Tinto Maps #23 - 18th of October 2024 - China

[SuperLexxe]

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The Wuhusi-system & The Silver Grant-system

It might be too early to propose content & mechanics, but this also provides some context for my map feedback (here)

I would suggest implementing both the wuhusi system and the Silver Grant systems (or both into one mechanic) to strengthen ties between the extended Borjigin dynasty, and to add challenge to balancing the Mongol estate in Yuan. These systems would act as a form of "subsidy" for the surviving Mongol successor states, while also providing an additional source of revenue for the Mongol noble class within Yuan. This would give the Mongol nobility significant power, making them a troublesome estate to deal with. It would also provide the Mongol successors outside of China a vested interest in maintaining good relations with Yuan, and its continued survival...

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The wuhusi 五戶絲, or "five-household silk," system was a refined version of the earlier revenue-sharing appanage system among the Borjigin princely families and lesser Noyan families. Under this system, the conquered lands in China were regarded as joint property among the Borjigins and Noyans, with revenues from allocated territories, known as Ayimaqs (tribes), distributed among these families. These territories included Khanbaliq, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, parts of Inner Mongolia, and northern Henan, beyond the Yellow River.

When the Toluids achieved dominance over both the Yuan dynasty and the Ilkhanate, it left the Jochid lineage of the Golden Horde and the Chagatayid lineage of Central Asia with diminished or, in some cases, halted revenue streams from their Chinese fiefs. However, the Jochids did begin receiving their due in 1339. In the Yuan's Central Region, minor descendants of these princely houses—Jochids, Ögedeids, Chagatayids, Qasarids, and branches of the Toluids—remained as vassals to the Great Khans. Cut off from their distant relatives, they served as military officers for the Yuan. Together with other Mongol nobles (Noyans) and their tümens of warriors, they formed the Mongol military elite in the region.

The administration of this system was overseen by non-Han officials, known as Darughachi, who were responsible for collecting revenues from these lands. These revenues were then distributed to the rightful owners, provided those owners were not hostile to the Yuan at the time. The selection of these officials was often left to the owners of the fiefdoms, although nominal approval was required from the Great Khan. These officials often had dual loyalties—both to their princely house and to the Great Khan—but the princes typically appointed the most loyal and trusted individuals to oversee their Chinese fiefs.

This practice of revenue sharing was not confined to China; it extended to the Ilkhanate and, in a more limited capacity, to the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate. For instance, in 1308, the Yuan Toluids reformed the administration of their share of revenues from Transoxiana. Similarly, Özbeg Khan of the Golden Horde, after fostering friendly relations with the Yuan in 1326, successfully requested and began receiving his share of Jochid revenues from China in 1339. This arrangement continued under his successor, Jani Beg, and likely persisted until the fall of the Yuan dynasty.

Alongside the wuhusi system, the Silver Grant system played an important role in maintaining the loyalty of the domestic princely families. The Silver Grant was an annual allocation of silver and textiles given during the Yuan dynasty, primarily to male members of the "Golden Family"—relatives of Genghis Khan and their descendants. Unlike territorial fiefs, which were tied to specific lands, the Silver Grant was directly linked to the personal relationship between the grantee and the emperor. The size of the grant was determined by the recipient's dynastic standing within the Golden Family, as well as the emperor’s capacity and willingness to distribute the resources. Members would have to attend the annual meeting to receive their grant.

Although both systems diminished over time, they remained an effective and a necessary tool for Yuan emperors to secure the loyalties of domestic princely families. By using both the wuhusi and Silver Grant systems, the Yuan emperors could maintain influence over their Mongol nobility, while also encouraging a semblance of cohesion among the network of Mongol successor states.

Map of the princely and noyad fiefs in the Central Region:

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"Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire" (2004):

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“Nomads in the Sedentary World” (2001):

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“The Mongol Empire: Fragmentation, Unity, And Continuity” (2021):

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[Streamlet]

The Dai (Shan) people in Yunnan hadn't really adopted Theravada Buddhism yet. Burmese missionaries spread the religion to the "heretic" Shan states in the 16th century, before this they mostly followed their traditional folk beliefs (Sasana Phi) with possible influences from Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism.

The Dai people share an inseparable history with the Shan in Burma, so I'll elaborate more on this region in the main SE Asia / Burma thread and link it back here.

Some sources:

https://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/reign/hong-wu/year-30-month-9-day-19

https://www.burmalibrary.org/en/the-shans-vol-i (page 150)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_people

 

[Goblin Slave]

For the new East Asian religion you guys have planned how will you account for the lack of Daoism in Korea? Will Korean shamanism be represented within this new religion? I figure you could split off the Vietnamese and Korean branches similarly to how you plan to divide Shia Islam. (It could also let you use the much more inclusive name of Sanjiao for Chinese religion, while giving Vietnam and Korea different names under the blanket)

 

[Sulphurologist]

Spot the 7 differences

Still not a fan of seeing only the marketplace map reverted to the previous style.

 

[nyetflix2]

Hm, main culture I can think of that might be missing is She. Did you guys decide that was too granular?

 

[Mangi Qahan]

Even if you consider Mahayana Buddhism to be the most representative religion, you still cannot solve a problem. During this period, the state religion of the Mongolian royal family was Vajrayana (they changed back to Tengrism after returning to Steppe), and you must address this confusion.

 

[Iocilin I Corneu]

ΜΟΜ

 

[Roger Corominas]

Wow, this Yuan really do be looking pretty Borjigin.
On other note. How many releasable tags are there in China?

Quite a bit of them will appear during the Red Turban Rebellion.

 

[LinglingSokovy]

Poor distribution of population, ethnicity and beliefs. Weird natural harbor standards.
You actually believes that the mudflats at the mouth of the Yellow River are a natural harbor?
edit:"Chinese Buddhism" sounds like a crude stereotype of the rich and colorful folk customs across East Asia.Whether you are Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese or Bhutanese, The people of East Asia, unite! We'd better start to sort out our folk customs and traditional beliefs immediately, such as 무속 in Korea and Fujian's Mazu worship.
edit: At least please check the spelling of place names carefully .You mistyped "wútóng"（梧桐） as "wúróng" in Jiaxing,Zhejiang.

 

[Polesie Admiral]

China will grow larger™

 

[Roger Corominas]

Could I recommend calling the “Chinese Buddhism” Zen?

Zen is just the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese Chán, which is just one of the sects of Buddhism, so it doesn't work as a name for the whole.

 

[nyetflix2]

We have finally eliminated Animism as a religion from the game and have divided it into many multiple ones.

Could we get some religious maps of sub-Saharan Africa now that this change has been made please?

 

[ND81]

The culture groups probably need to have some stuff ironed out. Modern linguistic borders should not be superimposed over cultural borders in the region in the 1300's.

More edits are to come: I'm a bit busy right now, so I'll just continuously edit this for the time being. I'll be cross-checking with some local chronicles/gazettes over the weekend/next week. Sections labelled [discussion warranted] do not have strong textual support and may require further evidence

1. Southern Anhui should definitely be an area of Wu majority.

Mandarinic languages being the dominant Chinese language in Southern Anhui is a relatively recent phenomenon. Many Huai locations should be made into slashes (Wu/Huai), and certainly some should outright be fully Wu in that regard.

The first high tide of immigrants began after the An Shi Rebellion, and their footsteps were spread all over the south. Due to the convenience of the Great Canal, immigrants arrived north of the Yangtze River and south of the Huai River, ie. present-day Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, and some travelled southward to the south of the Yangtze River - present-day southern Jiangsu, southern Anhui, Zhejiang, and other areas such as Xuanzhou (present-day Xuanzhou City), which is near the river, therefore it acted as the first area for immigrants to settle, and its population rose rapidly. In the year 765, parts of Xuanzhou prefecture was separated to form Chizhou prefecture, and then again Shidai County. Shezhou (Shexian County), located in the southern mountainous area of southern Anhui, also had many immigrants. Historical records also show that areas south of the Huai and Yangtze, [ie.] southern Anhui, were important settlement areas for immigrants or corridors for them to continue their journey southward.

The second high point of immigration was after the Jingkang Rebellion, which lasted for one and a half centuries. During this period, there were more immigrants from Ningguo, Taiping, Chizhou, and Huizhou in the southern Anhui region.

Furthermore, the early Ming dynasty immigrants to the southern Anhui region social and cultural development is quite influential. Residents of Dongliu county (now part of Dongzhi and Guichi counties) perished or fled during the wars in the early Ming dynasty; the post-war immigrants mainly came from Jiangxi. Some immigrants near Nanling and Fanchang came from Huizhou. Early Ming Dynasty immigrant trends compared to that of Qin/Han-Yuan period, has many differences. For example, Huizhou became one of the main population exporting places in the Yangtze River Basin, and the population of the Yangtze River Basin was mainly exported to the north and west in a fan shape to the provinces of northern Jiangsu and Anhui (except Huizhou).

[...]

It is reported that in the early 1890s, the residents of southern Anhui were already “half local and half foreign”.

Jiang (2003) 吳語徽州片方言音韻研究. Translated by DeepL (I don't have time to do it manually)

This area is painfully underresearched so I can only provide a few sources (if more are needed). Territories pretty much up to the Yangtze River should be of Wu majority at this time. Large-scale migration of non-Wu speakers only really happened during the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Huizhou itself isn't actually that coherent a linguistic group, and is culturally considered part of the same general strand of Han Chinese as the rest of southern Anhui.

The question then is, what are the Huīzhōu dialects? And here we must face the fact that in the course of our comparative studies we have failed to uncover any shared Huīzhōu innovation vis-à-vis the QYS or Norman’s Common Dialectal Chinese (Norman 2006) which could be used to uniquely characterize this dialect group. This therefore suggests that the Huīzhōu area may in fact be a linguistic refugium or residual area, as characterized by Nichols (1992:14,16,22), where a number of intrusive linguistic types have come together and survived in contact for an extended period. They share certain features, such as loss of many earlier nasal codas and reduction of diphthongs, due to contact and convergence; but they do not show shared innovations that would identify them as a genetically distinct group. If this view is correct, then the common system derived in the present paper must be viewed as an analytical device or template rather than an proto-system in the genetic sense.

Coblin (2007) Comparative Phonology of the Huīzhōu Dialects

It's also quite clear that Huizhou, due to having superficially Wu-looking features, has been comfortably considered a Wu Chinese subbranch, unlike Xiang. Refer to some of YR Chao's early works if evidence is needed. I would therefore advise for an outright merger of Wu and Huizhou.

2. The Hakka migrations have not reached the lowlands yet.

It is known through historical sources that Hakka people have yet to arrive in the Pearl River Delta at this time yet. This further southward migration happened largely during the Ming dynasty, and as such Hakka people would not significantly inhabit said low-lying areas in much of coastal Guangdong. Refer to the attached map from Coblin (2019) for a rough guideline on the distribution of Hakka people at this time.

Coblin (2019) Common Neo-Hakka: A Comparative Reconstruction. Olive sections ("Ancestral Shē Settlement Area") can be ignored

3. Mandarinic cultures are highly anachronistic.

I am unfortunately unable to as accurately describe the exact migration waves in the various parts of Mandarinic-speaking China due to my research focus not being in this region, though I can at least share some thoughts using the knowledge I already have.

First, some general notes on the distribution of lects, going west to east. These are very minor issues on discrepencies between 1330’s China and today.

Southern Shaanxi should be a lot more "Zhongyuan" (see further comments), as Southwestern Mandarin-speaking migrants only entered the area during or after the Yuan dynasty. Other than this, I am unable to give further details on the Chinese-speaking population of Sichuan at the time.

This text primarily discusses the modern pronunciation of zhi, zhuang, and zhang series initials in the mixed lects in southern Shaanxi and their historical strata. Southern Shaanxi is located in the Qin-Ba Hills, and is an important north-south military passageway. It serves as a hotspot of battles, and has seen continuous warfare throughout history; in terms of post-Song conflicts, the Song/Jin-Yuan transition was likely the most catastrophic. Wars inevidably lead to the reduction of population: according to The Yuan Chronicle: Geography, as of the Yuan dynasty, only around 29,862 people live in southern Shaanxi, and of which only 2,768 live in Ankang (a large prefecture). As reflected in the data, between the Southern Song and Qing dynasties, southern Shaanxi has seen three large migratory events: one being the southward migration of Guanzhong (area around Xi'an) refugees, therefore making southern Shaanxi once again an important location for refugees to flee, another being the "Jingmen-Xiangyang exiles" during the early years of the Ming dynasty, where southern Shaanxi again becomes an important location for refugee assistance, and another being the large-scale "Huguang migrants" during the Qianlong regency of the Qing dynasty, where Shaanxi and Sichuan once again became the officially designated site for migrants to settle. The Song/Jin/Yuan refugees and the Jingmen-Xiangyang exiles first occupied the basins and river channels; the later Huguang migrants (aside from the minorty that continued to settle the lowlands) largely settled in the mountainous areas of the region. The above shows that the population of southern Shaanxi is mainly composed of immigrants, and the lects of southern Shaanxi is largely that of immigrants; the primary linguistic problem in southern Shaanxi is therefore that of contact and stratification among the various language families.

Zhou (2014) 陜南混合方言知莊章組聲母的今讀類型與歷史層次

[discussion warranted] The border between Zhongyuan and Jin at around Yuncheng and Linfen is different to that of the Language Atlas of China (Li 2012). It seems intentional, as it follows the provincial border of Shanxi instead; I don't think it's a huge problem to depict it this way. I am also not aware of any sort of significant diglossic situation at that time. Similarly, Northeastern (including Beijing) Mandarin does not reach this far south in the Language Atlas, though again, this seems intentional.

The significantly more pressing issue is that of culture groups in general. Mandarinic language families are a lot more tentative, and are only classified based on a single, quite flimsy shared innovation, that being the distribution of historical checked tones. Even then, it's not always strictly adhered to.

As has already been pointed out above and in other comments, Sichuan at this time has not been resettled by Huguang migrants. Old Shu (“Ba-Shu Chinese”), spoken in Sichuan at the time, is perhaps the most famous extinct Chinese branch due to having a Wikipedia page (though many, many other extinct Chinese groups also exist). It is therefore completely unreasonable to have a merged Hubeinese and Sichuanese culture group. A simple split along the provincial border between Sichuan and Hubei could solve this issue.

Previous studies have suggested that the modern lects of Sichuan were brought over by immigrants from Hunan and Guangdong since the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dyansties. According to historical material regarding immigration, as well as the distribution and phonology of modern Sichuanese, we believe that the modern Sichuanese lects can roughly be demarkated using the Minjiang River, with the area north and east of said river being the lects brought over by the immigrants of the Ming and Qing dyansties, and the area south and west of the Minjiang being the local Song and Yuan dialects. In previous studies, the Nanluhua variety was neglected and confused with the Huguanghua variety, which led to a biased conclusion on the historical formation of Sichuanese.

Zhou (2013) 從移民史和方言分佈看四川方言的歷史. Note that the "area south and west of the Minjiang" would coincide with the checked tone-preserving Min-Chi varieties, ie. those that have a stronger Old Shu stratum, and the "area north and east" would be the Chengdu-Chongqing (ie. "core Sichuanese") variety.

[discussion warranted] Similarly, the lect area of Shaanxi should probably be split off from Zhongyuan to form a distinct cultural group. I do not have any sources on hand to cite (I may come back to this), but there is precedence in the use of a Qín-Lóng (秦隴, ie. Shaanxi-Gansu) group of Chinese lects. This would culturally make sense as well, as Shaanxi is typically not seen as part of the same geographical region as Henan, which can be explained by the lack of easy transportation routes between the two provinces, as compared to, say, Henan and Shandong. This can, again, be easily solved by creating a separate culture group based on provincial borders, this time between Henan and Shaanxi. As previously stated, Lanyin could and should be merged with Qinlong, and be pushed further east.

[discussion warranted] The Northeastern region of Shandong and Hebei is the area in which the use of language families just does not work. Jiaoliao and Jilu are two groups that were created solely based on the above checked tone criterion, and have very little historical precedence. Consider removing Jiaoliao, Jilu, and Dongbei, and reintroducing the Shandong and Zhili (can be rephrased as 趙燕 Zhàoyàn if "Zhili" is perhaps unwanted?) groups from EU4 instead. If any people have more information on any alternative solutions to this, please do raise them.

 

[nyetflix2]

What's this religious minority around Fujian? Manichaeans?

 

[Joe The Eskimo]

Now that animism is gone can we get a religious map of the whole world again?

Also Yuan could use a prettier color.

 

[Dongerino]

Personally, I'd prefer it to be Great X over X Dynasty, i.e. Great Yuan, Great Ming, Great Qing

 

[Roger Corominas]

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Mongol presence in China:

The strategic importance of the Central Region (which consisted of Khanbaliq, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, parts of Inner Mongolia, and northern Henan, beyond the Yellow River), made it the focal point of the Mongol population in China during the Yuan dynasty. There were a multitude of imperial and princely Borjigin families (Toluid, Jochid, Ögedeid, Chagatayid, Qasarid, etc) who held fiefs there, including the lesser non-Borjigin Noyad families.

(The mention of “ninety toumans” in the image below likely meant minggans, or very severely understaffed tümens, because 90 full-sized tümens would mean 900,000 troops, while 90 full minggans would be 90,000)

“Soldiers of the Dragon: Chinese Armies 1500 BC-AD 1840” (2006):

View attachment 1203654

Due to this, it can be assumed that this region held significant tümen & tammachi (garrison) allocations, including the Mongol units (wei) of the expanded Imperial Guard. This would mean somewhere around 300,000-500,000 Mongol pops (if we take the 90,000 troops as fact), up until their expulsion following the Red Turban Rebellion.

In addition to the Central Region, smaller Mongol fiefs could be found in regions like Gansu in the northwest. Notably, in 1389, a Chagatayid prince with fiefs in Gansu defected from the Yuan and established the Kara Del kingdom in and around Hami. The Sarta and Monguor people trace their origins to the Central Asian and Mongolic settlers in Gansu and Ningxia. Though these groups are composed of several Central Asian peoples, they speak a Mongolic language.

In the southwest, the viceroyalty of Yunnan served as a critical base for Mongol military operations into Indochina. It also became the southern stronghold for resistance against the Red Turban Rebellion. Even today, Mongolic peoples, such as the Khatso and the Sichuan Mongols, continue to inhabit Yunnan and Sichuan, believed to be descendants of the Mongols who remained in the region following the collapse of the Yuan dynasty.

Although the Mongol numbers would be significantly outnumbered by the native peoples, and as a result would probably not show up as a minority on the culture map in most locations, they were there at this time.

Also something important to note;

The Mongols of China had serious issues equipping themselves with the horses required to enlist in the cavalry forces of the Yuan, as China was largely unsuited for breeding horses. The forcible requisition of horses across China, and import from Mongolia and Korea were still not enough to fill this demand, and many Mongols were left to fight on foot. This should definitely be something that Yuan should have to deal with.

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We will take a look at that, we may add more Mongolian pops to represent these garrisons.

 

[Gurtannon]

Animism is gone,

YAY!!

 

[vyshan]

Could I recommend calling the “Chinese Buddhism” Zen?

thats just chan. There are a number of Mahayana Buddhist sects. Chan/zen, Pure land, Tiantai, Huayan are just some of the various buddhist sects within east asian Mahayana.

 

[MrEko]

Could I recommend calling the “Chinese Buddhism” Zen?

1. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation . The school is Chan in Mandarin.

2. Chan/zen is a subset of Chinese Buddhism. The other main school is Pure Land.