Of Tangowan

Tangowan lies far to the south, and its commerce reaches Daub only at several removes. I include it not because Your Grace will have much occasion to deal with it directly, but because it is the clearest demonstration available of what Singhapura may do to a place unchecked. Wattle and Daub are partial incorporations, where the Empire’s hand is shown rather than closed. Tangowan, with no armies and no great industry, is the fullest expression of the Empire’s power.

Of What Tangowan Is and Was

Tangowan is an archipelago, and a vast one: thousands of islands, dense jungle, volcanic mountains and monsoons, spread across a territory almost as large as the entire North. Its natural wealth is extraordinary. Daub must labour for its crops and Singhapura must engineer its water, but Tangowan simply produces: rarewoods, fisheries, spices, wild game. It is said that one may assemble a decent meal by strolling about in the morning. The sea yields to its fishermen and divers with a generosity that has no equal in the known world.

The people of Tangowan named their lands the Sagarika Mandalam, which renders approximately as “the Realm of the Ocean”. We call them Tangowan, owing to a translation error made by the diplomat Vanarkali in the seventh century. The world knows them by the second name. Nobody in Singhapura has ever troubled to correct it.

Before Singhapura, governance rested with a council of nineteen governors called the Paridarakas, selected by lot, each holding a major island or a cluster of smaller ones. Periodically, it is said, a Paridaraka would call for a Maha Sabha, a great gathering, to resolve some matter of consequence. Outside the Sabha, each administered his domain as an independent body with its own customs. Laws were not written down. Custom arose from need and circumstance, and disputes were resolved by the community, and especially by its elders. In this we see no great sophistication, Your Grace, but the mechanisms by which a family governs itself.

The failure of such a system before Singhapura is most instructive.

The Paridarakas held authority over small lots, but none had the capacity to set forth a common purpose, or to arm all of Tangowan under pressure. In times of peace and plenty ordinary people may pool and share what they have. War requires a grim purpose and an authority that cannot be swayed by the winds of opinion and fear. When Singhapura arrived there was no single throat to cut; there were nineteen fragments, each with its own interests. Even where a ruler opposed Singhapura, some great part of his community could be swayed, and the Paridarakas who resisted were in time cast aside by their own people.

The economy compounded this. Tangowan is known for its kula, family clans of artisans whose techniques pass down the generations. Their craft is intricate and remarkable; even today Tangowan produces some of the finest carvings and most elaborate seaworthy vessels in the world. But the clans kept to themselves, and to one born outside the right families there was little to do. Talented young people with an aptitude for engineering or large-scale organization drifted toward Singhapura. From this, and from the flight of the alchemists of Lusia, one may draw a general lesson: talent in a poorly organized place always drifts toward wherever organization exists.

Of the Singhapura Merchants Guild And Its Acts

Here I ask for Your Grace’s particular attention, because this is where Tangowan’s incorporation bears most closely upon Daub. The lord who enters a territory with an army has announced his intentions and provoked resistance. The merchant who arrives with goods and services that the existing institutions cannot provide is greeted with benevolence, and even love, until the day he is indispensable.

So it was with the Singhapura Merchants Guild. At first they came for crafts. Then, having persuaded others of the profits of such trade, the Guild moved by degrees into everything outside the protected traditional crafts. Singhapura metals and jewellery and silks became items of great value. Tangowan had no immediate need of grain, but the Merchants sold it cheaply regardless, together with such spices and tea as are ruinously expensive to grow except upon very large estates.

These actions decimated what little farming Tangowan had. It was more profitable for a man to spend a few hours idly whittling, and trade a small carving for a sack of rice, than to spend days labouring over his crops.

Having thus enticed the populace, the Merchants set about acquiring land. There are records of Tangowan governors handing over vast acreages for a pittance: a hundred swords here, the furnishings of a mansion there. Without an economy, or an authority that understood one, the value of land went wholly unrealized. Upon these lands the Guild planted tea, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, saffron, fruit, cotton and whatever else Singhapura required, and much of Tangowan embraced it with enthusiasm.

There was nothing in place to resist. The kula had no means of operating at scale. The rulers had no banks and no organized trade beyond their individual arrangements. When the Guild arrived with credit, supply chains and the capacity to turn Tangowan’s natural wealth into reliable exportable income, it was seen as a great opportunity.

Soon the 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 afterward. It remained only for the Adhiraj to issue one command, and all of Tangowan, having already surrendered its livelihood, fell to its knees.

This is not a novel pattern. The history of Singhapura is full of kingdoms new and old that fell in this manner: Ratnapura, Ridheepura, Balalpura, Udanuwara, Giridhora. The Singha Chronicle records these entries proudly, and takes great care to mention that they profited from the arrangement. But of Ratnapura and many others, Your Grace, only the names remain. There are no great histories of their works, save a few scattered legends and minor works of poetry and theatre. One day the name Sagarika Mandalam, too, will be a footnote of that kind, reserved for entertainments and little else.

Of the Church’s Intrusions

The Haugris Church is now building schools and hospitals across Tangowan. I wish to dwell upon this. Schools and hospitals are commonly received as instruments of benevolence, and they are a great deal 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 of the Church schools will learn the Singhapura account of history, of legitimacy, of what constitutes proper governance and proper devotion. They will not remember the Maha Sabha as a living institution. They will know it, if at all, as a thing their grandparents clung to, some primitive and naive notion rightly dispelled by the civilization of the Empire.

The memory of the old order need not be suppressed. It need only be made archaic, a matter for the history-books that bore children. Thus a new order is securely established, and a people so educated, even should they rise in rebellion, can only replicate the mechanisms the Empire has given them.

Hospitals work similarly. A population that receives its care from the Church has reason to think well of the Church. The care is real, and those who give it believe fully in the virtue of what they do. But gratitude is a form of loyalty, and loyalty established at that level, upon visible bodies, is remarkably lasting, especially where nothing of the kind existed before. Any new order must then face the question of how to provide a service the public now firmly believes is its due.

Of Tangowan Religion and Spirits

It is a curious feature of Tangowan that it has not wholly embraced the Church and the worship of Great Raavan. It may be said to be the only form of rebellion left to it.

Tangowan worship centres upon two classes of being. The Yami are powerful and unpredictable nature spirits, inhabiting ancient trees, rivers, volcanoes and the like, and requiring appeasement through offerings and ritual. The Uso are ancestral household spirits protecting family and hearth, honoured through daily domestic practice.

Most Tangowan people worship as many Yami as their circumstances require, without the exclusive affiliations that mark Temple or Church devotion. Indeed, many have adopted Raavan as one more Yami to appease, and go about their lives unbothered.

Some scholars propose that this is a hybrid of deity worship and something like the Rosantic Ascended. The scholarship matters less than the fact of this one resilience, which I attribute to culture rather than to any institution. It is not resistance, exactly. It is more in the manner of the old adage: the bamboo bends with the wind, but does not break. The Empire has so far had the wisdom not to attempt a direct reorganization of it.

I note that it has become fashionable among Singhapura’s nobility to holiday in Tangowan for purposes of spiritual communion. The Yami, from what the accounts suggest, do not respond well to aristocratic tourism. Nevertheless the income appears to be raising the living standards of certain groups upon the coast, in the same manner that certain villages of Daub benefit from tourists. I leave the matter there.

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

A Duchess 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. Here is my list, and after it, what I would have Your Grace do about each.

1) The structure of the Maha Sabha, and its weakness when the time came to act collectively against an outside 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 pressure.

2) The export of talent. A territory that exports its most capable people is, in a real sense, financing its own death. Tangowan’s best minds became artisans, engineers and administrators in Singhapura, and were of no service to their home, and with good reason. Your Grace has a partial answer in the Lesser Theoretical University, but the LTU alone cannot make up the deficit among those in the countryside who lack any gainful employment.

3) The absence of redundancy. Every essential function in Tangowan was performed by a single family, or by whoever the ruler appointed. A system with redundancy may be called bloated; a system without it has no resilience, and shatters when any single piece is removed. This principle I take from my studies and practice of magic and Ritual. In this regard the overlapping complexity of Daub’s institutions may be an asset, provided a careful hand shapes it into something more than mere factionalism. Competing institutions drain resources; they also guard against the weakness of a single load-bearing pillar.

4) The confusion of natural wealth with strength, which contains all the others. Tangowan was rich, but riches alone are not strength. Strength is the organized capacity to defend a state.

Tangowan is thus a perfect example of what not to do. Should Your Grace ever doubt, it useful to always ask yourself whether you’re repeating these mistakes. If not, there may yet be some hope.