Write a realistic, plausible alternate history scenario in the form of a history book chapter completely set in the world of the alternate history scenario with absolutely no references to real life, OTL or that this is even an alternate history timeline at all, in which the following events all occur in this same timeline:

First Period [16th to 17th century]: Japan and North Asia

By the time European explorers arrived in Nihon in 1547 AD, the country had been wracked by the warlord period known as the Sengoku Jidai for 80 years of endless war. As nearly every clan fought each other for supremacy, the Empire's central government was almost non-existent.

In theory, the Shogun held the real political power while the Emperor had almost no authority aside from partaking in specific rituals, but in practice the Ashikaga Shogunate had almost no power at all, unable to wield authority outside of the imperial capital of Kyoto.

That being said, the Shogun still had a good deal of authority if not direct power, mostly in being able to direct the local Daimyo on how to interact with the outside world.

In particular, the Shogun declared that the Europeans, who came not just to trade but to play their political games and evangelize their people to their Christian faith, would be banned from trade in Nihon with two exceptions: the Portuguese and the Hapsburg-ruled, Austrian dominated Holy Roman Empire, though they should not be seen as equals, as the Portuguese were allowed trade in only two ports, while the Holy Roman Empire under the Hapsburgs had access to seven.

And even with this, much would change.

While the Portuguese sought to expand both Christian influence and their own political influence in Nihon , the Austrians took an interest in the continuing situation of the war, documenting and reporting on every aspect of it, as well as Nihonese culture, history, and traditions.

This willingness to see the Nihon as equals captured the interest of both the Shogunate and the Emperor, both of whom invited Celtic ambassadors to their courts.

In 1557, Emperor Ōgimachi came to the throne at the age of 30 on the death of his father.

Having spent the last decade becoming familiar with the Western European ambassadors to the Nihonese, he was growing increasingly frustrated with the level of destruction that the endless civil war in Nihon had inflicted on the country.

Not long after his coronation, he met with them in secret, and gave them an offer: in exchange for their assistance in overthrowing the Shogun and reunifying the country under the Emperor's rule, he would grant exclusive trading rights to the Holy Roman Empire and and become a partner to it in East Asia.

After the message was returned to then-Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he was eager to accept if it meant having a partner in the Orient the way that the Poles had become their partners in Eastern Europe against the Rurikids and later on the Slavs.

For the next decade, advisers surreptitiously leaked knowledge, weapons, and supplies to the Imperial Court, all the while presenting a friendly face to the Shogun, who had instead begun a tentative partnership with the Portuguese.

In the year 1568 CY, as events in Europe began to spiral increasingly toward war between the Catholics and Reformists both in the RCC and the Protestant movement, the Celts were increasingly focusing themselves on matters abroad, and the chance for Ōgimachi to strike had come.

That year, Shogun Yoshinaga had died unexpectedly after a 9 month reign, and an increasingly powerful Daimyo named Oda Nobunaga and his Tokugawa alles marched their armies victoriously into Kyoto to declare his allegiance to the Emperor.

The time to act had come.

Acting with both the support of the Holy Roman Empire and Oda, Ōgimachi issued an edict declaring Oda Nobunaga as the new Shogun, though reduced greatly in power from that of the Ashikaga, and immediately moved to quell dissent from forces that, despite nominally being loyal to the Emperor, saw the move as Oda Nobunaga trying to seize power through a puppet Emperor and thus moved against him.

For fifteen further years, the Sengoku Jidai entered into its endgame, though by now it was a much more solidly-defined civil war.

On one side was the Imperial Court, and on the other were the opposition Daimyo. After more than 100 years of fighting, the nation was exhausted, but after long last in 1583, the Emperor and his court were victorious.

For the first time in centuries, Nihon was truly under the authority of a civilian government, the last period having been the brief Kenmu Restoration in the 1310s AD.

With a triumvirate of Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi now working as civilian administrators subordinate to the Emperor, Ōgimachi would spend the waning years of his life reforming the Empire away from the feudal system of the old government to a new, more centralized model based off of Holy Roman and French lines, quelling the now powerless Daimyo the way the Holy Roman Empire had placated both the Old Romans and the German tribes by creating the Gikai, a parliament in which they would be allowed to represent themselves and their interests, but unlike the Holy Roman Imperial Diet it had little real authority as compared to the Emperor.

And now we arrive in the year 1600.

Ōgimachi is dead, replaced by the younger son of his only son, who now reigns as Hachijō, the 107th Emperor of Nihon.

Having been at peace for 17 years, the scars of the Sengoku Jidai, which had lasted for about 116 years, still run deep and are not easily healed.

The large-scale political reforms of the Ōgimachi Restoration are still in flux, with threats from Daimyo unhappy with their loss of authority, to Samurai demanding their traditional place as the Empire's army be maintained, to a newly emboldened peasantry that has become resentful of the long-imposed caste system in Nihonese society.

True to their deal, the Nihonese have forbidden all European merchants save for the Holy Roman Empire from their ports, and now the Austrians prosper massively from trade in fine Nihonese silks, teas, and porcelains.

Europe, however, is not pleased, and seeks some means of wedging their foot in the door to re-open the nation to their merchants and missionaries. Perhaps most interestingly, however, is the growing plans of many in the Imperial Government.


In the course of the last 10 years the Empire of Nihon has seen an astronomical level of growth in all directions. Not just has it managed to subjugate the Great Joeson State ruled by the Han Chinese-Korean Royal House of Jeonju Yi in Korea but it has expanded its influence into all of the surrounding islands and even gone so far as to extend its influence across the entirety of the Pacific Ocean.

With the Sengoku Era now more than 60 years distant, Nihon's reconstitution into a strong, unified empire is clearly paying off in spades. The meteoric growth of Nihon as a rising power in East Asia is almost unprecedented.

Prior to the modern age Nihon had been a divided, feudal nation that had only briefly been involved in skirmishes with Korea and China, ultimately falling back to its home islands every time.

This period would die in the hundred year conflict of the Sengoku Era, when at the end Emperor Ogimachi re-asserted imperial control and broke the power of the Daimyo.

Now with its resources fully behind the ageing Emperor Hachijō's projects to make Nihon the new arbiter of power in East Asia, it is well on its way to achieving such a goal.

Hideyoshi wins a surprising set of victories in his invasion of Korea, allowing him to annex the peninusla in its entirety by 1599.

Instead of taking the Joseon monarch as a vassal, Hideyoshi is forced to distribute land among the invading daimyos in order to keep their loyalty, effectively turning Korea into a new "island" of Japan.

Ming's defeat in Korea sets off a series of internal conflicts within China that ultimately weakens their military.

Combined with a series of natural and agricultural disasters in the late 1590s, the Ming forces are unable to stop the Japanese advance on Beijing and later Nanjing.


The rest of its expansion has been relatively less dramatic. The islands of the wider Nihonese Archipelago are mostly smaller and less populated, dominated by the Ryukyuans in the south and the Aynu in the north.

To the north the islands of Chishima and Kitaezo were less subjugated by main force and more the local tribes being absorbed into the Imperial sphere through tribute missions and offers of protection.

Ryukyu meanwhile did involve some military action but this was largely a symbolic act, as Ryukyu had historically relied on China for protection but with the Ming rapidly deteriorating as the Jurchen tribes of Manchuria planned to claim the mandate of Heaven, King Shō Ken willingly agreed to submit to Nihonese overlordship as a vassal, saving his kingdom from prolonged military action.

Taiyowan [Taiwan] is a different story.

Unlike the others, the island is further to the south from Nihon's main territory and a much larger island with rougher terrain, particularly in the east. Initial landings began at the northern end in 1638, and the wider coastal plain facing the mainland was mostly captured within several months.

Most of the region's population was made of Hoklo settlers from the provinces of Han China near Cantonia and a few Han Chinese, some of whom were resistant but enough joined as collaborators to the new administration to legitimize the occupation.

The real issue was the mountainous east, where many native Taiyowanese groups had taken refuge and actively fought against both Nihonese and Chinese alike, forcing the invasion force there to mire itself in a prolonged campaign against the Taiyowanese tactics of guerrilla warfare, using the mountains to constantly harass and Nihonese forces.

Second Period: Indochina/Cantonia [early to mid 19th century]

The history of the Empire of Vietnam's post-1802, current reigning imperial family of the Imperial House of Nguyễn is one of ambition.

After all, their dynasty traced back centuries, having both Vietnamese noble, royal and imperial blood and Han Chinese noble, royal and imperial blood as well, slowly amassing power and wealth from both China and Vietnam until the great Emperor Gia Long, who claimed to be descended from the Ming dynasty's reigning imperial family, the crypto-Muslim Han Chinese Imperial House of Zhu and whose adoption of the Rí Qí [Sun Flag], a orange banner [the Rí Qí] with [what the Rí Qí has] a red dot [in the middle of the Rí Qí] to [the red dot in the middle of the Rí Qí] represent the sun, [the Rí Qí] being the unofficial naval jack [the Rí Qí] of the Tang dynasty and then [the Rí Qí] becoming the unofficial Chinese Civil flag [the Rí Qí] during the initial Ming era,[Gia Long adopting the Rí Qí] when and after he [Gia Long] had [Gia Long] been able to reunify and conquer all of Dai Nam in 1802, with the assistance of the French from far overseas through a Catholic Priest who had championed his cause, with the establishment of the Empire of Vietnam after the conquest of all of Dai Nam essentially being a means for Gia Long to re-establish the Ming dynasty and simultaneously the Southern Ming, along with re-establishing a cultural world that the Ming had been the center of, that the Lê had participated in, and that the Tây Sơn had disrupted, that particular cultural world, being what some people at that time saw as the Han cultural world, with “Han” here referring not to an ethnic group but to a cultural group, a group that was forced to defend its identity when a group that was different from it – the Manchus –intruded into its world from 1644-1662 and established the Great Qing Empire.

Gia Long also was the first Nguyễn Emperor to use both Vietnamese combined regal and era names and separate Chinese traditional and regal era names which remained within the Ming and Song era tradition of Chinese imperial regal and era names along with using the Ming-era traditional Chinese imperial calendar, in addition to implementing many Ming-era bureaucratic, judicial, government and military concepts and institutions from China while also modernizing them to fit modern times along with making the Zhu Emperors of the Ming dynasty's personal plum blossom seal the personal seal of the Nguyễn dynasty, in order to solidify his claim that he was the simultaneous successor of the Ming's last Emperor, Chongzhen Southern Ming's last Emperor, Yongli.


Thus began a partnership between the French and Dai Nam, but toward the end of both his reign and his life, he slowly came to distrust the encroaching French influence, seeing patterns in how the British had wormed their way into the Muslim Indian lords and exploited the Hindus until they had taken control of the entire Indian subcontinent.

He feared for his kingdom, that the French might do just the same and reduce his land to vassalage.

In a hidden missive to his younger son and successor Minh Mạng, he gave him a final order: "Do not trust the French. Make use of their resources and goods, use them to your advantage, but never give them your trust."

Emperor Minh Mạng would take this to heart, keeping French advisors both in his court and at arm's distance, as well as welcoming British advisors to keep a balance.

Trade was opened to both equally, knowing that any conflict between the two could be fought more fiercely outside of Vietnam.

But he also began to study them.

The Confucian Orthodoxy was strengthened, but surreptitiously Minh Mạng commissioned scholars and students to study western designs and systems of government along with those of the Ottoman Empire, as the branch of the Nguyễn family ruling over the Empire of Vietnam as its reigning imperial family had maintained the secret religion of the Ming Emperors, Sunni Islam and wished to do what the Ming had never done and establish a openly Muslim state in the Sinosphere.

He had them report back to him, and ever so slowly he slowly began to slip these reforms, developments and modernizations into use by theVietnamese  government.

Emperor Thiệu Trị would only continue this, and soon the army of the Empire was making use of western-style guns, purchasing from not only the Ottomans, but every power across Europe and even the Americans and the Japanese along with also building a fleet of new western-style fighting ships, the corner stone of what would become a restored Ming navy, and seeing the centralization of authority under the Emperor.

It would be under Emperor Tự Đức that it all came to a final head.

Having been the younger brother to Prince Hồng Bảo, his coronation was met by a rebellion in 1847 of the conservative and traditional elements of Dai Nam society led by Hồng Bảo, who claimed to be the legitimate Emperor to those who wanted to reverse the ongoing westernization (ironically, Hồng Bảo had also asked for Western help with the promise of conversion to Catholicism and to make Dai Nam a Catholic country).

This, though, was met with failure, and thus established firmly that the new western course was set in place. Victories abroad soon overran the Khun Lo-dynastyLuang Phrabang Kingdom in Laos and annexed Cambodia to direct rule, followed by success in bringing North Borneo under their rule when the Sultan of Brunei submitted to Vietnamese rule.

The real victories were yet to come.

After expulsion of the French from the country, Emperor Dục Đức announced his most ambitious project yet.

The European states had begun to take bites out of the failing Qing Empire, and so too would Vietnam.

The First Sino-Viet War only the conquest of the island of Hainan, but then the Second Sino-Viet War saw a colossal success with the conquest of virtually all of Guangxi, expanding deep into Chinese territory and legitimizing the "Westerness" of Dai Nam in the eyes of the East with Guangdong also being conquered and subsequently integrated into all of Vietnam, making the Empire of Vietnam a simultaneous modern day incarnation of both the Nanyue Kingdom and the Southern Ming.

Only the west remained, and that was to come.

France had never wanted to be evicted from Dai Nam, and now with the army required to occupy Guangxi, they struck through their treaty ports in Guangxi that Dai Nam had been careful to leave, but now moved on with a vengeance.

And here again, the efforts at progress succeeded.

Within two years, the French treaty ports were under full Dai Nam control, and the Franco-Viet War ended in a resounding success for Dai Nam.

Now, with control over the Eastern Sea, they could begin to strangle Western trade into China, exercising their strength as a rising power on the world stage with a growing sphere of both territory and influence.

Third Period: North Asia [mid-to late 19th century]

After the Tokugawa Shogunate was forced to open its waters to foreign vessels due to the Putyatin Expedition launched by the Russian Empire, a new era of revolutionary changes loomed over Japan in what seemed like an endless exchange between the traditional Japanese order and Western ideals.

However, many were those who held resentment against the Shogun's weakened authority and what they saw as his submission to Europeans. As a result, a movement to overthrow the Shogunate was born led by the long-resented domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, and both sides started to modernize their forces as quickly as they could.

Finally, the Shogunate led a failed expedition against Chōshū in 1865-66 which was repelled by the modernized Chōshū army.

As a result the Shogun's authority was significantly weakened, with Satsuma defecting to Chōshū's side.

The same year, both Tokugawa Iemochi and Emperor Kōmei passed away.

Iemochi, who belonged to the conservative clique in Edo Castle, was succeeded by the reformist Tokugawa Yoshinobu, who had plans for a compromise with the new Emperor, the future Meiji.

By mid-1867, the advancing forces of Satsuma and Chōshū occupied Kyoto, and wrote a letter in the Emperor's name demanding the "slaughtering of the traitorous subject Yoshinobu".

Against their plans, Yoshinobu accepted their demands and abandoned power.

However, his government's structure continued to exist, and Yoshinobu and his clan remained a prominent force in the evolving political order and retained many executive powers, a prospect that the Satsuma and Chōshū domains found intolerable.

On January 3, 1868, forces from these domains seized the imperial palace in Kyoto in a coup, and the next day the new Emperor declared his "own" restoration to full power. Satsuma's general Saigō Takamori threatened the assembly with the abolition of the title "shōgun" and ordered the confiscation of Yoshinobu's lands.

Enraged by this, Yoshinobu returned to Edo and ordered the immediate subjugation of the rebel domains, sending an army of 15,000 men towards Kyoto.

On January 27, both forces met at the Toba and Fushimi gates that led to Kyoto, and battle ensued.

Due to numerical superiority and the key role of the Steuble guns, the Shogun's forces won the battle, forcing Takamori's forces to retreat south after 2 days of battle, while the Imperial Court ultimately sided with the Shogunate.

Yoshinobu and Emperor Mutsuhito met in Kyoto's palace, and a westernization of the state aswell as a return of political and legislative power to the Emperor was agreed on, while the Tokugawa dynasty would remain as the Shoguns in control of the Japanese local government.

By the end of 1868, Takamori and his forces had been defeated in Hagi, Chōshū, and a series of punishments were decreed against the renegade domains, though Satsuma managed to avoid a change of dynasty due to the Shimazu switching sides when they decided the cause was lost.

In Febuary 1869, the Japanese Empire was formally proclaimed; The Tokugawa shogunate, although de-jure now restricted from political affairs, continued to exert influence and power from their positions as hegemons of the daimyo system and the military, while Imperial provinces were finally fused with domains, who were now converted into provinces ruled by a hereditary prince in the western sense of the word, with the kokudaka system being removed over the following years.

At the same time, the number of domains went down drastically, from around 200 to 60.

At the same time, the Emperor enjoyed a return to power, with Kyoto regaining the importance it had in the past as the capital of the empire.

Fourth period: East Asia/Oceania [early to mid 20th century]


Warren G. Harding doesn’t die early, and the Teapot Dome Scandal leads to a democratic president in office to be blamed for the Great Depression.

The Republican New Deal Coalition equivalent includes a cadre of isolationists which never alter the Neutrality Acts or embargo Japan.

Following the failure of Chiang Kai-Shek's so-called "Northern Expedition" against the post-1912, pre-1928 stratocratic [military governed/military dominated], democratically elected bicameral legislative branch divided into a Senate and a House of Representatives known as the National Assembly founded 8 April 1913 having, Beiyang Government from the presidential parliamentary democratic republic first Republic of China ruling over the fifteen provinces of Han excluding Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan in the China region since 10 March 1912 ruling over the sixteen provinces of Han in the China region excluding Yunnan and under the control of the Japanese protectorate of the Yunnan Clique in Yunnan in 1927 and Guangdong and Guangxi, long under the control of the restored Later Ming/revived Southern Ming/Empire of Vietnam ruling over not only Vietnam but Laos and Cambodia too, [the Beiyang Government as the first Republic of China] having long been under the control of the Chinese warlord junta of the Fengtian Clique based in Manchuria lead by Zhang Zhuolin, the final consolidation of China began as Kai-shek's Nationalist Government, literally imported from Moscow to the Indochina-Cantonia region came to its knees against the force of the Beiyang Clique's combined armed forces, the Anguojun [National Pacification Army].

The Anguojun was bolstered by Japanese material and personnel support that poured in following several incidents of the Kuomingtang's armed wing and thus Nationalist China's combined armed forces, the National Revolutionary Army forces damaging Japanese owned businesses or attacking Japanese nationals in southern Han China.

The new Tanaka government in Japan was keen to expand Japanese interests and profits in China following the Showa financial crisis, and saw the failing Northern Expedition as an opportunity.

Kwantung forces began pressuring Zhang Zuolin in Beijing to allow further Japanese concessions in Manchuria and promises that Japanese forces could be stationed in parts of China until stability was restored. Zhang, desperate to stave off both the Soviet-backed Nationalist China, which is a rebel group in China due to Guangdong and Guangxi being controlled by Vietnam, and the Bonapartist, anti-Soviet CCP-ruled Chinese Soviet Republic in Inner Shaanxi, continued to relinquish power and authority to the Japanese while the Anguojun continued the pacification of the south.

Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang had little choice but to bow to Japanese demands themselves as they were reliant on Fengtian support to maintain their authority.

In 1928, Zhang declared the Southern Pacification to be over as Southern Han China fell into Anguojun hands and the Japanese's Vietnamese allies mopped up the rest.

However, the Japanese were not finished just yet.

The weakened Zhili factions of Wu and Sun were soon pacified by Japanese forces stationed along the Yangtze for "protection of Japanese nationals", and authority in Shandong fell to Japanese hands as Zhang Zongchang caved to Japanese demands.

All over China, informal Japanese authority and concessions spread like a virus, infecting and extorting all those who touched it.

Zhang could only watch as while the Anguojun continued pacifying the provinces of the west, his authority in his own nation eroded.

The Soviets, trapped in Siberia due to a Central Powers victory in WW1, attempted to reverse this by having an operative plant a bomb along a railroad bridge, which exploded when Zhang's train passed under it on 4 June 1928, mortally wounded, Zhang died a few days later, which backfired on them when the Soviet operative was caught leaving Manchuria.

The Japanese exploited the chaos in Manchuria due to the Soviet agent being captured to help the Qing imperial court, still operating and carrying out its functions in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the Qing's reigning imperial family, the Manchu Imperial House of Aisin-Gioro, jointly seize control of both the leadership and the government of the Fengtian Clique with the help of Qing monarchist Anguojun officers and the aid of the post-December 1911, pre-1932, conservative, Manchurian nationalist, Manchurian royalist, Qing royalist political party and militant organization active in Beiyang Government as the first Republic of China-ruled and then Nationalist Chinese-ruled after the Northern Expedition, the Society for Monarchical Constitutionalism, [the Society for Monarchical Constitutionalism] popularly known as [the Society for Monarchical Constitutionalism's more popular name] the Royalist Party, with the now Qing-controlled Fengtian Clique relinquishing control over the Beiyang Government as the Republic of China and remaining confined to Manchuria with the branch of the main branch of the Beiyang Government's National Assembly operating in Manchuria under the Fengtian Clique transitioning into a modernized version of the Great Qing Empire's post-1906, pre-1912 unicameral national legislature, the Advisory Council after the Qing imperial court's takeover as the Fengtian Clique, with the Anguojun transitioning towards a modernized, well-equipped Manchuria-based version of the Qing New Army.

In order to both appease the Han Chinese people and suppress the further rise of the Kuomingtang and the CCP, the Japanese also stage a similar palace coup in the Beiyang Government as the First Republic of China in collaboration with the Empire of Vietnam, allowing Dr. Sun Yat-sen's other protege and true heir to his legacy and ideals, Wang Jingwei, to become the next civilian president of the first Republic of China, now the Japanese protectorate of the Reorganized Nat