Of Tangowan

Tangowan lies far to the south, and its commerce reaches Daub only at several removes. I include it here not because Your Grace will have much occasion to deal with it directly, but because it is the clearest available demonstration of what Singhapura does to a place when it decides to do so in full. Wattle is one example; Daub is another; but both are partial incorporations, the empire’s hand felt rather than shown. Tangowan is the full hand, and Your Grace should understand what that looks like.

The people of Tangowan named their lands the Sagarika Mandalam — the Realm of the Ocean. We call them Tangowan, which derives from a translation error made by the diplomat Vanarkali in the seventh century. It is the latter name that the world now knows them by; that it rests on a mistake, and that the mistake has never been corrected and never will be, tells you much.

Of What Tangowan Was, and What It Teaches Us About the Nature of Incorporation

Tangowan is an archipelago. In size it is vast — thousands of islands, dense jungles, volcanic mountains, and monsoons, spread across a territory almost as large as the entire North. Its natural wealth is extraordinary. Daub must labor for its crops and Singhapura must engineer its water, but Tangowan simply produces — rarewoods, fisheries, spices, precious gems, wild game; it is said one can assemble a decent meal simply by strolling around in the morning. The sea yields to its fishermen and navigators and divers with a generosity that has no equivalent elsewhere in the known world.

Before Singhapura, governance rested with a council of nineteen hereditary Governors — the Paridarakas, or Overseers — each ruling a major island or cluster of smaller ones. Once a year they convened for the Maha Sabha to resolve disputes. Outside the Sabha, each Governor administered their domain as an independent state with its own laws and traditions.

I want to be precise about why this failed, because the failure is instructive and Your Grace should understand it as such.

The Governors had authority. What they did not have was the capacity to convert authority into resistance. Authority is what you exercise over those who already accept you. Resistance requires something additional: coordinated ideals, a shared goal, the ability to act under pressure, and the ability to collect and share resources as needed.

When Singhapura arrived, there was no single throat to cut; there instead were nineteen fragments, each with their own interests, each capable of being addressed separately.

The economy compounded this. Tangowan is known for its kula; these are family artisan clans whose techniques were passed through generations without being written down. They were capable of extraordinary craft, but on the whole also produced extraordinary insularity; to one born outside the right families, there was little to do in Tangowan. Talented young people with aptitudes for engineering or large-scale organization drifted toward Singhapura. From this we gain a great lesson: talents in poorly organized places always drift toward wherever organization exists. A territory that exports its most capable people is, in a meaningful sense, financing its own death.

Thus, Tangowan presented not a challenge, but an opportunity.

Of the Merchants Guild, as It Pertains to Daub

Here I want Your Grace’s particular attention, because this is where Tangowan’s incorporation becomes most instructive for Daub. The lord who enters a territory with an army has announced his intentions and provoked resistance. However, the merchant who arrives with goods and services that existing institutions cannot provide is instead greeted by acceptance, until such time as he makes himself necessary.

The Singhapura Merchants Guild arrived first, trading in the fruits of the land until they were able to buy land itself. There are records of Tangowan governors handing over vast acres in exchange for a pittance — a hundred swords here, or furnishings for a mansion there — for without an economy, the value of land was utterly unrealized. The Guild moved into everything outside the protected traditional crafts; there was no existing commercial infrastructure to resist it. The kula system had no mechanism for operating at scale. The Governors had no banks and no organized trade beyond their individual arrangements. When the Guild arrived with credit and supply chains and the organizational capacity to turn Tangowan’s natural wealth into reliable exportable income, it was experienced as opportunity.

Soon the Merchants Guild held dominion over large tracts of Tangowan. The Governors who accommodated it earliest did best in the short term. That this was also the mechanism of their demise becomes clear only in retrospect.

Your Grace has a Merchants Guild in Daub, modelled closely after its cousin in Singhapura. I do not say this to alarm; in this, Your Grace has a natural defense; in fact, it may be bold to allow it to flourish even more, such that the mechanisms of selfish economic interests are allied to the protection of your state.

Of the Church’s Intrusions

The Haugris Church is now building schools and hospitals across Tangowan. I wish to dwell on this, because it tends to be received as evidence of imperial benevolence, and it is only that.

Consider what a school does. It takes children at the age when the world is still being explained to them. The children educated in Church schools will learn the Singhapura account of history, of legitimacy, of what constitutes proper governance and proper devotion. They will not remember the Tangowan Maha Sabha as a living institution. They will know it, if they know it at all, as a thing their grandparents described. The memory of the old order does not need to be suppressed; it merely needs to be seen as archaic, a matter for history-books which bore children. Thus a new order is safely established.

Hospitals work similarly. A population that receives its medical care from the Church is a population with a reason to think well of the Church. The care is genuine; the people who staff these institutions believe fully in the virtue of what they do; however, gratitude is a form of loyalty, and loyalty established at such individual levels, on visible bodies, is remarkably durable, especially when no such thing has existed before.

The Haugris Church is building schools and hospitals in Daub as well. Your Grace has thus far managed the Church as befits a religious and military faction; however, I wish to draw your deliberate attention to its other enterprises. The moment any single institution becomes the only source of something a population cannot do without, that institution has acquired a form of power that political authority cannot easily check. Tangowan had nothing to replace the Church with. Your Grace should be clear-eyed about preventing a similar situation occurring in Daub.

Of Tangowan Religion and Spirits

It is an interesting feature of Tangowan that it has not wholly embraced the Church and the worship of Great Raavan.

Tangowan worship has centered on two classes of being: the Yami, powerful and unpredictable nature spirits inhabiting ancient trees, rivers, volcanoes, and the like, requiring appeasement through offerings and ritual; and the Uso, ancestral household spirits protecting family and hearth, honored through daily domestic practice.

Most Tangowan people worship as many Yami as their circumstances require, without the exclusive affiliations that characterize Temple or Church devotion. Indeed, many have adopted Raavan as yet another Yami to appease, and continue to go about their daily lives unbothered. The empire has been wise enough, thus far, not to attempt a direct reorganization of this state of affairs.

Some scholars have proposed that this represents a hybrid of deity worship and a form of ascendancy similar to the Rosantic Ascended. The scholarship is less important than the existence of this one resiliency. This we may attribute to culture rather than institution. I note that it is not resistance, but more along the old adage: the bamboo bends with the wind, but does not break. In extraordinary circumstances, this, too, may be a form of power.

I note that it has become fashionable among Singhapura’s nobility to vacation in Tangowan for purposes of spiritual communion. The Yami are not, from what the accounts suggest, beings who respond well to aristocratic tourism; nevertheless, such income appears to be greatly raising the living standards of certain groups on the coast, in the same manner that certain villages of Daub benefit from tourism. I leave the matter there.

Of Tangowan’s Errors, Stated Plainly for Daub’s Benefit

A prince who wishes to learn from another’s misfortune should be able to name the errors precisely. Your Grace will naturally see more than I do; I shall make my list here.

The first error was the structure of the Maha Sabha. An institution that meets with such infrequence and with such little formal authority is weak. No doubt Tangowan’s nineteen Governors were individually reasonable men operating a system designed for peacetime; but when the time came to act collectively against an external power, there was no mechanism for producing an answer that could hold. Your Grace’s own council arrangements should be examined with this in mind. The question is not whether they function under ordinary conditions but whether they would function under extraordinary pressures.

The second error was the export of talent. A state that cannot offer its most capable people a reason to stay will find those people employed by its rivals, carrying with them dangerous knowledge of said state. Tangowan sent its engineers and administrators to Singhapura for generations before the formal incorporation occurred. Your Grace has a partial answer to this problem in the form of the Lesser Taprobane University, but it alone cannot make up the deficit of citizens in the ruralities who lack for any gainful employment.

The third error was the absence of redundancy. Every essential function in Tangowan was performed either by a single family or a single Governor. A system with redundancy may be said to be bloated, but a system with no redundancy has no resilience; remove any single piece and the whole shatters or reorganizes around whatever replaces it. This principle I extend from my studies and practice of magic and Ritual.

In this regard, the overlapping complexity of Daub’s institutional landscape may be an asset, provided it is sculpted by a careful hand to extend beyond mere factionalism. Competing institutions drain resources, but they are also critical.

The fourth error, which contains all the others, was the confusion of natural wealth with strength. Tangowan was rich, but riches alone are not strength. Strength is the organized capacity to defend a state. Daub, too, is rich, and has some strength: Your Grace’s intelligence network, the Charter Knights, the LTU, and the Merchants Guild’s roots go deep in this ground; and yet there may be other avenues hitherto unexplored.