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 may do to a place unchecked. Wattle and Daub are but partial incorporations; the Empire’s hand is shown rather than felt; Tangowan, with no armies and no great industry, is the fullest expression of power.

Of What Tangowan Is and Was

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, 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 divers with a generosity that has no equivalent elsewhere in the known world.

The people of Tangowan named their lands the Sagarika Mandalam. The approximate rendering of this is “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, will tell Your Grace much.

Before Singhapura, governance rested with a council of nineteen governors called the Paridarakas. These rulers were selected by lot, numbering in their dominion a major island or cluster of smaller ones. Periodically, it is said, a Paradarika would call for a Maha Sabha, or a gathering, to resolve great matters. Outside the Sabha, each administered their domain as an independent body with its own customs. Laws were not written down, but customs arose owing to need and circumstance, and disputes were resolved in accordance with the community, especially its elders. In this we see, Your Grace, no great sophistication, but the mechanisms similar to a family governing itself.

The failure of such a system in the face of Singhapura is most instructive.

The Paridarakas had authority over small lots; but none had the capacity to set forth coordinated ideals, a shared goal, and to arm all of Tangowan under pressure. In times of peace and plenty ordinary people might collect and share resources as needed, but wars require a grim purpose and an authority that cannot be dissuaded by the winds of opinion and fear. When Singhapura arrived, there was no single throat to cut; there instead were nineteen fragments, each with their own interests. Even where individual rulers opposed Singhapura, there were always some great part of the community that could be swayed, and the Paridarakas who opposed were eventually cast aside by their own people.

The economy compounded this effect. Tangowan is known for its kula; these are family artisan clans whose techniques were passed down through the generations. They were capable of intricate and extraordinary craft - even today, Tangowan craftsmen produce some of the finest carvings and most elaborate of seaworthy vessels. But on the whole, this system also produced extraordinary insularity: to one born outside the right families, there was little to do. Talented young people with aptitudes for engineering or large-scale organization drifted toward Singhapura. From this, and from the flight of the alchemists in Lusia, we gain a great lesson: talents in poorly organized places always drift toward wherever organization exists.

Of the Singhapura Merchants Guild And Its Acts

Here I wish for 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, especially ones that existing institutions, cannot provide is instead greeted by benevolence, and even love, until such time as they are indespensible.

Thus it was with Singhapura Merchants Guild. At first they came for crafts; then, having convinced others of the profits of such trade, the Guild systematically moved into everything outside the protected traditional crafts. Singhapura metals and jewellery and silks became items of great value. Tangowan had no immediate need for grain, but the Merchants sold it cheap, and complimented it with such spices and tea as are ruinously expensive to grow except in very large estates. Such actions decimated what little existed of Tangowan farming. It was more profitable for a man who spend some hours idly whittling, and to trade a minor token of carving for a sack of rice, than to spent hours laboriously weeding his crops.

Having thus enticed the populace, the Merchants set about acquiring land. 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, or an authority that understood it, the value of land was utterly unrealized. On these lands they began growing tea, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, saffron, fruits, cotton and such others as Singhapura needed; and this embraced with enthusiasm by much of Tangowan. At this point there was no existing commercial infrastructure to resist Singhapura: the kula system had no mechanism for operating at scale; the rulers 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 seen as a great opportunity.

Soon the Merchants Guild held dominion over large tracts of Tangowan. The rulers who accommodated it earliest did best in the short term. That this was also the mechanism of their demise became clear only in retrospect. It only remained for the Adhiraj to issue but one command, and all of Tangowan, having already surrendered their lives, fell to their knees.

This is not a novel pattern. The history of Singhapura is full of kingdoms both new and old that have fallen in this manner; Ratnapura, Ridheepura, Balalpura, Udunuwara, Giridhora - these entries are recorded proudly in the Singha Chronicles, and great care is taken to mention that they profited from the arrangement. But I may note, your Grace, that of Ratnapura and many others, only their names remain. There are no great histories of their works save for a few scattered legends and minor works of poetry and theater. One day the name Sagarika Mandalam, too, will be a footnote thus, an object reserved for entertainments and little else.

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 in directions that Your Grace decides, such that the mechanisms of selfish economic interests are allied to the protection of your state. Without it, the tale of Tangowan becomes an omen for the subjugation of other kingdoms. As the philosophers say: history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Of the Church’s Intrusions

The Haugris Church is now building schools and hospitals across Tangowan. I wish to dwell on this. Schools and hospitals are often recieved as an instrument of benevolence; but they are far more.

Consider what a school does, Your Grace. 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 clung on to, some sort of primitive and naive notion that was rightfully dispelled by the civilizations of the Emprie. 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 securely established. A people so educated, even if they rise in rebellion, can only replicate such mechanisms as the Empire has given to them.

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. Thus any new order must face the question of how to provide this service that the public now firmly believe is their lot.

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 these other enterprises. The moment any 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. In fact it may said to be the only form of rebellion left.

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.

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. The empire has been wise enough, thus far, not to attempt a direct reorganization of this state of affairs.

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 Duchesss 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, and of its weaknesses when such the time came to act collectively against an external power. 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 territory that exports its most capable people is, in a meaningful sense, financing its own death. Tangowan’s best minds became artisans and engineers and administrators in Singhapura; they were of no service to their home, and with good reason. 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 admistrative function in Tangowan was performed either by a single family or the ruler thus appointed. 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. 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 also present a bulwark against the weakness of a single load-bearing pillar.

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 networks, the Charter Knights, the LTU, and the Merchants Guild’s roots go deep in this ground; and yet there is no strength that can give an empire pause. This, Your Grace, is worth considering.