HOME | DD

Description
Well it certainly has been a while hasn't it. Hope you found something fun to pass the time until I could actually get round to working on a map again. I'm a bit rusty, but I still think this turned out rather well. This map here is for a map contest on the Alternate History forums, whose topic of the fortnight is "Make a map showing a country that existed in OTL (our timeline) ruling a region that it did not rule in OTL." An example would be the French ruling India instead of the British. This map here primarily takes inspiration from B_Munro's Azoth-7 map, with a bit of additional input from FederalRepublic's Holy Empire of Nipon map, which are both of a much higher quality than mine and you really should have a look at. Hopefully my map is different enough that I won't get shouted at.

The principle is highly implausible, but I liked the concept of it. I'll keep it concise as well, although if you want specifics then do not be afraid to ask. During the Middle Ages a deadly plague spreads across Eastern Europe, devastating areas of Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland. One of the groups which survived remarkably well were the Teutonic Order and the German settlers of the Baltic, referred to by their history henceforth as the Teutons, who overtime expanded into and (partially)colonized European Russia before moving into Siberia (in this world called Tartary or Tartarei in German). By the mid 1700s the recently unified German Empire (unified largely thanks to the ambitions and superior manpower of the Teutons) stretches from Alsace to the Pacific Ocean. Their last major threat to their dominion over Asia was the Chinese Ming Empire. However, China had recently begun to fall into chaos, as the Ming dynasty collapsed earlier than in our timeline and the lack of a clear heir resulted in a slow decline into anarchy. Those in the courts of the contenders who expressed concern that the northern barbarians were becoming surprisingly and dangerously well armed fell on deaf ears as the pretenders started to court German power in the hopes of securing their own position. Thus, Germany was dragged into the developing quagmire of China, playing court against court and would-be-emperor against would-be-emperor. Over the next century various areas of China came under German protection in a process the British East India Company would be impressed by until, in the 1880s, the last independent Chinese realm, the southern Long Empire, fell to German invasion over accusations of sponsoring partisan activities in the German sphere.

With the fall of the Long the whole of China had come under German rule. This rapidly became too hard to manage as a whole and in response the lawmakers in Konigsberg drafted the Declaration of the Ten "Governates" (a word developed in this timeline), which divided German China into ten smaller regions named after their capital city whose governments were separate from the various vassals and protectorates of the German Far East. The Ten Governates would remain until the 20th century, where growing nationalist uprisings eventually toppled German rule in China and later elsewhere in the vast empire. One remarkable feature of the German Empire was its strong multi-ethnic component. There were never as many German settlers in Tartary than Russians in Siberia, so they made far more extensive use of native populations of both Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In governing China Germans stood in service alongside not only Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians and Russians, but Turkemens, Mongols, Manchurians, Koreans, Kazakhs and even Yakuts as well. It is often said that the German Empire was not so much German as it was Germans sitting on top of the vast ethnic groups under their rule and nowhere was this more apparent than in China.

Description
Well it certainly has been a while hasn't it. Hope you found something fun to pass the time until I could actually get round to working on a map again. I'm a bit rusty, but I still think this turned out rather well. This map here is for a map contest on the Alternate History forums, whose topic of the fortnight is "Make a map showing a country that existed in OTL (our timeline) ruling a region that it did not rule in OTL." An example would be the French ruling India instead of the British. This map here primarily takes inspiration from B_Munro's Azoth-7 map, with a bit of additional input from FederalRepublic's Holy Empire of Nipon map, which are both of a much higher quality than mine and you really should have a look at. Hopefully my map is different enough that I won't get shouted at.

The principle is highly implausible, but I liked the concept of it. I'll keep it concise as well, although if you want specifics then do not be afraid to ask. During the Middle Ages a deadly plague spreads across Eastern Europe, devastating areas of Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland. One of the groups which survived remarkably well were the Teutonic Order and the German settlers of the Baltic, referred to by their history henceforth as the Teutons, who overtime expanded into and (partially)colonized European Russia before moving into Siberia (in this world called Tartary or Tartarei in German). By the mid 1700s the recently unified German Empire (unified largely thanks to the ambitions and superior manpower of the Teutons) stretches from Alsace to the Pacific Ocean. Their last major threat to their dominion over Asia was the Chinese Ming Empire. However, China had recently begun to fall into chaos, as the Ming dynasty collapsed earlier than in our timeline and the lack of a clear heir resulted in a slow decline into anarchy. Those in the courts of the contenders who expressed concern that the northern barbarians were becoming surprisingly and dangerously well armed fell on deaf ears as the pretenders started to court German power in the hopes of securing their own position. Thus, Germany was dragged into the developing quagmire of China, playing court against court and would-be-emperor against would-be-emperor. Over the next century various areas of China came under German protection in a process the British East India Company would be impressed by until, in the 1880s, the last independent Chinese realm, the southern Long Empire, fell to German invasion over accusations of sponsoring partisan activities in the German sphere.

With the fall of the Long the whole of China had come under German rule. This rapidly became too hard to manage as a whole and in response the lawmakers in Konigsberg drafted the Declaration of the Ten "Governates" (a word developed in this timeline), which divided German China into ten smaller regions named after their capital city whose governments were separate from the various vassals and protectorates of the German Far East. The Ten Governates would remain until the 20th century, where growing nationalist uprisings eventually toppled German rule in China and later elsewhere in the vast empire. One remarkable feature of the German Empire was its strong multi-ethnic component. There were never as many German settlers in Tartary than Russians in Siberia, so they made far more extensive use of native populations of both Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In governing China Germans stood in service alongside not only Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians and Russians, but Turkemens, Mongols, Manchurians, Koreans, Kazakhs and even Yakuts as well. It is often said that the German Empire was not so much German as it was Germans sitting on top of the vast ethnic groups under their rule and nowhere was this more apparent than in China.