacific and Indian oceans nicely and were rapidly developing labour efficiency to compensate for their limited resources and kicked off a whole technological revolution.


However in the West the Mongols had busily conquered Germany and established a great steppe empire (this actually becomes something of a German-wank as the Mongols spread a 'Tartar-rural, German/Jewish urban areas, 'Mongol' aristocrats' social model all over Hungry and Southern Russia to the detriment of the Slavic populations.


Stuff happens, the Chinese advance (but find the Europeans and Indians much keener on emulating them than the OTL Chinese were of Europe). The Chinese don't colonise on the European model (indeed the court actively forbids large scale of peasants) except in Malaya and the Philippines where a slow violent displacement occurs (the Dazhu on occasion get up to stuff every bit as bad as a the European East Asia companies in SEA, though are much more pleasant to India, Africa and the New World compared with the OTL).


As to the imagine, this is obviously some fancy pants computer tablet that runs on microfluidic chemical processing (the electronic logic gate being missed in this TL). The text is crazy because in this timeline English has had to adapt to the dominant Chinese, Mongolian and Arabic typological paradigms, hence is now read down first and left from right, and has been embellished and modified to look more Mongolian and Arabic. Note several of the letters have changed and some new ones have turned up (namely i is now – (capital =), y is (, 'th' has its own letter / (capital looks like //), as does 'ch' the letters of which look like a squashed ir and |{). I can share the font if people want it.


Glossery:
Zineike - "honorable guests of the inner forbidden court", higher ranking tributary states (has little to do with their political power)
Ziwaike - "honorable guests of the outer forbidden court”, lower ranking tributary states
Dazhu – mercantile cities with special privileges and independence in China
Yaozhu – their daughter cities around the globe


The rest you'll have to guess


Legend Reads:


“Map produced with imagery from Changezhou Earth observatory made available from the Zhongsource on CH 1904.


The worldsystem stands on the cusp of transformation as the long standing duality between the Servants of Heaven and the Great Qingzhen States begins to shift. The rapid population growth of the New World states, their advances in <optics>, and their resource and information based economies promises to tip the balance of power towards the Servants of Heaven and away from the Great Qingzhen they so detest. A similar, if less pronounced, shift of the same character is occurring in Africa as many of the numerous nations there industrialise on cheap labour. Though this all appears fortuitous for the Servants of Heaven, there is growing dissatisfaction with their stewardship of the worldsystem and mutterings occur even in the highest ranks of the Zineike over the mismanagement of the worldsystem fluidity crisis, and #e Ten Courts indifference to the rare minerals shortages or heavy metals contamination of the seas as long as Huangzhou remains gleaming.”

This round is now closed. The voting thread is here, the general discussion thread is here.

Good after-noon!

HERE IS GUDERIAN'S BEARD'S ENTRY, MADE VISIBLE:


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