Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  Jangir’s campaign is recorded in many more detailed works than this. Suffice to say that after calling up more armies from all three Jüz and the other nomad groups he had forced into submission, he attacked the remnant of the Dzungars – hammered between the Kazakh hammer and the Chinese anvil for years – and conquered them in 1809-10. He then turned his attention to the New Great Wall, but failed to breach it even with the help of the Russian artillerymen. He proved his ruthless but effective leadership, however, expertly manipulating tribal politics to ensure his most dangerous rivals among the Jüz were killed leading futile charges against the high walls of the late Daguo Emperor’s fortresses. Though Jangir would not realise his dream of marching into China proper, he did succeed in destroying the Dzungars as a state and absorbing them into his own horde, a considerable triumph considering the Dzungars had once ruled half the area of the contemporary Chinese Empire. By the time he died in 1829, on the eve of the political earthquake that would change the world yet barely touch the Kazakh Khaganate, he left behind him a nomad state more unified and efficiently governed than any since the days of Timur the Lame, perhaps even the Mongol Khans themselves.

  And it was to the cradle of those world-bestriding Khans that the Russians now came. By the end of 1809, Kuleshov had fought his way to the heart of the Mongol lands, his troops initially seeing off attacks by the local Oirat clans who, having ties with their Dzungar cousins, saw any ally of Jangir Khan as an enemy even without him invading their land. The Russians’ effective destruction of the Oirat armies (reflecting the fact that the discipline that had been instilled into the expeditionary army extended to warfare as well) made the Khalkhas who dominated further east decide to take a more tactful approach. The Mongols in general had lent a cautious support to the Yenzhang Emperor in the Chinese civil war, both due to the proximity of his power base and the fact that some of the more poetic-minded among them genuinely admired his romanticism of the nomadic past. However, for the most part the support they had sent had been token, mindful of the fact that Chongqian might well win and they did not want to be in the position of being painted as raging traitors. A few well-chosen heads here and there delivered to Chongqian when he triumphed could discreetly undo any damage caused by the lukewarm support for Yenzhang.

  Now, though, the Mongols faced a threat in their own homeland, and Yenzhang certainly was not in a position to help, being flanked by the attack of King Gwangjong’s Corean army as well as facing his brother to the south. Though still making much of their old traditions as a proud warrior race, the Mongols were not stupid, and knew the Russians posed a potentially devastating threat. To that end, Khalka envoys were sent to approach the Russians to negotiate. Kuleshov agreed, not wanting to lose any more men to pointless battles en route to their real destination. Of course, the Khalkhas added, any decision so important would require – cue groans from the Russians – a Kurultai.

  The Russian army therefore spent another three months stuck in the Chakhar region (Outer Mongolia still lacking many real cities) while petty-khans from all over the country joined them to debate. Mongolia’s own royal dynasty had been smashed by the Manchus at the same time as their conquest of China, with the country now being theoretically ruled directly from Beijing. In practice, Outer Mongolia at least was more or less left to its own devices aside from imperial necessities such as taxation, but now the Mongols lacked a single political ruler. However, they did have a single spiritual leader, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu or Holy Venerable Lord who was believed to be the serial reincarnation of Taranatha, a Tibetan Lama who had founded the heretical Jonang faction in Buddhism. The Jonang had been wiped out by the orthodox Gelug in Tibet years before, helped by the Chinese and ultimately by the late Gorkha invasion that had inadvertently rooted out many hidden mountain monasteries, but they lingered on in Mongolia. The current Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, Luvsanchültimjigmed, was – like his predecessor reincarnations (purely by an astonishing coincidence, of course) – a member of the Khalkha nobility and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan.[216]

  Now the Mongols had been receiving envoys for a while from King Gwangjong urging them to join the fight and win their independence. They had treated them with contempt, of course; for historical reasons the Coreans were proverbially worthless in Mongol eyes. So they had backing from some Russians? So what? The Mongols knew of the Russians, scattered bands at the far end of their frontier, unworthy of notice, and the singers told of how the great khans of the past had beaten them in their own heartland as well.

  Those stories took on a different colour when the Mongols faced a vast Russian army sitting in the middle of their country. Like Jangir Khan, but in a rather inferior negotiating position, the petty khans decided a discerning approach was required and hammered out an agreement with Kuleshov, Luvsanchültimjigmed, and those Corean envoys who had been allowed to stay around.

  The Russians would be permitted through Mongol lands and even guided and resupplied by the Mongols, allowing them to burst through into Manchuria. Of course, the Chinese – either claimant emperor[217] – would not be pleased at such a move, to say the least.

  But the Mongols believed this to be unimportant. They knew what the Chinese were facing; not only this western army, but that of Jangir Khan who they privately feared. Yes, let him expend his strength against the New Great Wall. And even the hapless Coreans might defy all precedent and actually win something. Therefore, the Kurultai agreed that they could not be left behind in this war that was changing the world as they knew it. Of course, the Mongols were prone to disunion, and no single petty khan among them could command enough support to lead them, considering the problems of clans and tribes and blood feuds. But then there was the unifying force of religion…

  In February 1810, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu Luvsanchültimjigmed became the Bogd Khan, the first free Khagan of the Mongols since Ligdan Khan had been defeated by the Manchus almost two centuries before.[218] The reunited Mongols sought to gain control over Inner Mongolia, stripped of forces by Yenzhang in his increasingly desperate position, while the Russians finally marched into Manchuria.

  Only to find that they were too late.

  Oh, Benyovsky and his men had not been overrun. They had survived. But someone else had reinforced them first…

  Chapter #96: Nichibotsu

  Note from Capt. Christopher Nuttall.

  I have overruled Dr Pylos here in switching sources from Brivibas Goštautas to Ivan Gudenov. My reason for this is that Goštautas espouses various theories about the Japanese people in the second half of his book which are considered out of step with mainstream thought among most people living in TimeLine L. While Dr Pylos is almost certainly correct that Goštautas’ theories are much more likely to be true than said mainstream thought, I decided it would be misleading to present them here as this record is intended to be an explanation of how TimeLine L got to be as it is today, and therefore popular beliefs are more relevant than historical revisionism, even if it more likely to be grounded in reality. Furthermore, as both authors admit, the lack of records in this period mean that any history is more guesswork than would be preferred.

  Therefore instead I present an extract from Gudenov’s more mainstream work, which as you will probably recognise displays a more prominent pro-Russian bias than Goštautas’.

  The text follows this message.

  *

  THE BRINGER OF CHAOS

  THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS

  THE ONCOMING STORM

  - disputed translation of the caption from a damaged Yapontsi[219] tapestry found in the ruins of Morioka in 1968. The identity of the demonic figure depicted is also debated, but the prevailing theory is that it is Moritz Benyovsky

  *

  From: “Decline and Fall of the Yapontsi Empire” by Ivan Petrovich Gudenov (1970, English translation 1972)—

  To say that 1806 was a tumultuous year for the Company would be a gross understatement. In China, the Guangzhong Emperor finally acted upon reports o
f deep Russian penetration into the Amur region, captured many settlers including Pavel Lebedev-Lastoshchkin himself, and was then the subject of the resulting assassination plot that plunged the empire into the War of the Three Emperors. Yet world-shattering though these events were, they were paralleled by another sequence of occurrences over the Corean Sea[220] in Old Japan. Ulrich Münchhausen, military right-hand man to Benyovsky, embarked on a wild escapade worthy of his father Karl’s tall tales when, whilst accompanying the young Daimyo Hidoshi of Matsumae to give homage to the Emperor Tenmei and Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, he was recognised by the Dutch trader Pieter Roggeveen as a European and not an “Aynyu [Ainu] servant” as Hidoshi had claimed. One arrest, one prison break and one desperate boat escape later, the incensed Tokugawa ordered an attack on Edzo [Hokkaido] to punish the Matsumae’s treacherous collusion with foreign barbarians (for so he saw it, unaware or not willing to recognise that the Matsumae were essentially doing what they were told at Russo-Lithuanian gunpoint).

  Tokugawa’s anger stemmed as much from the fact that this Edzo business distracted him from what he considered to be the real danger on the horizon as from the insolence of the Russians itself. The Shogun was becoming slowly convinced that the southern Daimyo of the islands of Sikoke [Shikoku] and Kiushiu [Kyushu], led by the ambitious Daimyo Shimazu Shinsuke,[221] were plotting to undermine or even overthrow the Shogunate system. The Crown Prince, Yasuhito, had worrying ideas about absolutist philosophy that he had constructed both from his readings of his own country’s history and from accounts of Bourbon practices he found in the Rangaku (“Dutch Learning”) that trickled in through the Dutch settlement on Deshima in Nagasaki. His heroes were the Emperors of a millennium earlier, such as Mommu and Kammu, who had possessed a national army based on conscription under their own direct command and had not had to navigate a complex network of feudal overlords and samurai loyalties in order to obtain some troops. More to the point, they had also not had to deal with a Shogun who had grabbed most of the political power for himself…

  This tied in with another implicit criticism of the Tokugawa Shogunate; the reason why those earlier Emperors had so sorely needed a national army was because they faced potent foes such as the Silla state in Corea, Tang dynasty China, and the Emishi people of northern Niphon [Honshu], who are speculated to be related to the Aynyu, though this is disputed.[222] The Shogunate had created an atmosphere of splendid isolation through its Sakoku policy of minimising trade and contact with the outside world, and it followed that if Yasuhito was so enthusiastic about having a standing army, it meant he was ready to overturn that policy and start poking around outside the Sunrise Land. Despite the aforementioned isolation, this can perhaps be attributed to the same wave of increased attention to European affairs that swept across all of Asia in the aftermath of the early stages of the French Revolution, from Persia to Mysore to Corea. Whatever its cause, Tokugawa was convinced that the southern Daimyo were conspiring with Yasuhito to impose a more unitary state and abolish or weaken the Shogunate – though naturally the southern Hans would retain their old autonomy, or strengthen it. Dutch learning was at the heart of this strategy, to the point where Tokugawa considered closing even Deshima. However, his meeting with Pieter Roggeveen, in which he quizzed the VOC trader about the potential European sources of Yasuhito’s ideas, convinced him that the Dutch were worth accommodating, being ready to bend any way to preserve their trade monopoly. Shamefully dishonourable even for barbarians, but useful. It was this meeting which led to Münchhausen’s unmasking, and therefore the pre-emptive conflict itself. Tokugawa remained suspicious about the southern Hans’ rather lukewarm response to Emperor Tenmei’s call for a great samurai army to take back Edzo and punish the treacherous Matsumae and gaidzin foreign barbarians.[223]

  Soon, however, it was apparent that matters were far more serious than any at the court could have dreamed. At the Battle of the Tsugaru Strait in April of that year, the Russians and their allies – Lithuanians, Nivkhs, Aynyu, Yakuts, and not a few turncoat Japanese – hurled the Shogun’s army back into the cold, unforgiving waters of the strait that separated Niphon from Edzo. Even though many troops made it through the Russian naval blockade thanks to overwhelming numbers, they were nonetheless defeated by a combination of superior technology and discipline. That the Shogunate’s ban on firearms and heavy restrictions on sailing ships was now a terrible mistake was obvious to any Japanese with historical knowledge, and the poet Maruyama Kenji acidly remarked that the Japan of two hundred years earlier, with the cannon-armed fleet that had fought the Coreans in the Imjin War, would be better equipped to fight the Russians than what they were left with today. This was no exaggeration, and it along with other observations served to rally intellectual opinion against Sakoku and the Shogunate itself.

  The matter spiralled out of control when the ill Emperor Tenmei died on hearing the news of the catastrophe and a confrontation between the two parties became imminent. Tokugawa, as blunt and ruthless as any of his forefathers, declared that the Emperor had adopted on his deathbed a distantly related noble named Kojimo as his heir. However, the Crown Prince rejected this, aided by the public defections of his father’s Ministers of the Right and Centre to his side, and was – as Tokugawa had feared – supported by the rebellious southern Hans led by Daimyo Shimazu Shinsuke of Satsuma. The island Hans of Sikoke and Kiushiu felt particularly secure in this blatant defiance of the once-omnipotent Shogun, as the Tsugaru incident demonstrated that a simple stretch of water could render the Shogunate utterly powerless. Yasuhito initially established his capital in Nagasaki, both because it was an important city already in the hands of his supporters, and because it symbolised his policies for openness and outside contact. It was, after all, through Nagasaki that the Dutch learning that had inspired him flowed. The Dutch themselves retained a cautious neutrality, being careful to use only terms such as “the Emperor” (name not specified) in their trade agreements, hedging their bets in case Tokugawa won. Nonetheless, they did begin to sell European firearms and artillery to the Japanese, who attempted without success to duplicate the weapons, an act which their forefathers had once achieved. Once more the deleterious effects of Tokugawa rule upon the Yapontsi are illustrated; even when isolation and Sutcliffism[224] were recognised to be mistakes, they had already become so ingrained that the race no longer possessed the capacity to save itself.[225]

  At this point we must acknowledge that any attempt to portray the Yapontsi civil war of this period is inevitably doomed. Despite its relatively recent timeframe, we probably know more about, for example, the battles between the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts in England during the so-called Dark Ages. The destruction wrought, not primarily by this first round of warfare, but what came afterwards, meant that almost all records perished and what little survives is insufficient to judge whether it truly reflects reality or is a biased version designed to serve one side or the other; we do not possess enough corroboration or contradiction from other accounts to judge.

  Having said that, certain broad strokes can be discerned. The most obvious is that both sides seem to have had a somewhat hapless war record. This is unsurprising considering the fact that the Japanese had not fought a war, even a civil war, in more than a century.[226] With both sides clinging to antiquated technologies and the corresponding tactics, even a small group armed with more advanced methodologies and weapons derived from Russia or the Dutch possessed a disproportionate advantage. Early in the conflict, several Han armies were virtually annihilated in isolated battles thanks to this, when there was no defined ‘frontier’ between the broad, vague claims of ‘the north supports the Shogun and the south supports the [rightful] Emperor’. Many Daimyo took the opportunity to use the crisis as an excuse to use their military force against those of their rival neighbours they held grudges against, something that they would never have been able to do if the Bakufu system was still functioning. It is worth noting however that even once the battle lines were more coherently
drawn, relatively minor forces still inflicted swingeing losses upon their opponents through their adoption of European guns and tactics. It is interesting to reflect on how this (among other factors) led to changing views of the land then known as Japan became clear through European sources in the early nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, Japan was (a) a mysterious and exotic land, (b) known for its severe justice system and brutal sense of honour, but (c) a country whose civilisation, though alien in nature, was nonetheless undeniable and respected. It can be compared to how the Ottoman Empire was viewed in countries such as Britain and France, which lacked the same proximal perspective as Russia or Austria towards the Turk.[227]

  References to Japan in the European press are relatively few and far between thanks to the isolated nature of the country, but a trend is nonetheless visible; a people once mistakenly regarded as being on a similar level of civilisation to the Chinese, the Moguls or the Coreans were found to be inferior and largely incapable of adapting to the effects of European innovations in warfare, resulting in mass slaughters by those few who grasped their impact or, more usually, allied themselves with European groups acting as mercenaries. It is a particularly glaring contrast considering how other peoples formerly regarded as primitive and savage underwent the reverse transformation in the European view, such as the Mauré and the Matetwa, as despite their lack of much urbane civilisation they adapted far more rapidly to the changes wrought by the introduction of European warfare.[228]