This time, it’s going up after a
one-day delay. If this situation continues, I will post here immediately, without
delay.
We’re
lucky that we didn’t win the war on China.
No,
not that one. That one, the on-again,
off-again war between 1592 and 1598.
Hideyoshi
Toyotomi subjugated the last of the warlord holdouts—actually, he forced him to
commit hara-kiri—in 1590, bringing
the century-long Age of Civil Wars to an end. But Hideyoshi had his eyes on
bigger things. He decided that he would next conquer China, which at the time
was under the rule of the Ming dynasty. He went on to wage two major if
inconclusive campaigns, almost exclusively on the Korean Peninsula, before his
death in 1598 brought an end to Japan’s war on China.
A
half century later, the Manchurians had better luck—or so it seemed at the
time. In 1644, they kicked the Ming dynasty out of Beijing and officially
established the Qing dynasty. Qing endured until 1912, when China itself virtually
fell apart in the face of the forces of the modern era and took the dynasty
with it. Manchurians did get a rump
state, courtesy of Japanese imperialists, in 1931, but that lasted all of 15
years until it was subsumed into China when Japan surrendered to the Allied
Forces. They are stateless, and stateless they will be. They will forever
remain a minority in the Han Empire known to us as the People’s Republic of
China.
The
Manchurians were not the first to conquer China. The Mongols had done it much
earlier, formally establishing the Yuan dynasty in 1271. They took a little
more time to completely do away with its predecessor the Sung dynasty, which
had fled south, but the task was finished in 1279. The Yuan dynasty was
relatively short-lived, and the all-Han, Ming dynasty set up shop in 1368. The
Mongols did get some of their sovereignty back in the early 20th Century as the
Qing dynasty, indeed China itself, was falling apart, but most of them were
left behind in China—mainly in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where they
are now outnumbered 5-to-1 by the Han.
So
the deal appears to be: conquer China, and you get your own dynasty in the
Middle Kingdom, the greatest state on the planet, for a couple of centuries,
sometimes more, sometimes less. But when your time is up, they get to keep you,
and they move in. And that is why I say that we got lucky when Hideyoshi
Toyotomi failed to defeat the Ming dynasty.
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