Qin

Oh for ducks sake. This a Veeky Forumstory board, history is about written events that may or not may be true. But if there's something clear about fucking history, is that "if" should never be used.
Because hustory is past (what happened), present (why and what it's happening) and future(what could/will/would happen). Not fucking if or maybe or whatever. Fuck you

Choina

Qin did nothing wrong

Qin victory was part of a massive battle royale between warring states. A Qin failure most likely means a Chu victory, and a China united by them instead.

But wasnt Chu also pretty weakend by their own system?

>volleyfires
And how did the ancient Chinese do that without guns?

>what are crossbows

Probably happen by an other dynasty. Qin not as successful

Hustory you say

They invented crossbows. Mass conscription. Mass production of crossbows.

This

Sure, but that made them light years ahead of anyone else in the region. Also the Qin dynasty were crazy and only lasted a few decades, the Chu on the other hand, being less adroit, but also less insane, might have held on longer.

So they had huge masses of soldiers running around armed entirely with hundreds of thousands of crossbows blasting away at each other with volleys like Napoleonic armies? Crossbows aren't quite as good as guns at defeating armor from range or playing artillery, could that really work? How did their crossbows compare to the Roman ballistae or the medieval European handheld crossbows? And why does Dynasty Warriors only have spearmen fodder?

More like Russia. Large country that controls access to the interior and limitless expansion, then uses the resources from that expansion to march to the sea. Both were seen as barbaric states until the last century or so of their history.

See, Napoleon was emperor of the wrong country, in direct proximity with the most advanced states, where one faces a coalition from the get-go.

The chinese crossbow was bulky and rated firepower in terms of shield penetration. They were part of Qin combined arms tactics. The crossbows would be in front of the line, to outrange enemy skirmishers and draw them in, which would be enveloped by cavalry. They would kite the enemy infantry and withdraw behind the main line, which was composed of pikemen. The Chinese had pikes of 30-40 feet, with one major innovation compared to the contemporary macedonian pike, which was the sharp dagger attached to the end. This allowed them to pull back and forth and cut enemies on the side, whereas a traditional Mak phalanx has to rely on depth of formation since one cannot harm an enemy who gets past the initial spear shaft. Meanwhile crossbows are firing through the gaps. The soldiers were also armed with a decent, medium sword, which they used in the latter stages of the battle when they pursued and executed beaten enemies. The soldiers were paid by the number of heads they caught (much like scalp bounty), which encouraged a capitalistic innovation in killing methods, the traditional warfare states that you let the enemy escape, but the qin soldiers had incentive to trap and kill as many as possible, which either intentionally or accidentally made them formidable in the attrition warfare of the later warring states.

Hustory and himanities, faggot

Qin did fail in some respects,after the death of Qin Shihuang regional sentiments were strong enough to topple the Qin regime and old feudal states were re-established.

The subsequent Han dynasty avoided overextending and kept Qin centralization in the west while their cadet branches were enfeoffed in the eastern coastal regions.

youtube.com/watch?v=L_7BRWUBf8M
youtube.com/watch?v=jvTul5_js_A
Qin Music time!

Somewhat like India and with much more distinct cultures, especially south of the Yangtze River.

This. The Warring States period was an existential fight to the death over who would be the ruler of "All Under Heaven". The more bloodshed occurred, the more people wanted peace. The more people wanted peace, the more they wanted unity. The more people wanted unity, the more they wanted to embolden the military. The more the military was emboldened, the more blood was shed. In the later years, Qin won because it was a quasi-totalitarian, ultra-militaristic state blessed with excellent rulers and ministers and solely dedicated to subjugate China by the force of arms.

Even a Chu victory would be rather unstable. It had a notorious reputation for chronically violent successions of the throne. China under a Chu legacy would be more aristocratic though. They were not as autistic as the Qin about strengthening the central government.

This. I have even heard Qin soldiers would massacre entire villages and towns while passing through in order to collect more heads.

Russia is not very good analogy. The interior of Chinese civilization lies east of Qin, not to the west. Expansion, apart from fighting other Chinese states in the east, mostly could only go south into the Sichuan Basin. The west of Qin was full of quarrelsome hillniggers (Qiang) and the north was desert and steppe. The Qin also developed its domestic infrastructure and industry far better than Russia ever did. Russia's land is very rich in potential but poor in utilization. Qin's land was quite poor but the government utilized it extremely well. It turned a peripheral borderland into a military juggernaut which could subjugate the other states by itself whereas Russia is struggling to fend off NATO incursions into its geopolitical backyard.

After a relatively short time, the cadet branches were suppressed after they chimped out over privileges. After that, they gradually lost power to the Han court.

Would be interesting if China would revert to feudal polities if Xiang Yu or Liu Pi were the victors.

It is worth mentioning that despite the length of the Han dynasty the Sinitic speakers of Chu and Wu had strong regional identities and weren't considered proper Chinese which was limited to the geopolitical Central Plains.

It would look the same. There is imo no way for the history of China to ever play out differently-- it will always unite, divide, re-unite and on into infinity due to it's underlying factors that precede its civilizations. It would have different names and languages, and that's about all.

Stuff like this is literally impossible.

China is a contained geographical entity, look at all the dynasties and see their roughly equivalent borders of influence. Any state that rules over China will expand until reaching those limits simply because it cannot expand past them. And on the interior of China, it is basically defined by the three river basins (Yellow, Pearl Delta, Yangtze). Rule over those waterways is rule over China. Any civilizations on the Yellow/Yang are basically destined to knife fight until one is victorious, and the Pearl isn't large enough to resist northern invasion very long. China will always unite under one power.

I don't think it is impossible. It is very hard to do though. The key is weakening Chinese civilization in the central plains after the Han dynasty. Make the barbarian intrusions in the north much more successful through mass ethnic and cultural genocide. Fortify these new non-Han kingdoms in as many choke points as possible (Hanzhong, Hangu Pass, etc). Strengthen countries like the Tibetan Empire, Vietnam, and the Korea kingdom(s). This would mean China losing control over some vital outer territories needed to secure the river valleys. At the least, it would take a very long time for reunification to occur in this scenario.

I must emphasize, Chinese civilizational tendency towards unification was quite strong by the Han era. So I must emphasize permanent division will be very, very difficult without also thoroughly discrediting Chinese philosophies.

The river valleys are simply so overwhelming rich compared to the surroundings that that any invading barbarian force historically (and there sure were a lot) settled down and assimilated into the inhabitants. I'm not even sure you can have more successful barbarians than the Southern-Northern dynastic split after the fall of the Jin. A hundred year of barbarian rule over the Yellow River, it's permanent destruction as the heartland of China, millions dead.

Pic related, population estimates as of the Han dynasty.

So why did China not unify under a Yangtze centered polity but a Yellow river polity instead.

Excellent ruler, superior military tradition, a bit of luck, and the Yandgzete polities had a lot of catching up to do and no shortage of devastation from the wars, either.

And his polity, post-unification, was much more focused on the economic basis of the Yangtze delta than the Han was before him. The Tang and Ming relied heavily on it as an economic basis comparable the north, where it never was before the destruction of the north. His construction of canals to link to the south really are proof of just how important it had become.

That is why I put the POD after the Han dynasty. Extending and intensifying the chaos in the central plains will give states in the periphery a greater amount of opportunity to expand territory at China's expense. Accompanying it with a massive epidemic severe as the Justinian Plague in the Roman Empire and would possibly deplete Chinese numbers to the point barbarians would become a majority in many places in northern China. It would also be helpful towards disunity in the north to prevent Ran Min's massive and rather successful genocides against non-Han. Even if they may have received a lot of Chinese influence, the barbarian states now can at this point plausibly maintain their identity instead of being absorbed by the Han as in OTL. Remember, the relative demographic advantage the Chinese had during the Han largely disintegrated due to decades upon decades of famine and civil war before the Uprising.
Moreover, Vietnam seizing parts of Guangdong and Guangxi, Tibet seizing the Tarim basin and and Koreans seizing Manchuria up to Liaoning would put the now barbarian-dominated states in the central plains and any remaining Chinese states in the south in a more geopolitically precarious state.
Ultimately, the more time passes, the more non-Han kingdoms (now surrounding the Chinese rumps in the south in three directions) economically and culturally develop themselves, and the more they can resist attempts by Chinese remnants at unification of the former empire.

China could easily be balkanized under modern conditions if the warlord period had just lasted a little longer, long enough for the international community's "no border changes by military force, ever, or we fuck with you" attitude to kick in.

The Modern era enforcing a balkanization on China is not really related to the possibility of a historic balkanization or China never forming in the first place as an entity.

And no, I also don't think the international community realistically could or would have ever prevented China from re-unifying in the Modern era.

How did the coalition of the 5 states fuck up so bad

Because the Qin had overpowered as hell ministers that screwed up any vertical alliances. It didn't help that it was extremely hard to attack the Qin homeland from the east.

>So why did China not unify under a Yangtze centered polity but a Yellow river polity instead.
The middle/lower Yangtze was peripheral territory and outside the Chinese heartland.

>Moreover, Vietnam seizing parts of Guangdong and Guangxi, Tibet seizing the Tarim basin and and Koreans seizing Manchuria up to Liaoning
None of these 3 polities existed in that time period. There wasn't even a Korean/Vietnamese identity prior to Chinese domination anyways.

All you need to do is delay a Sui-Tang esque unification so Chu and Wu vernaculars(among many others) would develop national identities.

See pic.

The "King Qin"(秦王) of "秦王破陣樂" indicates Emperor Tang Taizong, he was king(or prince) of Qin(秦王) before he took the dragon throne. Not Qin Shi Huang.

>So why did China not unify under a Yangtze centered polity but a Yellow river polity instead.
They did in Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang's base was in Nanjing which was the capital of Ming once.

That is why I talked about the POD being an extension of the Age of Fragmentation (which would entail lasting at least several more centuries after the OTL unification under Sui) due to an even more disastrous chain of events than OTL.
Since it is after the decline of the Han, the commanderies in Lelang, Rinan, etc that controlled territory in Korea and Vietnam can be assumed to be already defunct. So it would mean that the age of Chinese domination has come and passed with what it would mean culturally for people living in those areas.
By the later part of the first millennium in this scenario, all three aforementioned ethnicities including Tibetans would have created states in some way or another (unified or not). They all would have a much better environment than OTL to expand at the expense of vastly more politically, ideologically, and culturally fragmented states in geographical China unable to muster as much resources to suppress their consolidation. These expanded states of "Koreans", "Vietnamese", and "Tibetans" would exert pressure to make unification of China even more difficult for any ambitious Han or non-Han state scattered around the river valleys.
Koreans were not unified until Silla and Tang ganged up on Goguryeo but the ethnicity did exist by the later half of the first millennium. I used the term "Koreans" to try to imply Korean/Koreanic kingdom(s), not necessarily a unified Korean state.

Thanks for the correction. So Taizong was enfeoffed in the Guanzhong area when he was crown prince?

> So it would mean that the age of Chinese domination has come and passed with what it would mean culturally for people living in those areas.
I'm not talking about the Han,both the Korean and Vietnamese dynastic histories traced their ancestry to Nanyue and Gojoseon who were both foreign polities ruled by Sinitic speaking elites.

>By the later part of the first millennium in this scenario, all three aforementioned ethnicities including Tibetans would have created states in some way or another (unified or not).
What nascent polity of the Tibetan plateau or northern Vietnam(who had a Sinitic elite) during the Northern/Southern dynasties had the military capacity to annex Gansu or Guangdong/Guangxi?

Goguryeo,which may not even be Koreanic is the only one who could have plausibly conquered more.

>Koreans were not unified until Silla and Tang ganged up on Goguryeo but the ethnicity did exist by the later half of the first millennium.
First off,we don't even know which of the Three Kingdoms spoke Koreanic.

You have Sam Han derived polities such as Gaya and Silla in the south,Buyeo related polities such as Baekje and Goguryeo and predating all of this Yemaek(Hui-Mo) and Gojoseon from Liaoning.

To put it this way,I find it far more likely that without a strong centralized government Southern Sinitic vernaculars would form their own identities(see Romance languages in Europe) while non-Sinitic barbarians such as the Li,Liao and Man people would form their own kingdoms rather than being conquered by the other Sinitics or the Vietnamese.

someone else would have did.

see, most people sees Qin and Han as SEPARATED time.
but in reality, Liu Bang was just 3-4 years younger than Yin Zheng (Xiang Yu decades younger than both).

Liu Bang not only did lived through the Qin era ( heck, he's a street-level bureaucrat of Qin, but also bear in mind Qin lasts only 15 years ), but he might also have seen the final days of all seven Kingdoms.
And went on kick starting the true first unified cHANa

The fact that Qin Shi Huang extinguished all six kingdoms all WITHIN HIS LIFESPAN never failed to amazed me.

We're talking about very entrenched, deep-rooted regimes who has existed for the past 2 to 3 Centuries. Yes, sometimes some of them will go down in a random Blitzkrieg, but they'll always bump up right away.

And Qin under Yin Zheng, sweep off all of them right under 15 years, one by one, all of them conquered none other than QIN.

Also it was father of Yin Zheng, who killed off last remnant of ZHOU court, teared down the last facade of pseudo-authority, kick starting the final stage of battle royale.

Well to be fair didnt ying zheng´s grandfather and
general Bai Qi weaken the other states massively. Which gave Ying zheng the opportunity to unfiy China.

>There is imo no way for the history of China to ever play out differently-- it will always unite
Qin is the sole reason the concept of united China even exists.
Without it the internal drive for unification would have been much weaker.
There probably would have been a few cases of monolithic dynasties controlling most of the area like it happened in the rest of the world but far less of a "single china" thought process.

If Qin didn't conquer China, some other state would.

Why do you think Qin in particular is any different from another state in unifying China? They didn't perform some great or amazing feat by conquering China, because some polity was eventually going to do just that. Once someone conquers and unites the Yellow River civilization, they easily extends its influence over the Yangtze and Peral, and thus-- forms China. And this will regularly happen in the region.

I honestly doubt that.The other states where either to weak or didnt have rulers that were ambitious enough to conquer the other states. Not to mention Qin had a great advantage being out in the west ''Geopolitical'' wise.

Qin´s king made it his goal to unite china while all other kings just wanted to keep status quo going. Its seriously incredible and it was a revolutionary at the time. Other kings were shocked and immediately created coalition against qin. And qin still fucked them over. I know its not reliable source but read manga called kingdom. Easily one of the best mangas in the world right now

I guess whether Goguryeo was Koreanic or not is irrelevant in my scenario. Any sinitic elite remaining after the collapse of the Han dynasty will not be influential enough to motivate the area of the Korean peninsula to accept Chinese identity. It/they can still serve to dissuade unity in the river valleys.
I don't know too much about Vietnamese history. But, if it is at all possible to start an earlier version of the OTL rebellion which overthrew the First Chinese Domination, this new Vietnamese state might seek to expand north. Going against a united southern China is impossible but if the south was fragmented like the north, "Vietnam" does have a chance going against one or two of these statelets. Also, I did not mention total conquest of provinces, more like slicing off small pieces of Chinese territory.
Tibetan states did have enough power to contest with Tang China (admittedly in a very weakened state) to the point of briefly conquering Chang'an. So I am not ready to dismiss them yet in a world of greater fragmentation.
The overall idea of mines is of permanently stunting the unification of the center (the river valleys) while giving room for formerly peripheral peoples to expand by:
1) Permanently fragmenting northern China politically, ethnically, and culturally
2) Politically fragmenting southern China
3) Discrediting Chinese philosophies that can be used to justify unification. Limiting the expansion of Dharmic and Abrahamic religions
4) Using the lack of unity as breathing room for outside states to expand at China's geopolitical expense
How this would be done has been covered to some degree beforehand. But as I have said, it is very, very difficult to ensure all of these criteria being fulfilled. But if they are, geographical China would probably not unify.
But you have a good point, independence of the southern vernaculars is very possible under less centralization imposed by the central plains.

You shouldn't try to depend on popular culture sources for analyzing history for the most part. It was not only Ying Zheng or his predecessors who wanted unification. I recommend reading “A History of Chinese Political Thought” by Kung-Chuan Hsiao.
With the disintegration of Zhou political system, chaos increased as the various kings were free to engage in countless amounts of treachery and intrigue, launching escalating wars of conquest that saw the increasing rise of centralized autocracy. To bring harmony and peace to the war-ravaged land, many different schools of philosophies arose to advocate their visions of how society should be run, collectively called the Hundred Schools of Thought (諸子百家). In the paradigm of the time, three philosophical alignments were possible: attempting to reconstitute the old Zhou system in some form, accepting the new trend of centralization and justifying it, and rejecting all systems altogether in favor of a pursuit of individualistic realization of freedom and sufficiency.
Everyone in that time was getting increasingly fed up with this never-ending, intensive warfare and thus people devised these kinds of philosophies for achieving supreme peace using different understandings of the world. When Qin initially conquered the other kingdoms, there were not many rebellions because the people were too weary to resist. Had not the Qin gone full autist and exhausted China even further with even more conquests, monuments, and public works after unification, most people would probably be content to be imperial subjects like in the Han Dynasty.

>Any sinitic elite remaining after the collapse of the Han dynasty will not be influential enough to motivate the area of the Korean peninsula to accept Chinese identity. It/they can still serve to dissuade unity in the river valleys.
There's no guarantee the Korean peninsula would even unify without external stimulus. There were at least four separate language families that co existed in Southern Manchuria/Korean pensinula.

>First Chinese Domination, this new Vietnamese state might seek to expand north
The Lac elites of Northern Vietnam were vassals of the fallen Nanyue,which had a mixed Sinitic-Tai Kadai speaking elite not Austroasiatic. If the Trung sisters established Nanyue then the polity wouldn't be viewed as Vietnamese.

>Tibetan states did have enough power to contest with Tang China (admittedly in a very weakened state) to the point of briefly conquering Chang'an. So I am not ready to dismiss them yet in a world of greater fragmentation.
Not in the timeframe of the Northern/Southern dynasties. Perhaps if the Northern Wei never unified the north the Di and Qiang identities would last far longer.

>1) Permanently fragmenting northern China politically, ethnically, and culturally
Well,the northern Chinese never even had a unified identity(Han) until it was imposed by nomadic rulers. Historically,regional identities and vernaculars were far more important.

What would have to happen is the nomads would have to reject the Chinese elite cultural identity(Hua) and somehow assimilate the northern Sinitics despite their numerical superiority.

The problem with Korea/Vietnam is that they did not have a separate civilizational identity and would likely claim to be the new "Han" similar to how polities in Europe claim Rome. You have better luck theorizing if the Qin never unified China,if Xiang Yu won the Chu-Han contention or if Sinitic speakers never migrated to the south or the northeast.

Every king wanted his dynasty to rule over China eventually. It's just that the Qin was so competent in warfare, diplomacy, and administration in the later part of the Warring States it may seem Qin was the only one with initiative.
Also, this is not only because of the rulers. Qin is famous for the abundance of genius-tier ministers it had.

>Easily one of the best mangas in the world right now
Calm down dude it's shonen

>Every king wanted his dynasty to rule over China eventually
Doubt
That's like saying every European monarch was aspiring to unify Europe

>There's no guarantee the Korean peninsula would even unify without external stimulus
True but a lack of unified China flanking any hegemon on the peninsula would make unification of the region easier.
>somehow assimilate the northern Sinitics despite their numerical superiority.
That's why explored the possibility of a major pandemic like the Justinian Plague in the West. Of course, it would have to happen before the barbarian incursions to not wipe out the nomads as well.
Anyways, I agree it's easier to encourage permanent disunity by preventing Qin unification or Sinitic migrations than trying to formulate mass die-offs or buff non-Chinese states. I still think my ideas do have potency though.

No it's not. Post-Roman Europeans lauded the Roman Empire quite a bit but they were fundamentally far more interested in religious unity than political unity. On the other hand Chinese were foremost concerned with political unity due to an ingrained reverence of hegemonic dynasties at least since the Shang and the king/ruler as the mediator between "Heaven" and the world of man since the Zhou. The Warring States was an existential crisis in Chinese civilization. Whether if under a loose feudal system like the preceding Zhou or the Legalist model of a centralized state, people wanted order to be reestablished under a Son of Heaven.

Qin Shihuangdi wasn't the first man who ever it ever occurred to to unify china and he certainly wouldn't have been the last. In all likeliness it would have been unified by someone else but it's a very hypothetical situation so its impossible to say

It'd been 500 years or so since the fall of western Zhou when Qin started it's conquest in earnest

Along with the decline of Zhou central authority was the increase of power of the former vassals. The advent of centralized bureaucracy, use of iron, and mass infantry warfare meant the rise of expansionist wars of conquest. The increasing use of the prestigious title of "king" instead of vassal titles for the rulers of the various states indicated a rise of ambition towards hegemony, not the less. The Qin simply expedited the selection of who would be supreme ruler over China.

The majority were. The Byzantines had ambitious of Roman restoration, the HRE, Habsburgs, Charlemagne and immediate successors all had ambitions of a broadly united Europe and Roman Empire restoration. Unlike in China, a credible outside threat had seized many territories constituent of Rome and thus narrowed the focus of later ambitions. Every dynasty and duke broadly can be seen as wanting to consolidate more power all the way up to the Emperors at the top who aspired to unify large swathes of Europe.

> Unlike in China, a credible outside threat had seized many territories constituent of Rome
What do you call the barbarians who took over the North of China after the fall of Sima Jin (which coincidentally happened around the same time as the fall of the WRE)

It was the Confucian Hans that made more of an impact on the culture, so they probably would have just took over earlier.

That means nothing.

Absolutely this. East Asia is too geographically disadvantaged to have long lasted coexistence of nations. And with unification the culture withered as well.