How do I prevent the creation of a huge empire in the northwest without adding mountains?

How do I prevent the creation of a huge empire in the northwest without adding mountains?

Yes, I'm using an upside down east asia.

Something went wrong.

Mineral deficiencies in the soil mean it's impossible to have the sort of widespread agriculture needed to support large populations?

Climate?
Resources?
Feudal fragmentation?
Uncooperative locals?
Different culture developing than Chinese?
Fuck man, there are so many reasons it almost feels like a bait

That's a good answer. That region of China is great for growing rice. Rice is more calorie dense than wheat (the main crop of medieval Europe) meaning the rice farms can sistain a larger population. More food means more people, more people means wider societal spread and more power for those in charge. Giving that region poor soil, or making it difficult to irrigate farmland, or having a particularly destructive species of insect/rodent, or anything else that makes the farming of a large surplus hard would limit power in the region.

You could also add other hard to navigate terrain, like thick jungle/woodland, or fast moving rivers, non-navigable rivers. Depends on your tech level I suppose, but it's not just mountains that act as barriers.

Depending on what you're going for, you could even go so far as to have some kind of magical objects that everyone wants, leading to the emergence of numerous warlords who control small parts of the region that are almost constantly at war with each other, the magical items passing hands every few years or so through battle. The constant instability prevents the region from being unified and the focus of fighting each other prevents these warlords from aggressing against foreign neighbours.

Oceans, tundra and desert also make good natural barriers.

An important tool for understanding the history of China is the difference in agriculture across the country. In the north, the historical heartland of the nation, the main crop had always been wheat. In the south, which they slowly conquered and assimilated over the millennia, the main crop was rice.

Wheat farming communities tend to be more spread out, with fields of low-diversity crops managed by individual households. This tends to result in a more individualistic or family-centered culture (e.g. Europe). Rice farming communities tend to be more dense, with high diversity paddies (rice in the paddies, carp in the ditches and ponds, fruit trees lining the dykes) managed communally by a village. This tends to result in a more community-centered culture (e.g. Japan). These are pretty broad generalizations, but they're useful.

The difference with China is that the flat wheat-growing northern plain lent itself well to a centralized state, with few natural obstacles and convenient water transport, while the rugged rice-growing southern highlands isolated communities from one-another and resisted large-scale governance.

Simple: Remove the Yangtze and the Yellow River. Without these rivers, there's no Chinese Empire. Erasing Tibet from the map also works since it is the source of many of its rivers.

You could be specific about your ideas like instead of being a faggot.

>That tibet

How the hell did the Chinese conquer that?

It helps hardly anyone lives there. So there isn’t that much you need to conquer.

Or you could think on your own, you useless piece of shit, rather than asking rhetorical questions.

You can look at Europe for analogues (though I'm not sure whether you're keeping climate constant or what, I don't know what flipping Asia entails for you).

The North China Plain can be seen as roughly equivalent to the North European Plain, which has given us northern France, the Low Countries, Denmark, northern Germany and Poland, Belarus and the Baltics. Historically speaking, there have been times when there were many more or less states there. Either way, just because the terrain is relatively flat and well-watered does not mean it will always host an empire.

You could also make the highlands in the south of China roughly equivalent to central Europe and the Balkans, since the terrain is relatively similar. It's the same deal as with the northern plain - there could be many states, or there could be few. Even if there are powerful empires surrounding them, though, it would not be odd for there to be smaller hold-out states and "ungovernable" territory. In fact, much of Yunnan province, northern Indochina, and northeast India were considered exactly that until the late 1800s.

But really there's no need to look beyond China itself. China's imperial history has always been punctuated by periods of "civil war," which were most always not that but rather the existence of multiple independent states, occasionally at war with each other. From the Chinese perspective, there's always supposed to be a "China," so any period of disunity is simply a civil war as the empire recollects itself, but in reality there have been multiple periods where China was just as politically fractured as Europe.

So if you don't want to have a huge empire there, you really don't need to change anything honestly. Even more so if you're not including the North China Plain as part of the "northwest" that you're concerned about, since that's not where the Chinese empire came from to begin with.

>pic sort of related but mostly a bad exercise in "most any state could be fit most anywhere"

There would even be a desert for Deus vult.

I'm not the OP you retard, however he was asking a perfectly legitimate question that leaves room for some debate like how big an effect soil quality, existence of major river valleys, and culture have on the formation of large empires.

Gobi desert

Tweak the climate a bit and have the northwest plain turn turn into an impassable rainforest. Basically turn the Yangtze into the Amazon - have the main civilizations spring up around the Yellow Sea (Basically Beijing vs Shenyang vs Korea vs Shanghai) which gives some flexibility. Have Taiwan as a reclusive naval power, and play up Hainan a little, maybe as a trading post along a coastal trade route to the North.

Mongols pretty much stay the same, as does Tibet.

You could also throw in a bunch of horse nomads. Those guys can make expansion difficult.

Is it supposed to be that foul color, or is that rampant unregulated industry at work?

>How do I prevent the creation of a huge empire in the northwest without adding mountains?
Feuding Warlords

There just isn't an empire.

Your PCs are not scientists and they will not be able to know all of the facts about the history of your world. It's also ok for there to be mysteries. Strange things can happen in real life, and every time something does, god doesn't come down from the heavens and explain why to a group of adventurers.

>wheat (the main crop of medieval Europe)
THIS TRIGGERS MY AUTISM

The middle stream of the Yellow River passes through the Loess Plateau, where substantial erosion takes place. The large amount of mud and sand discharged into the river makes the Yellow River the most sediment-laden river in the world.