Wei Dynasty

[siafu]

Sorry, this isn't making sense. Only monarchs and leaders have death dates. A Zongli would only be an abstraction through an event.

I was speaking abstractly. In writing out the timeline on paper, each prime minister would be set to die (or retire) on a particular date, and on that date the two candidates who are still alive would be presented as the two choices in the event. This is still just going to be just a series of events and flags, I'm just talking about how I'm working it out in advance; I don't think that they necessarily need to reconnect date-wise cyclically if I do it this way.

That way, there only needs to be one event for each person (his death or retirement) and the date of that death would indicate who the two candidates would be.

If you choose A over B in event 1, and A dies in 1435, say, on my paper list it would show that B is still alive, and C continues from A. Therefore the choice would be B or C (i.e., the player could choose person B or person C). Alternately, B might also be dead by then and the choice would be C or D. Or if they had chosen B, and A died first, then the choice would be C or D. &c. It's just the way I'm envisioning the chain and planning just how many events would need to be written. I am, of course, planning on writing the text for each one myself, and the flags should be fairly obvious (i.e. ZZZ AAA is prime minster or XXX AAA is prime minister).

I don't see how this is different from the version I gave up above. Because you would have to be sleeping events, not triggering them. You cannot trigger an event to happen later. If you trigger it, it happens immediately. Otherwise, you are taling about using flags, ids or sleepevent commands to be selective about an event which will fire in the future.

The only difference I was proposing was in NOT having to synch up the dates ever. It doesn't result in an explosion, just really a doubling of the number of events (which means double the work for me, in particular).

 

[siafu]

On a separate note, I have finished coding up all the existing Wei events and monarchs you have posted.

Most excellent.

 

[MattyG]

fu,

I have a problem with the printing press event. I just think that the 'results' of the event need more thinking through.

First, the printing press forever changed Europe, the ramifications were huge. How will it effect the whole of Asia?

Second, the follow-up event happens in only 4 years. This means that in four years the press was developed, implemented, massive numbers of books began being printed and lots of new academics arrived for the examinations.

I think that these events need the following:

1. A whole thread of its own about the potential impacts

2. A more thorough cycle of events exploring what gets decided from 1.

3. The events need to be province-based, rather than tied to Wei. At least, once the initial event to invest in it happens.

Matty

 

[Don_Quigleone]

fu,

I have a problem with the printing press event. I just think that the 'results' of the event need more thinking through.

First, the printing press forever changed Europe, the ramifications were huge. How will it effect the whole of Asia?

Second, the follow-up event happens in only 4 years. This means that in four years the press was developed, implemented, massive numbers of books began being printed and lots of new academics arrived for the examinations.

I think that these events need the following:

1. A whole thread of its own about the potential impacts

2. A more thorough cycle of events exploring what gets decided from 1.

3. The events need to be province-based, rather than tied to Wei. At least, once the initial event to invest in it happens.

Matty

Actually movable type printing was invented in china in 1040 and korea in 1230 but it never took off as there are 47,035 different characters in chinese, making the endeavour highly impractical, so the entire event sequence could not have happened, instead I would reccomend an event cycle maybe about a ruler inventing a new phonetic alphabet (like korean hangul) combined with movable type printing to improve literacy among the peasants see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

 

[MattyG]

The telling line is the one which refers to Siafu's event.

"In Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) China, metal movable type was also invented separately from Korea, first used by Hua Sui in 1490 AD with bronze type."

So, Siafu is aware of this, it seems, and I think the event included a presumption of character change. If not, it can.

Nonetheless, I still think that it needs more analysis of the impact: does it, for example, lead to the great challenge on the role and importance of Confucianism itself, in the same way that the European press help the challenge to the Catholic church (and the French government) by breaking through the control on the disemination of knowledge.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

A change in characters is not such a minor thing, is it so easily imaginable for the europeans to abandon the latin alphabet and use something completely different, I mean hangul was only succesful in the modern day, it was never used when it was first invented and had off and on success (primarily among women and the uneducated, in that respect it achieved it's aim) and only achieved true success in the rise in korean nationalism that took place in the late 19th century, an entire educated class would have to be displaced for a new writing system to be implemented and widely used, to this effect I think it's highly unlikely, so without an alphabet change, which is itself unlikely, movable type would never ever be succesful in china, as per history, just for practical reasons, you'd need an extremely radical government to achieve anything along these lines, you noted how it would effect the confucian establishment, but i would say that the confucian establishment would have to cease to exist in order for such changes to take place

 

[siafu]

Don Q. sez:

but it never took off as there are 47,035 different characters in chinese, making the endeavour highly impractical, so the entire event sequence could not have happened, instead I would reccomend an event cycle maybe about a ruler inventing a new phonetic alphabet (like korean hangul) combined with movable type printing to improve literacy among the peasants see

Actually, you only need about 20,000 at most to get by with either reading or writing. Many characters are rather obscure and rarely used.

Nonetheless, I still think that it needs more analysis of the impact: does it, for example, lead to the great challenge on the role and importance of Confucianism itself, in the same way that the European press help the challenge to the Catholic church (and the French government) by breaking through the control on the disemination of knowledge.

Actually, I would think that it would have the opposite impact. Confucianism has always been a very literary pursuit-- the greatest effect would most likely be an increase in applicants for the imperial examinations as more printing = cheaper texts to study by.

I'm still without a computer at home, but I will work on more events (and changing this series) when I'm up and running, hopefully next week.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Actually, you only need about 20,000 at most to get by with either reading or writing. Many characters are rather obscure and rarely used.

That's still a HIGHLY impractical number

Actually, I would think that it would have the opposite impact. Confucianism has always been a very literary pursuit-- the greatest effect would most likely be an increase in applicants for the imperial examinations as more printing = cheaper texts to study by.

People don't like to relearn a writing system, I know i wouldn't stand for a new alphabet being brought in even if it was a better one, I'm too used to how it is now, very few people would be willing to put in the time and effort to learn a whole set of letters and of course spellings when the previous system more than suffices for their needs, basically the entire literate population would stand against the idea out of laziness, as happened in korea with hangul, you might be able to get women and previously illiterate people to take up the idea but it certainly wouldn't spread to the educated class, where all the power lies in the end, anyway wood block printing wasn't that innefective anyway

 

[MattyG]

I agree with Don Q, but I also think that a committed Emperor could push through a new writing system if he chose. Someone whose reign was long enough and who had enough authority. But it would still be an involved process.

I envisage something akin to the implementation of the Paper Dirham that Calipah and I worked on for the Abbasid Caliphate, wherein it takes generations to really see the benefits, but which can ultimately lead to a more dynamic and innovative culture which gains the latin tech group.

Let's remember that the Japanese have taken on four writing systems: katakana, hiragana, kanji (and, more recently romanji). Isolation (women developed hiragana and monks katakana) aids in the creation of new languages and writing style (and new species on plants and animals too).

Anyway, so, perhaps the emperor decrees that only poets, the classical texts and the court can use the traditional characters, and that a new writing system is for all legal documents and trade. Slowly but surely, the Han characters become only for the elites, the printing presses can work and literacy spreads.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

A new writing system could certainly be introduced to the working classes and merchants, but it would be an even more involved process than the paper dirham to be sure

 

[MattyG]

A new writing system could certainly be introduced to the working classes and merchants, but it would be an even more involved process than the paper dirham to be sure

Agreed.

But not necessarily longer.

There will be less resistence to something 'new' among those who are not literate in the first place. Unlike the dirham, which was being forced upon people who already had their established currencies and systems.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

I think we should take the lead of korean hangul, it was very succesful among the illiterate (particularly women) but it didn't lead to society wide revolution like similiar developments in literacy in europe as educated texts weren't put into the writing, and a variety of other reasons too which I can't think of.

EDIT: A new alphabet (or whatever you call it) could be tied to the muslims or christians in the area, who would both have brought religious texts in their respective scripts, or you could have them take the lead in writing from european visitors.

 

[MattyG]

I think we should take the lead of korean hangul, it was very succesful among the illiterate (particularly women) but it didn't lead to society wide revolution like similiar developments in literacy in europe as educated texts weren't put into the writing, and a variety of other reasons too which I can't think of.

That would be the steady approach, but this is Interregnum!!!!

OK, now I'm down off my high horse.

If that's the path we take, then it sort of takes us nowhere in the strategic level of this game. Which is fine, if that's what we want. But I'd much rather be able to offer a player with a hard-but-rewarding alternative if we can.

EDIT: A new alphabet (or whatever you call it) could be tied to the muslims or christians in the area, who would both have brought religious texts in their respective scripts, or you could have them take the lead in writing from european visitors.

Yes, this is very interesting. Perhaps, in a vein like the Japanese use of hiragana for foreign words, that the society adopts the new alphabet for foreign works - a kind of conservative approach - and that the alphabet becomes more popular via this, because people want to be able to read these texts, so they learn the alphabet. It then starts to take over, because of its simplicity and reproducability.

 

[Culise]

Curses, my post got deleted. Ah, suffice it to say, hangul got banned because of the Confucian elite, who saw one of the bases of their power being made available to the unwashed masses and womenfolk. Korea won't have nearly as strong a Confucian elite without the Joseon dynasty in power, which means less opposition and that if hangul is created (court notable and scholar Yi Do) it may last longer. In fact, it may serve to educate the basis of a new bureaucracy to replace the older, less efficient methods of governance. Extra irony points if the new bureaucracy is formed by neo-Confucian scholars leaping eagerly on the new methods to help show their usefulness to the crown. Wei is harder since the neo-Confucians are already established and entrenched only recently, but a ruler willing to brook no opposition and force its use on the educated classes might get somewhere. Either way, it will be popular among the commoners, and both might get a serious boost from the printing presses.

Creating a new alphabet for foreign languages seems odd. Katakana and hiragana, though only the former is used for foreign texts, were both derived from Chinese hanja/kanji, which were already being used in Japan. Most would simply use that foreign alphabet, as in romaji (Japan - globalization with the specific note of American English, German, and etc.) or Cyrillic (Eastern Europe - spreading of Old Church Slavonic rites).

 

[Don_Quigleone]

I think you hit the nail on the head there Mattyg, though I also support "radical" stuff, it can't be too implausible, I mean most people tend to get quite beholden to their writing scripts, so it would be a very difficult process if the educated elite remain in place, from the religion perspective we could have this happening in the southern chinese state with influences from islam (giving them a chance to move up a tech level maybe to orthodox...) or to the nestorian state (i don't remember their names , maybe giving them orthodox) I think the ming and song should probably stay conservative in this respect and not be given the option, though maybe later with european "influence"

Finally Korea should be given varied options with regard to Hangul, Culise may be correct in that it's morely likely to happen, but I don't know koreas lore well enough to be certain, I think Korea should move up to latin, cause it's home grown and non derivative, though they should have to do other things in combination with hangul (as should all the powers here, a new alphabet alone doesn't conferr any advantages, and on the flip side a new alphabet isn't strictly necessary either, I think characters could still serve well enough, a phonetic alphabet isn't inherently "superior" though I think it's better, though I may be biased also english isn't actually phonetic anyway, did you know english speaking children can be up to 2 years behind their peers in other countries because they have to spend so long learning spelling! But I think I've gone off the point...)

 

[siafu]

Wow, busy weekend here.

I very much disagree with the idea of introducing a new writing system, for two primary reasons.

The first is the less important: printing is not actually all that hard in Chinese. It's done in the modern day, and it was done in the 19th century extensively. While it's difficult in dealing with so many characters, any particular newspaper (for example) will only use about 3000-5000 with some extras, primarily in names of people and places. Additionally, such complications that exist in printing with the latin alphabet (leading, kerning, spacing, formatting) are not issues at all in Chinese-- every character takes up the exact same amount of space, and prior to modern times Chinese was completely free of punctuation so they could basically just produce page after page of flowing text. I know it sounds complicated to have to pick out characters from a table of 5000, but anyone who has ever done any printing or worked with publishing will appreciate the simplicity in the other aspects.

The second reason is that trying to implement alternate writing systems in China has been tried before, repeatedly, and failed. Khubilai Khan tried to introduce a phonetic script for Chinese that was modelled on Tibettan-- this was not adopted by anyone except for being used alongside Mongol and Chinese in certain official records. The second time was the introduction of the simplification table in the 20th century. The first simplification was proposed and introduced by the nationalist government, but was very minor. The more radical simplification was introduced by the communists, who saw it as the first step towards using ONLY pinyin in writing Chinese. The simplified character set (which is really not so simple, still around 30K characters) remains, but the goal of using pinyin was abandoned after great effort and great failure. The simple fact is that written Chinese is rather different from spoken Chinese and the attempts to unify the two invariably run into massive problems, particularly with the sheer number of homonyms that exist in Mandarin. Put simply, with Don Q's "upper bound" of about 50,000 characters, there are only about 60-70 possible syllables. Multiplied with the four tones (some don't have four, and there is also a rare "fifth" neutral tone so it balances out) there are some 240-280 possible syllables in Chinese (in English there are closer to 1000)-- this means that every syllable with its particular tone can be up to (50,000)/(280)=6250 different characters. Of course, most of those characters aren't used (there are, as mentioned, only abotu 20,000 in the 現代漢語詞典 ("Modern Chinese Language Dictionary")), and when speaking there exists plenty of context to tell them apart. When writing, however, the lack of context demands that characters be unique.

So, in short, I agree upon reflection that the printing press event should be a bigger deal than it is in all ways, I absolutely do not agree that a new writing system is a feasible alternative history solution. If the Communist regime couldn't force a new writing system on China, then it's not going to be done by any of the Imperial power we have in Interregnum.

As an aside, comparing Chinese writing to Japanese or Korean is a quite flawed idea. Japanese Kanji, for example, was a brute force attempt to adapt Chinese writing to Japanese-- these two languages are as different as English is from Hindi, and naturally it makes for a complicate and unsatisfactory result (i.e., this is why Kanji is not the preferred writing system in Japanese). The situation is similar for Korean, which is a close relative of Japanese. Chinese has no inflection, so discreet characters work well as a writing system-- it does not work well at all with other languages.

 

[siafu]

fu,

I have a problem with the printing press event. I just think that the 'results' of the event need more thinking through.

First, the printing press forever changed Europe, the ramifications were huge. How will it effect the whole of Asia?

Second, the follow-up event happens in only 4 years. This means that in four years the press was developed, implemented, massive numbers of books began being printed and lots of new academics arrived for the examinations.

I think that these events need the following:

1. A whole thread of its own about the potential impacts

2. A more thorough cycle of events exploring what gets decided from 1.

3. The events need to be province-based, rather than tied to Wei. At least, once the initial event to invest in it happens.

Matty

Well, since wood-cut printing had been in use in China for quite some time beforehand, and literacy was also generally more common in the East in this period than it was in Europe (i.e., not just monks and clerics) the impact would not be as huge. In particular, my thought was that the biggest impact would be to reduce the cost of books and texts by 1/3 to 1/2, which would increase the number of people who could afford them. Since the biggest barrier to the lower classes taking the imperial examinations was the cost of books (and the cost of time not spent working required to study them), and in general poor people always seek to become richer people, the effect would be to increase the number of applicants, as I mentioned.

Additionally, the effect on Confucianism would be altogether positive. Studying Confucian texts is akin to studying the "classics" in the west, like Plato, Aristotle, etc. The challenge, as it were, would be to the other major schools of thought in China, particularly Buddhism (big in Song), Daoism, and Legalism (which will be a big deal in Ming, I think), all of which to greater or lesser extents believe that knowledge is or can be dangerous in the hands of the common people. Daoists, for example, eschew science and engineering (particularly the latter) as being against nature, and Legalist doctrine portrays the people as being too stupid to manage themselves, therefore preferring them to be illiterate and subservient to a paternalistic government.

As for the rest of Asia...

I don't know much about society in Korea, but I would suggest that a traditionalist Japan (e.g. one run by the bakufu) would be very threatened by a rise in literacy. An interesting side idea, also, is that with an increased Muslim presence in China (which we have in Nanzhao, and potentially with the Hui dynasty), the prospects of movable type increase quite a bit-- Arabic script, for example, while not entirely suited to movable type (it certainly doesn't lend itself to flowing Khufic script) is much more amenable than Chinese. The result could be an introduction of the printing press in Nanzhao, Hui, and then Champa and Srivijaya slightly in advance of its historical introduction in Europe. I'm sore those more familiar with Arabic writing and Muslim history than I (Calipah? Ahmed?) could expand upon or denounce that idea.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

You're pretty much right Siafu though there are several things to consider in your argument

1. Yes they may have used movable type in the 19th century, but thats the 19th centurey which is considerably different from the 15th and 16th century, let's not forget that by this time china was under extensive influence from europe as well, it stands in history that they chose not to use movable type even when it was available to them, it must have been considerably problematic, problematic enough for them to choose to continue to use woodblock printing.

2. All those rulers tried to impose a new alphabet over the entirety of china, here the situation is considerably different in that china is very split up, and various parts of china are also under great influence from foreign powers as well, it's much easier to make large changes in a small country then a large one, the same applies anywhere, be it china, europe or kyrgazstan, so with all these small successor states wild occurences become all the more plausible

 

[siafu]

You're pretty much right Siafu though there are several things to consider in your argument

1. Yes they may have used movable type in the 19th century, but thats the 19th centurey which is considerably different from the 15th and 16th century, let's not forget that by this time china was under extensive influence from europe as well, it stands in history that they chose not to use movable type even when it was available to them, it must have been considerably problematic, problematic enough for them to choose to continue to use woodblock printing.

2. All those rulers tried to impose a new alphabet over the entirety of china, here the situation is considerably different in that china is very split up, and various parts of china are also under great influence from foreign powers as well, it's much easier to make large changes in a small country then a large one, the same applies anywhere, be it china, europe or kyrgazstan, so with all these small successor states wild occurences become all the more plausible

1. Well, as mentioned before, the Ming dynasty was not particularly known for fostering technology, and the Qing less so. Certainly they were under European influence by the 19th century, but I'm just citing the fact that movable type WAS used and made to work economically. The point, bringing these bits together, is that it seems entirely plausible that movable type could catch on if it only had a bit more support to implement it.

2. Yes, yes they did. Generally, though, new writing systems are incredibly hard to implement and have only truly worked well in cases where there either was no previous writing system available-- like the invention of Mongolian script, or the application of the Latin alphabet to English-- or where the locals are using a foreign script that is particularly maladapted or only writing in a foreign language-- like the introduction of the modern Vietnamese writing system. Obviously neither case applies to China, as its writing system has been in continuous development since the Shang period (~1000 BCE).

Even minor changes encounter heavy resistance, like the spelling reform in Germany, implemented in 1996 (which, btw, is only a part of the German-speaking world, so somewhat analogous to our divided China).

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Heck you're never gonna see spelling reform in english but let's not forget most of the population couldn't read anyway so it's not really the same, so if you have a state without much of an educated literate elite then it might be possible (and even then you have the case of hangul, though in korea chinese script wasn't suited to korean) however I'm really just playing devils advocate here, I don't think it's very likey either, but having movable type work in a meaningful way is almost equally improbable as don't forget that in the 19th century there was a raison d'etre for a movable type i.e. mass market newspapers which weren't really present before then in europe much less china