Pantokratocracy: Government by ruler of the world.
The Pantokratic Dominate of Emperor Pudu Jilang Shangjun XLII
The Dominate is a unique state in the world – both historically and presently. The monarchy that leads the Dominate today is more than four-thousand years ancient; the Dominate is a country of archaic culture and modern technology; a country of old monarchies and new ideas; the Dominate is a vast, storied land; it is a land of contradictions, and of mystery.
The Middle Prefecture
Geography:
Total Area: 145.124 million km2
Land: 144.16 million km2
Water: approximately 864,000 km2
Coastline: 200,000+ km
Territorial Sea: 250km
Contiguous Zone: 500km
Exclusive Economic Zone: 2000km
Climate: Ranges from arid steppes in the north to humid tropical and warm continental in the south. Summers are very warm in the southern areas, while northern winters can be very cold
Terrain: High mountains in the north bordered by arid desert, tropical rain forests on the central coasts, low mountains in the center and temperate grasslands in the south and eastern inland territories.
Highest Point: Lunkash Goddess 6,577 m
Lowest Point: salt flats -33 m
Natural Hazards: Floods, earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic activity in the Nantagh Mountains; monsoons, floods in the central jungle; fires, floods, earthquakes in southern plains
People:
Population: 16.68 billion (May 2012 estimate)
Age Structure:
0-14: 15%
14-65: ~84%
65+: >1%
Ethnicity/Race:
46% Farmer-caste Pudite
23% Artisan-caste Pudite
15% Merchant-caste Pudite
14% casteless population
2% Warrior-caste Pudite
~1% Noble-caste Pudite
(not including Khung ethnic groups, which may number as high as 800 million addition persons)
Literacy:
age 15 and over can both read and write: 37%
age 15 and over can only read: 55%
Major infectious diseases: Schistosomiasis, malaria, cholera among slave populations, various fever/influenza infections among compounds
Three largest cities (in order of population): Hollarum, Kuru, Athak
Economy:
Gross Domestic Product: 334.9 trillion
GDP per capita: $21,600
GDP by sector:
Agriculture: 16%
Industry: 66%
Service: 18%
Labor Force: 10.67 billion
Labor by occupation:
Agriculture: 34%
Industry: 59%
Service: 7%
Government Budget: 393.9 trillion
Agriculture Products: cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruits, beef, pork, milk, eggs, fish
Industries: All forms of machine construction, mining and resource processing equipment, shipbuilding, advanced electronics, medical and scientific instruments, rail transportation equipment, agricultural and construction equipment, textiles, foodstuffs
Exports: petroleum, natural gas, grain, tropical hardwoods, metals, chemicals, medicines
Imports: vehicles, electrical machinery, metal ores, fertilizer
Government:
Conventional Long Name: Pantokratic Dominate of Emperor Pudu Jilang XLII
Conventional Short Name: The Dominate, The Pantokratocracy
Government Type: Pantokratocracy
Capital: Hollarum / Administration Compound Zero-One
Administrative Divisions: 5 Prefectures (Middle [pictured above], South, North, East, Imperial), 10 Autonomous Cities
Political Units: The Imperial Government is a federal bureaucracy, it administers the Imperial Compounds, led by the Chancellor elected from the Senate, which is made up of a rotating selection of compound administrators. The Tongmenghui is a private assembly, it administers the ten autonomous cities of Hollarum, Kuru, Daram, Karal, Tablid, Nisi, Athuk, Shagal, Asral, and Nunkid led by the Chief Amban chosen by the Emperor, Tongmenghui is made up of all land-owning Noble-caste citizens of the Dominate.
Currency: gold crown
Military:
Manpower: approx. 500 million Imperial Armed Forces, approx. 100 million paramilitary
Branches: Imperial Army, Imperial Navy, Imperial Air Force, Imperial Guard all core military branches of Imperial Armed Forces administered by Imperial Government. Praetorian Guard, Iovani, Urban Cohorts, Equites, Frumentarii independent military arms administered by Tongmenghui. Comitatenses Palatini, Scholae Palatinae military organizations administered by the Imperial House.
Budget: 46.1% of government budget
The Imperial Compound System of the Pantokratic Dominate of Emperor Pudu
In 1973 the first of the "Citizen's Industrial Communities" opened its doors to house the employees of certain nationalized industries in a secure, localized, and comfortable way. The location was a centralized community designed to be nearly self-sufficient and able to sustain upwards of a hundred-thousand people. Construction of the Citizens Industrial Communities was motivated by the devastating civil war and ensuing chaos that dominated the 1960's. Citizens after the war were organized into “fraternal societies” in their communities and professions. Millions of unemployed people were put to work in the construction of the Citizen's Industrial Communities, and in less than a decade more than one-thousand compounds had been constructed, most sin the vicinity of the city of Hollarum and the Yourang Sea. Fraternal societies began to move into the compounds en-masse in the year 1975, and by 1980 tens of millions of citizens were occupants of the proto-compounds.
Construction continued at a rapid pace as many industries were wholly nationalized in the economic crisis of the 1980's, which lead to whole sectors of the economy being moved into the Citizens Industrial Communities. Those compounds which had been constructed continued to grow also, excavating sometimes kilometers of earth below the compound both to provide space for a growing population and increased security for vital industries. Geothermal, solar, wind, and nuclear energy powered the compounds, while the nation's oil, abundant natural gas, and coal continued to be used in the cities and towns of the empire. Food was produced hydroponically or farmed on the land directly surrounding the compound, if possible. Many compounds were highly specialized in their operations, including many which were devoted solely to administration of the others. The Public Fraternal Societies governed each compound and reported to the Imperial Government. Each compound sent an administrator to sit in the Imperial Senate.
In July 1984 Emperor Jilang Shangjun introduced a law to the Imperial Senate through Chancellor McDiarmid that scheduled the mandatory occupation of completed Citizens Industrial Communities by the remaining fraternal societies. The state-owned media and recent civil war left many willing to occupy the safety and supposed luxury of the government-run compounds, but many refused to move. The Autumn Rain is the name given to the period between July and December 1984 when the military was authorized to forcibly transfer any remaining lawbreakers to the citizen's communities. Not all citizens were required to move into the compounds, but so many were that among the remaining population there were not many who did not sympathize with or assist those who resisted the mandatory resettlement.
Millions died in the Autumn Rain, most executed by the army or Praetorian Guard. Millions more escaped the country or went into hiding in remote areas of the empire. Before the Autumn Rain there were more than six billion people living in the Pudite Empire. By January 1985 there were almost eight hundred million. Citizens who were moved into the compounds were primarily of the Farmer, Artisan, and Warrior caste. Countless towns and cities were completely depopulated by the Autumn Rain, and by 1985 there were only ten cities remaining in the nation. These ten cities became known as the Autonomous Cities and their population became Freemen, to differentiate them from the Citizens who resided in the now more than 4,000 compounds across the country. The government of the autonomous cities was made independent of the Imperial Government who administered the compounds, and while both remained subservient to the Emperor, they are still today two distinct political entities.
The first generation of “Citizens” in the compounds were quickly segregated into ghettos deep below the surface. Those who had moved in voluntarily prior to the Autumn Rain were not exempt. Clashes inside the compounds were not uncommon, but for the most part the population had already been defeated. Above the heads of the Citizens the next generation of compound-dwellers was being bred by the Imperial Government scientists. Fertility laboratories began to collect eggs and sperm from millions of Citizens and Freemen who were thought to have superior or otherwise desirable characteristics. From these generally favorable blueprints the next generation would be fabricated. Eggs were fertilized in laboratories and forcibly divided by artificial trauma to produce sometimes upward of one-hundred identical infants from a single pairing. These infants grew in artificial wombs and from their first day of life were raised inside the compounds, where they knew nothing else. Every one of them was infertile.
It took years to perfect the artificial reproduction and millions of fetuses were terminated in cases of genetic disease or other abnormality. Eventually the fertility laboratories had created standard models of each caste: Farmers grew to be very tall and strong, but were never allowed to develop their intellect, Artisans were smaller and received near immediate immersion and education in what would be their field of expertise, Warriors were physically relatively average but their training began literally at birth, forging them into formidable fighters. Other than members of the military, many Citizens of the compounds began to live lives totally underground, with no concept of the sun. Information is totally controlled and lives are regimented from minute to minute, with zero deviations. It is human efficiency, maximized.
History
The land that today is the Middle Prefecture has always been a crossroads; long fought over by many cultures, and throughout its history the sum of the territory has been under the control of nearly all of them.
Pre-history:
Twenty-thousand years ago nomadic tribes of people inhabited the northern hills and mountains of the western Rodinian continent. This Proto Lauro-Rodinian culture was the result of the human diaspora across Rodinia from the Laurasian continent that began thousands of years earlier. They were likely a maritime culture, arriving in boats across the Hidden Sea and spreading along the Rodinian coasts and rivers.
In the interior of the Rodinian continent the Proto Lauro-Rodinian culture developed into a family of related cultures which are broadly referred to as Kurgan cultures. The Kurgans were the inventors of the chariot, bit and harness for horses and were early metallurgists who worked copper. Burial mounds, animal sacrifice and horse burial were distinctive features of these cultures. The Kurgan were the likely ancestors of the Khottish, Groman and Coraxian cultures, among many others.
Certain Kurgan cultures domesticated wild pigs around 10,000 BCE as a result of living in close proximity to the animals along the many rivers of western Rodinia. The first permanent settlement by these people yet discovered was established along the Groma (now Xue) River. Archaeological dating has placed this village site around 10,000 BCE. The settlement of the previously nomadic peoples was likely a result of the drier climate in the region following the retreat of the ice sheets through the Dominate, about five-thousand years earlier.
The civilization that arose in the Groma river valleys first farmed millet around 9,500 BC, and settlements began to rise rapidly in the vicinity. Towns were small and centered around a common granary and public control of the irrigation systems. Records from this time are primarily economic and recorded through ideographic imprints on clay tablets. They documented the day-to-day trade within and between villages. Calendars began to appear, using a base-6 scale still used in the recording of time today. Towns were eventually brought under the influence of large centers of trade, these centers developed complex religions and standing armies to cement their control of the peripheral villages.
Circa 6,500 BCE rice was first domesticated south of the Nantagh Mountains, and the more intensive farming methods led to increased need for centralized government, land, and resources. The fertile geography south of the Nantagh range was such that sedentary farming did not become a necessity there until much later. The first large city on the southern Nantagh plateau was Kalim, settled first around 3200 BCE. It was a cultural and religious center, the only records of the time are hieroglyphs on the stone walls of temples and residences and they suggest a life dominated not by economics and politics but by tradition and spirituality.
West Rodinian Flowering: 4th millenia BCE
By the 4th millenia BCE there were three main centers of economic and political activity among the Bronze Age Groma culture: Abad, Rima, and Zuni. These cities vied for control of the smaller towns and cities but their influence was concentrated north of the Nantagh Mountains, which formed a natural southern extent for their interests. Hundreds of independent city states created an environment of sophisticated political and economic relationships. Cities with tens or even hundreds of thousands of residents arose and began to exert indirect control over large swathes of territory, forming the earliest empires on the Rodinian continent.
South of the Nantagh range the city of Kalim flourished for around six-hundred years, supported by a network of wet-rice farming and fishing villages. The culture that founded Kalim became known as the Khung, they traded with the Groma extensively and spread across much of south-western Rodinia. The Khung were the first to develop sailing ships which were used to trade up and down the many wide rivers of the south-western Rodinian plain. Khung urban planners were the earliest hydraulic engineers, making extensive use of sanitation and water supply systems.
Some time around 3000 BC ethnic Karasite islanders from the southern Agnito Sea began to appear along the southern coast of Rodinia. Archaeological evidence suggests that by 2600 BC the Karashan, a sedentary farming and fishing culture with ties to the Karasite islands, inhabited thousands of miles of coastline. Trade goods from the Groma city-states and Kalim to the north suggest contact was established quickly. This culture farmed millet and was distinctive for a high level of skill in pottery making. Their highly polished thin-walled black pottery eventually spread across Rodinia through trade. Toward the end of the Karashan culture the population declined sharply, matched by a gradual disappearance of the unique polished black pottery in ritual burials.
The Karashan culture established their first city at Nu where the earliest rammed earth walls and moats have been dated to approximately 2350 BC. The second major center of Karashan culture was Horai, founded sometime after 2227 BC. They brought with them an alphabet and they left many recordings. The earliest documents are largely political, usually announcements of a new king or other significant change in leadership. These things were tied into traditional belief systems and astronomical events, which can be used to date some events precisely. Scholars generally place the end of the Karashan Period in the 22nd century BC and the beginning of the Legendary Emperor's Period at the start of the Pudist dynasty.
The Numian and Horean cultures diverged at the end of the Karashan period; the pottery assemblages associated with Horean sites suggests that they stopped making the black pottery associated with the Numians at this time and switched to a less labor-intensive coarse, comb-decorated form of brown pottery. The Late-Karashan Horeans are associated with a de-emphasis on exploitation of coastal resources possibly caused by overfishing or over-farming of shellfish populations. The population moved inland. They began to subsist on hunting and gathering supplemented by small-scale horticulture and some shifting "slash-and-burn" agriculture techniques.
The Pudist dynasty: 2133BC - 1490BC
The Annals of the Kings of Nu is chronologically the earliest historical text and recounts the rulership of Nu between 2227 and 2084 BC. In particular, the Tale of Pudu of Nu describes a king of Nu as one of the Seven Sons of Heaven; it was Pudu of Nu who conquered the city of Horai and the other towns of the Zugen Sea beginning in 2133 BC. This is the first historical reference to the city of Horai. Doing so Pudu founded what became the Pudite Empire with its first capital in Nu. The Empire controlled most of the Zugen Sea and Agnito coast Karashan polities by 2115 and reached the Peng river by 2100 BC. Documents from the period assert that Pudu was the son of the god who had founded the city of Nu, and that his mother was the daughter of the same god, making Pudu the son and grandson of Heaven.
Between 2100 and 1800 BC the nascent Pudite Empire continued to expand northward, extending suzerainty over many Khung settlements south of the Nantagh range. In 2066 BCE a Pudist dynasty army of more than sixty-thousand sacked the city of Kalim and enslaved thousands of Khung. This began the Khung Diaspora across the Pudite cultural sphere, where they were traded as slaves from the Karasite islands to the Groma city-states and beyond.
The Pudite Empire quickly occupied most of the region of Kalium south of the Yourang and all of Numium. Around this time the Groma city states began to revolve solely around the city of Rima. The Riman and Pudite Empires continued to coexist for three centuries after the fall of Kalim. The cities of Nisi on the Tyrranus Sea and Asral on the Peng River were founded in this period, both thriving in the southern Nantagh plain in the power vacuum created by the fall of Kalim.
In the 18th century BCE the Pudist king Pudu VII crossed the Nantagh mountains and sacked dozens of Groma cities. Abad and Zuni were razed to the ground. Their locations remained lost until thousands of years later. During the siege of Rima the Pudist king was said to call upon his greatest magicians who summoned an avatar of their god who smashed apart the walls of Rima, to allow the Pudist armies to defeat the last Groma stronghold.
In 1718 BCE Pudu VIII, the son of the conquerer of Rima, established the city of Monglen on the Groma river, renamed the river Xue, after his wife, and moved the imperial Pudite capital north of the Nantagh mountains for the first time. This began the first of the large scale population migrations over the Nantagh Mountains into what would become known as Kursarrum.
The first eight Pudist emperors, from Pudu I to Pudu VIII, are remembered as the Legendary Emperors of the First Pudist Dynasty. Pudu VIII died in 1711 BCE without an heir, but his wife Xue inherited the throne and remarried to eventually produce the first emperor of the Second Pudist Dynasty, Pudu Hsieh Chu. Between 1711 and 1491 BCE three successive Pudist dynasties ruled, their sovereigns enjoying markedly shorter reigns than the first, pseudo-legendary emperors.
The Second Pudist Dynasty lasted from 1711 to 1665. Evidence in the archaeological record suggests that trade collapsed north of the Nantagh briefly during the end of the 2nd dynasty, which can probably be attributed to a war between Nisi and the capital of Monglen. From roughly 1650 to 1550 BCE the city of Nisi on the shore of the Tyrranus Sea effectively became the capital; the Third Pudist Dynasty arose in Nisi after the military defeat of an attacking force from Monglen in 1665 BC.
The 3rd dynasty ruled from 1665 to 1581 BC. The short line ended with the eccentric Emperor Yan. Yan moved the administrative capital from Nisi to the ruined city of Kalim, abandoned for almost 500 years, where he declared that he was the Sun God and Supreme Being and totally reordered the Imperial priesthood around him. As soon as Yan died the traditional priesthood based in Asral quickly reasserted their dominance and ordained a new Emperor.
The 4th dynasty began in 1581 BC and lasted until 1491. This dynasty is remembered for constructing the Great Wall to the east of Asral to defend against Khottish raids. The capital in Asral was connected to the empire by a vast network of canals as well as sophisticated roadways and systems of post and shipping. Large scale population movements took place at the direction of the central government in order to build the wall, which took more than a million workers to complete. Some speculate that the wall was equally intended to keep Pudite peasants in as to keep Khottish raiders out.
The Khottish Empire: ~1800 BC - ~650 BC
To the east of Numium there extends a vast expanse of steppe-lands known as Khottium, formerly inhabited by tribes from whom the Groma and Khung extorted tribute. The Khottish culture was heavily influenced by the Groman diaspora following the defeat of the Riman Empire. The city of Khot from which the culture takes its name is dated to around 1800 BC. The Khottish Empire which arose thereafter dominated Outer Khottium for centuries and fought many minor wars with the Pudite Empire.
For the next four-hundred years, a status quo was maintained, as the Khottish Empire and the Pudite Empire were both unable to eliminate the other. It was during the late Pudist dynasty period that the Great Wall was begun on the eastern borders of the Pudite Empire, dividing Numium and Kursarrum from Inner and Outer Khottium. The wall would eventually stretch thousands of miles north from the Agnito sea to finally cross the Nantagh mountains.
East of Khottium the city of Athuk was founded by a second wave of Karasite colonists, unrelated to the earlier Karashan culture, around 1700 BC and quickly flourished, trading and occasionally allying with or against the Khottish and the Pudite Empires. The region of the Agnito coast east of Numium became known as Athas and the colonists expanded east along the sea coasts and their cultural influence grew, independent from the Pudite Empire to the west.
The Khottish Empire began its decline around the year 800 BCE as the control from the city of Khot was harder and harder to enforce on increasingly factious local warlords throughout the empire. Eventually the Khottish Empire was reduced effectively to a city-state at Khot before it was finally sacked by Errican tribes in the 2nd century BC and Outer Khottium was lost. Inner Khottium, though nominally part of the Pudite Empire, broke free twice, once from the 7th to the 9th century and again in the 16th century for a brief period.
Three Kingdoms Period: 1490BC - 984BC
In the year 1490 BCE the last Pudist Emperor, Pudu Juaxian II, died and was left with no male heirs. The next Emperor, Xiang Tai, was believed to have been an influential courtier in Juaxian II’s court who rallied the standing Imperial Army to him and quickly subdued rival claimants, while alienating nobles far from the capital by demanding they travel to Monglen to render tribute to him.
Increased migration from the Karasite Archipelago to the south, many settling in and around Horai, put a strain on the agricultural reserves of the central government in this time of crisis, and Khottish warlords raiding the eastern border tied up valuable troops and resources indefinitely. In 1490, with the death of Emperor Pudu Juaxian II, Horai ceased to render taxes and levies to the Imperial government, effectively becoming independent. It joined the Xiang dynasty and the city of Athuk to make up the three kingdoms the period is named for.
The city of Athuk to the west of Horai, also independent of the Pudite central government at the time, sent ambassadors and trade vessels to the city in the Grand Gesture of Friendship in 1481 BCE. Records that survive in Athuk suggest as many as 10,000 people and 200 ships made the journey down the coast of the Agnito Sea bearing gold, platinum and many tons of fruits and grains. The city of Horai, already suffering from food shortages, survived a Khottish siege in 1455 BCE. After five months of siege an Athasian army arrived by sea to break the siege and relieve their beleaguered allies.
In 1438 the small navy of Horai, bolstered with the assistance of Athasian shipwrights, repulsed a large Xiang dynasty fleet from Nu which aimed to recapture the errant city. Archaeological surveys have located the site of the battle and findings suggest at least 500 wooden ships from that period were either sunk or scuttled at the site of the engagement. Horai never gained free access to the Zugen Sea, but their fleets similarly kept Pudite vessels from passing west toward Athuk and south toward the Karasite islands. This contributed to the internalization of trade in the Xiang dynasty and the eventual economic collapse that ended that dynasty.
For almost five centuries from 1490 to 984 BCE the native Karashan Geom dynasty ruled Horai and the surrounding Laipeng peninsula. They were ruled and protected by a caste of horse-riding professional warriors. The temperate, coastal climate made for fertile fields and allowed large-scale agriculture to support an still-growing population. This allowed them to support a standing army when their enemies often couldn't. The Laipeng peninsula is the only place in Rodina where dolmen graves can be found; megalithic stones stacked atop important grave sites. Horses, bows and bronze weapons are often buried along with their owners. Occasionally, horses have been found buried in dolmen graves alone or with their own grave goods, denoting their own important status.
The Xiang dynasty: 1491BC - 644BC
The Xiang Dynasty took the place of the 4th Pudist dynasty in 1490 BCE following the battle of Tiaoming, a city in northern Kalium south of the Nantagh range, where the armies of Xiang Tai defeated the last Pudist dynasty loyalists. Upon taking the Imperial rule Xiang Tai gave himself the additional family name Pudu as an honorific to cement his power, marking the transition of Pudu from cognamen of a dynasty to an imperial title in it's own right. From 1491 BCE onwards all Emperors of the greater Pudite territories would take on the honorific Pudu.
The Xiang Dynasty ruled from a series of seven capitals from 1491 BCE until 644 BCE, with their final center returning to the ancient city of Monglen. The Xiang Emperors ruled over much of western Rodinia, as far north as the Lunkash Mountaints. The ancient districts of Kursarrum, Numium, and Kalium comprised the Xiang dynasty empire. Their influence and political control extended farther inland than any previous Pudite ruler. Although Horai on the Laipeng peninsula initially succeeded in breaking away from the Xiang dynasty in 1490, it was brought back into the fold five hundred years later.
The Geom dynasty was brought to an end by the expedition of the last of the so-called Great Yong's, Emperor Xiang Yong Pudu III, who besieged Horai in 984 BCE. Xiang Yong Pudu III was himself killed in the battle while scaling the walls of the city, but Horai was eventually captured and the Geom family decimated by the victorious Pudite armies. The city was returned to Xiang control. In addition to subduing Horai, Xiang Emperors frequently sent troops against Khottish-aligned warlords to the east and the scattered barbarian tribes of Corras to the north. In 850 BCE Emperor Pudu Xiang Wu lead 300,000 Xiang troops deep into Corras in a campaign against the barbarians. He returned with gold and slaves and had begun the Pudite interest in their northern neighbors.
Trade in the Xiang dynasty was very internalized, with ever decreasing trade affiliations with the Karasite islands. High taxes to finance the first centralized banking system in the Pudite Empire, as well as a series of bad crop years, caused an upwelling of peasant mistrust and anger with the Imperial House. The dynasty eventually fell when the last Xiang Emperor committed suicide during the siege of the Imperial Palace in Monglen following a rebellion led by a prominent aristocrat, Cheng Yin. The body of the last Xiang Emperor was never located.
The Yin dynasty: 644BC - 461BC
Territorial extent of the Yin dynasty
The Yin Dynasty was a period of intellectual flowering, where the ancient Pudite script was developed to its first pre-modern stages. Mathematical and scientific advances were many as well, and under the Yin Dynasty the Empire extended all the way across the Nantagh mountains south of Monglen to the southern coast of Rodinia to the Hidden Sea for the first time. The Yin Dynasty also made many advances in the centralization of government, instituting uniform tax and property regulations following the scandals caused by rampant Xiang taxation. In 611 BC the second Yin emperor conquered the city of Athuk, bringing the ancient Karasite colony under the control of the Pudite Empire for the first time.
One of the most important works of ancient Pudite scholarship was the series of encyclopedias known as the Great Books of Master Shen, or the Shenzi. These encyclopedias covered many important topics of the time, including a limited history, science, alchemy, astronomy, botany, geneologies of important families, metallurgy, military strategy, and the production of many goods such as paper, oil, and ceramics.
The Yin Emperors also began a massive series of canal projects, connecting many major rivers and providing irrigation to many millions of citizens whom had previously been dependent on the sporadic rainfall. Yin central planners embarked on large-scale land reforms, giving millions of impoverished peasants now-fertile land to farm, and the country's economy and granaries benefited immensely from these changes. Food was in surplus, and many towns became more centralized by the beginnings of communal granaries and militias to protect the stores full-time.
North and South Yin and the Long Winter Period: 461BC - 108BC
The Yin line, however was split in 461 BCE when a widowed Empress and her father sacked the capital at Monglen and proclaimed the former Empress's brother Yin Sunshu the new Emperor. This event has inspired a classic dramatic opera following the conspiracies of the dead Emperor’s children to kill and replace him, which in the end they all fail to do, as their uncle takes the throne.
The Long Winter period
The Empire was divided into the North Yin and South Yin kingdoms, with Yin Sunshu ruling from Monglen and a coalition of loyalist nobles ruling from the ancient city of Nu in the south. These nobles had with them Yin Song Xing, the son of the murdered emperor, and they ruled the southern Yin kingdom through him. With the Yin court diminished the fragmentation of the kingdoms accelerated, from Emperor Yin Sunshu onwards the Yin kings ruled the whole Empire in name only.
True power rested in the hands of powerful local nobles, many of whom were upset with the central government following the massive land redistribution of earlier years. During these years it was common for more than one claimant to rise and attempt to seize Imperial power. Between 335 BCE and 108 BCE, there was a series of states rising to prominence within the territorial confines of the former Yin Dynasty, which were always in conflict. This is known as the Long Winter period.
The Zhu dynasty: 122BC - 464 CE
Throughout the fracturing of the Yin dynasty the city of Athuk, nominally loyal to the Pudite Empire, remained neutral. The city remained the cultural and economic center of the region of Athas, which became nominally independent. The city of Athuk funded colonists who founded many city states loyal to the Athasians across the Agnito Sea. In 122 BC a local nobleman and general called Huang Tangzhu succeeded to the throne of Athuk and immediately attacked Karal, his northern neighbor and a Khottish-aligned city-state. Tangzhu successfully conquered the city and enslaved much of its population, distributing them to various Athasian colonies across the Agnito Sea. These colonies provided him with further armies, which he used to inflict a second humiliating defeat on the Khottish, who then signed a peace treaty with the young king.
At this point Tangzhu's nominal Yin dynasty master in Monglen decided that Tangzhu was a threat to the throne and declared him a criminal and sentenced him to death. Tangzhu avoided the Imperial assassins and began to march his strong Athasian force against his former master. His first target was the ancient city of Nu where in 118 BC he routed the oligarchs there and claimed the Hewn Throne for himself. After a ten-year campaign across Khottium, Numium, and Kurassrum the newly crowned Emperor Tangzhu had captured Monglen and reunited much of the former Yin territories under his control.
The Zhu Dynasty ruled the Empire under a time of great technological and scientific advancement, and their rule saw the establishment of the Pudite Empire as a great civilization. The greatest cities, artwork, and thinkers of Pudite classic history came out of this period, including the founding of Hollarum and Shagal. The founding of Hollarum has since been used as Year 1 in the Pudite calendar. Also, the territorial advancement of the Zhu Dynasty surpassed for the first time in six centuries the largest reaches of the first Pudite Dynasty. The Zhu navy too, stretched the borders of understanding, adding new territory to the map in all directions.
The Spring of Zhu
It was during the rule of the Zhu Dynasty, in the third century CE, that the largest wave of immigration since the Pudists arrived on Rodinian shores, first in the ports of Daram. These people called themselves the Peregrini (or alternately the Dumani or Tyrrhenians) where they landed inside the Empire. They eventually were referred to by their Pudite name, the Sun. Their arrival found the Zhu Dynasty in full bloom, and they were welcomed by a cosmopolitan market society. For the next two centuries, their people came in greater and greater numbers, finding such a prosperous and peaceful country was a great boon to them, and their goods and labor was a boon to their Pudite hosts. Sun neighborhoods were common in every major Pudite city, with the largest communities in Hollarum and Daram. The Sun people in Daram became associated with the Dumani name, those in Kursarrum with the Peregrini name, while the Sun populations of Kalium and Numium became associated with the Tyrrhenian name. All were known to eachother as Peregrini and to everyone else as Sun.
The Peregrini had come from the West, they were of olive-skinned and slender stock, and spoke a tongue foreign to all Pudite citizens. However, they were intelligent and adapted quickly. The founded the city of Ulben east of Daram and many other important cities across the Yourang.
Time of Two Emperors: 464CE - 476 CE
In 464CE Emperor Pudu Zhu Shang died in his sleep. It is thought that he may have been poisoned by one of the Peregrini in his court, although it is uncertain that he did not simply die of his advanced age. Even as his son, Zhu Yi Sheng, was preparing to be crowned Emperor Pudu Zhu Yi in Monglen, the Peregrini noble Domitian had himself crowned 'Emperor Pudu Domitian' in the largely ethnically Peregrini city of Daram, claiming Zhu Yi Sheng was an illegitimate child and the Emperor had left no heirs. The cities of Horai and Athuk used the opportunity to once again assert their independence.
Quickly, the Peregrini population mobilized behind their new Emperor. The Peregrini lived largely in Kursarrum and western Kalium and many nobles of these areas supported Pudu Domitian's claim. The Peregrini capital was located in Daram, and later in Hollarum. It was Domitian who established the now-preeminent Praetorian Guard, as personal soldiers and protectors of the Emperor, following his turbulent enthronement. The Praetorians are to this day headquartered in Daram.
The Pudite Emperor Zhu Yi of the legitimate Zhu dynasty held sway over Numium and eastern Kalium, a land of thick jungles and great plains. He moved his capital to the original Pudist dynasty imperial city of Nu. The defensive position of Emperor Pudu Domitian north of the Yourang and the Nantagh mountains meant that for a Zhu force to attack him it would have to pass up the mountain rivers, which the Peregrini ships controlled. Likewise, the Peregrini could not initially hope to outnumber and defeat the Zhu on their own open territory, so there was a grudging status quo for over a decade.
The decisive battle of the conflict came when Emperor Pudu Domition finally mustered a large Peregrini and auxiliary force and marched on the city of Nu in the late summer of 476 CE. He was met in a field at the northern end of the Zhu domain by force of light infantry and cavalry. The battle was fought with armies numbering more than a million to a side and was waged over five days in August. Pudu Domitian's forces proved stronger and Pudu Zhu Yi was captured and forced to march in a Peregrini triumph through the streets of Daram. The battle is known as the Battle of a Million Broken Spears.
The Peregrini (Sun) dynasty: 476CE - 1603CE
With a Peregrini victory over the Zhu armies, Emperor Pudu Domitian marched south, and sacked the ancient capital at Nu, never to be rebuilt. The Hewn Throne, the ancient monolith carved from living stone in the center of Nu, was hacked from the floor and carried to Hollarum. Now the Pudite - the Peregrini - court would be held at Hollarum, where it remains to the present day. By the time of his death Emperor Pudu Domitian ruled an empire consisting of nearly the entire modern extent of the Middle Prefecture. Barbarian warlords in Corras and Khottium continued to harass the empire throughout the Sun reign, however, and fear of these barbarian invasions probably motivated the Sun expansionist policies more than anything else.
The new Peregrini dynasty extended the borders of the Pudite Empire to the south, conquering all the cities of Athas, including the ancient regional capital of Athuk in 558 AD, for the first time it had been besieged in almost a thousand years. The Pudite Empire then inherited a number of small city-states along the north-western Laurasian coast, which the Peregrini exploited greedily.
In 685 CE the Khottish city of Karal attacked a city under the suzerainty of Athuk, leading to a conflict between the two cities and eventually, the Pudite Empire and the Khottish warlords who united in the face of the threat. The Khottish Empire, under a sequence of these powerful and charismatic warlords, conquered Athuk in 726 CE and Kuru, the largest Laurasian colony, in 755. The Khottians dominated all of Inner and parts of Outer Khottium by 800. The Sun dynasty began to pay off the Khottians with payments of gold and slaves, until in 857 General Wang Yun raised an army in Numium, marched east and captured the city of Karal and sent the Khottish emperor back to Hollarum as a hostage. The wars had cost the Sun dynasty their colonies on Laurasia, however, all of whom ceased to send annual taxes and tribute to the capital.
In the 15th century the Sun Emperors began to finance large overseas trading expeditions using newly developed naval and navigational technology. Pudite colonies emerged as distantly as Memnonia, Tyrrhenia. and Sobeon and all along the northern and western coasts of Laurasia. These colonies would be a military tarpit, forcing the central government to continually fund foreign wars as well as care for the internal affairs of an empire with a population in the tens of millions.
In the 1550's the barbarian armies of the Khottish began to unify again, as a legendary chief rose to command the many disparate tribes. The Pudite records of the time refer to this leader as “Niu Mo Wang”, or literally, “Bull demon-king.” Through force and subtlety, the tribes of Khottium were unified under the Bull Demon King, who personally led the first Khottish raid across the Peng river in more than a half a century, sacking Asral. The Bull Demon King proved capable and defeated a succession of Pudite generals who were pitted against him.
By 1560 the Peregrini dynasty was more than twelve-hundred years old and facing instability at home as well as abroad; the pressures of the unified tribes of Niu Mo Wang pushed their way over the wall, and thousands of years of rivalries and oppression at home finally began to overflow. Rebels sacked Hollarum in 1566 and Niu Mo Wang did it again in 1598, and in 1603 CE the final Peregrini emperor died, childless and in his sleep.
The Shun dynasty: 1603CE - 1886CE
When the last Peregrini emperor died the warlord Niu Mo Wang claimed the throne, declaring the city of Karal in eastern Khottium to be his capital. The resulting conflict between the government in Kursarrum and the Khottish pretender blossomed into a seventeen-year period of civil war as many border settlements in Numium and Athas pledged allegiance to the Bull Demon King. It was Shun Li Song who took the throne at the end of the Peregrini dynasty, an adopted relative of the Imperial family who had been very influential at the end of the previous reign. During the time of civil war the capital was moved by Shun Li Song from Hollarum, and effectively traveled to wherever the Pudite emperor at the time held court.
The Khottish and rebellious Pudite forces though did not have the reach to occupy the whole of the Pudite Empire, and in 1620 Emperor Pudu Shun Li faced the Bull Demon King in decisive battle outside Athuk and routed his forces. The man Niu Mo Wang was not captured or found among the dead, but he never resurfaced to challenge the Empire again. What had been accomplished by the Bull-Demon King was to last however, as the Great Wall was finally overcome. The Shun dynasty was too poor and internalized to rebuild the fortifications and was afflicted with greater banditry and harassment on the eastern and northern frontiers.
During the almost three-hundred year reign of the Shun line the Pudite Empire became increasingly active in the global trade of the period. The Peregrini emperors had opened the Empire to foreign goods and markets, but during the reign of the Shun emperors there emerged the technology and information to trade further and more effectively than ever before. Pudite trade fleets were organized by the Emperor in order to legitimize the new Shun dynasty by establishing relations with as many foreign governments as possible. Massive fleets of hundreds of vessels and tens of thousands of men traveled east, south, and west from Daram, the center of the Pudite shipbuilding industry. Pudite traders and diplomats traveled as far as Parthia in Gholgoth and founded the colony of Shen Almaru. To the west the Pudite traders discovered Builder's Bay on the east coast of Tau and left trading posts throughout the Khanty and Rheic oceans. These trading fleets diminished and were eventually discontinued in the early 1700's.
In the early 1800's the peasant class was agitated by decades of poor harvests and widespread disease and invigorated by a series of local rebellions in which communist agitators seized the grain harvests and captured tax revenues to redistribute to the poor farmers. In the spring of 1816, after a spate of these attacks greatly diminishing the 1815 harvest the autumn before, Emperor Shun Jin accepted a program of democratic reforms lobbied to him by various left-wing agrarian movements. He founded the Tongmenghui, or literally, council for liberation, and allowed each district in the Empire to elect one delegate and send them to the capital. Many groups which had originally brought the idea to the Emperor immidiately rejected his efforts as not going far enough toward ending the plight of the peasant class and the 1820s and '30s saw a dramatic rise in popular unrest in the countryside. The next two decades saw widespread civil war where both sides, the peasant rebels and the Shun government hired Coraxian and Karasite mercenaries to fight, both using silver from the newly discovered silver mines in the north-eastern province of Corras, an important strategic area during the conflict.
In 1832 a Karasite warlord paid in Imperial silver bullion razed the city of Nisi in western Kalium nearly to the ground. An estimated two million people were killed or died in the fires that swept the city. After the massacre the many peasant paramilitary groups, largely broke, elected to come together to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Kursarrum and started to place candidates in elections to the Tongmenghui, starting in the 1938 National Election and had assembled a strong majority by the 1870's.
The Imperial Government was saddled with the incredible war debt of both sides and for decades, until the 1886 revolution, would export thousands of tons of gold and especially silver bullion to various Karasite and Coraxian warlords. In the end the Shun dynasty was undermined by the severe decrease in the production of silver coinage and their inability to raise money from a poverty-stricken populace, and this fact combined with several years of crop failures resulting from over salinization of the now heavily irrigated countryside along with several epidemics weakened the central government immeasurably. The peasant class was invigorated by popular protest and religious movements and revolts began across the countryside, starting in the 1880's and culminating in a popular socialist revolution against the monarchy. The PFLK walked out of the Tongmenghui when the Emperor censured the body after their protests against the Emperor's use of force against the protesters in Hollarum. They then played an important role in organizing the revolution.
The penultimate Shun Emperor was assassinated in 1886 while inspecting troops garrisoned in Hollarum. A cadre of officers was hung weeks later for allegedly plotting the assassination, but the act did nothing to empower the failing central bureaucracy. In 1887 Jilang Song, an officer in the Imperial Army, declared a socialist republic in Hollarum and declared war on the Imperial monarchy. The last Shun Emperor, Shun Gao, a fourteen year old boy, abdicated the throne in 1900 and fled the country. The Shun dynasty was over.
The Jilang dynasty: 1886CE - present
Jilang Song's revolution began among the Army but quickly spread to the people, Song himself traveled the countryside rallying support among those whom he could influence, and eradicating those he couldn't. Song's revolution began in 1886 and lasted fourteen years until turn of the century; the Praetorian Guard signed a peace treaty with Song in 1897 and the remnants of the Army not loyal to Song by 1900 had either been imprisoned, killed, or gone underground.
Song reorganized the government, redistricting the regionally elected Ambans of the Tongmenghui and granted suffrage to rural peasants and at the same time rescinded the suffrage of what his government termed counterrevolutionary sympathizers. He re-founding the senate as the "People's Senate" (as opposed to the "Imperial Senate") and ensuring the two were equal parts of the legislature, while introducing elections for the supreme executive position. In 1900 Jilang Song's revolutionary party was elected to control of the Senate and Song himself was elected to the imperial throne. Song never used the title Emperor, calling himself Marshal Song throughout his rule. The three 7-year periods between 1900 and 1921 were known as the Three Abundances, when agricultural reforms resulted in huge grain harvests. In 1901 Song ordered the design and founding of an entirely new city, to be built with socialist principles from the ground up. By 1919 the city of Songingrad was well underway, more than a million people were resettled in and around Songingrad. Marshal Song died in 1922 and his son Jilang Zong immediately seized power, deploying the Praetorian Guard to the streets in Daram, Hollarum, and Songingrad and posthumously delcaring that his father had been Emperor and he was inheriting the title.
Emperor Zong ruled the country until he abdicated in favor of his song Shen in 1953. Zong died in 1956. Under his reign corruption flourished and many of the pre-revolutionary officials returned to work and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Kursarrum, the agrarian left-wing coalition party that had supported Marshal Song, lost their monopoly on seats in the Tongmenghui for the first time in two decades. Monarchist and other right-wing parties gained seats slowly and steadily until the PFLK had lost the majority in the Tongmenghui with the 1942 National Elections. Jilang Shen took power from his father in 1953 in a landscape of increasing political turmoil. The PFLK agitated for intervention in the Gothic Wars to support the communist factions while the monarchists argued exactly the opposite in favor of the Gothic Empire. The economy had stagnated under Zong's mismanagement and millions of people were out of work and starving.
In 1957 CE a rebel group within the Jilang Dynasty detonated a small bomb in the capital city of Hollarum, killing the Chancellor of the Senate. This event was part of a trend emerging in the Empire; in 1959, demonstrations in the capital railing against near-slavery conditions and flagrant government cruelties engendered the violence that became the February Revolution. Massive crowds of democratically-minded, well-armed rebels rose up in cities all across the nation.
Organized rioters and protestors seized government buildings and raided armories. Within a few weeks in early February hundreds of thousands died in battles between rebels and government forces. Not all soldiers remained loyal, however, and it was the army garrison in Hollarum turning against the Emperor that turned the tide and resulted in the flight of the Imperial family and the sacking of the Emperor's government. Emperor Shen fled the capital with the Praetorian Guard and his palace was ransacked. He was popularly assumed to have abdicated the throne.
Emperor Shen escaped the capital and, with his young son Jilang Shangjun, rallied loyal military forces to him, capturing a number of cities along the Xue river for the monarchy. In September of 1959 and with the help of the Praetorian Guard, loyalist forces besieged Shagal. Inside the city the local revolutionary government was faltering, and civil disturbances and riots plagued the poorly-organized defenders of the city. With winter on the way and monarchist forces low on supplies Emperor Shen ordered that the city, which he thought weak, to be attacked on October 16th. Despite their differences, however, the defenders of Shagal rebuffed the initial Praetorian and loyalist attacks, inflicting heavy casualties. After two weeks of fighting enough of the city was captured that Shen moved his field headquarters into the municipal palace of Shagal and declared this, the largest city yet recaptured by the loyalist forces, to be the capital. On November 22nd a bomb exploded in the palace, killing Emperor Shen and many of his military commanders.
Shen's son Shangjun, only 19 when his father died, was proclaimed by the monarchist forces to be the successor to the throne and rallied to his banner. The winter of 1959 to 1960 in Shagal is known as the Longest Winter, because in response to his father's assassination he established the Civil Tranquility Auspice, an administration which arrested and killed more than 20,000 suspected rebels and traitors in Shagal. In the spring of 1960 Shagal was the only major city under the complete control of the Imperial Government. After fighting a protracted insurgency against the revolutionary forces along the Xue River, Shangjun marched north and besieged the capital of Hollarum.
The Emperor took the throne again the day of the surrender of Hollarum, on January 22nd 1961. It would take three years for the Senate and Tongmenghui to reconvene. The nation was splintered, and in many places the government's infrastructure and organization had been eviscerated. It took the Imperial Armed Forces until 1965 to regain control of the whole of the country. During this time period Emperor Jilang Shangjun initiated massive reorganization of the imperial government, and civil reconstruction on a massive scale. In 1968 the first of the so-called "Citizen's Industrial Communities" opened its doors to house the employees of certain nationalized industries in a secure, localized, and comfortable way. These employees naturally were moved into the large compounds with their families.
Throughout the late 1960's and early 1970's the newly ordained Imperial Government, which had been severed from the now-independent Tongmenghui, had been occupied with the organization of "Public Fraternal Societies". These societies were the basis of local government in the Empire. At the same time massive public works projects returned a generation and class of people devastated by civil war to work. Almost all of these projects involved the construction of Citizen's Industrial Communities.
In January 1984 Emperor Jilang Shangjun introduced a law to the Imperial Senate through Chancellor McDiarmid that scheduled the occupation of completed Citizens Industrial Communities by the fraternal societies. The state-owned media and recent civil war left many willing to occupy the safety and supposed luxury of the government-run compounds, but many refused to move. The Autumn Rain is the name given to the period between July and November 1984 when the military was authorized to forcibly transfer any remaining lawbreakers to the citizen's communities.
Millions died in the Autumn Rain, most executed by the army or Praetorian Guard. Millions more escaped the grasp of the military and avoided compound-life, either by fleeing abroad or evading the government internally. Before the Autumn Rain there were more than 6 billion people living in the Pudite Empire, and by the year 1990 that population had decreased to just over 3 billion. In past decades however more aggressive breeding and construction of new compounds has exponentially increased the population of the Empire.