Untsangasar
The Chuyan Realm of the Untsan Gasar | |
|---|---|
 Flag | |
| Capital | Kha'ankhot |
| Official languages | Tovshui |
| Recognised national languages | Bayar, Bayad, Khakhar, Turvan, Yaku, Tat'a, Shuyim, Gokchu, Buminchu, Xigchu, Lo, Zhurjiin, Siba, Ebengi, Nai-Nai, Xet, Hyug, Shukot, Dehtkil, Nibka, Yezo, Ubik |
| Ethnic groups | Ethnic groups of Untsangasar |
| Demonym(s) | Untsangasari, Chuyan |
| Government | Devolved unitary constitutional monarchy |
• Khagan | Timujin II |
| Establishment | |
• Creation of the White Horde | 1126 |
• Founding of Yu-Ozkan Clan | 1696 |
• Proclamation of the Untsangasar Khaganate | 1743 |
• Khuvirgalt | 1834 |
| Population | |
• 2020 estimate | 98,795,487 |
| GDP (PPP) | estimate |
• Per capita | USD$12,106 |
| Currency | Mohnkoh |
| Driving side | right |
Untsangasar, sometimes also rendered as Untsan Gasar or sometimes Anglicized as Unzangazar, also referred to as "the Great Chuyan Khaganate" is a nation in Northeast Ochran. It is a physically-vast, multiethnic realm, home to extensive natural resources and a significant percentage of the world's surface fresh water. By land area, it is the largest nation in the world. The country is governed by a constitutional monarchy, embodied by the royal clan, the Khagan, and an elected legislature known as the Kurultai.
History
Etymology
Untsangasar or, more properly, "untsan gasar" is one particular transcription of the Bayar phrase "Sleeping Land" referring to the land that makes up the vast majority of the country's vast interior.
Prehistory
People have been living here a long time. Unfortunately writing arrived in the region relatively late, meaning that most historic records prior to the 6th century CE are fragmentary and usually written by outsiders from other cultures, notably in Kaojiang, Tsurushima, and Seonko. Notably the area was rife with nomadic peoples, herders of horses, reindeer, and later cattle, with a tendency for climatic events and political instability to cause incursions into the more urbanized cultures further south, either via refugee migratory behavior or in the form of military incursions, either to raid or seize territory.
Bayarid Empire
The area that is now Untsangasar first attained wider relevance during the campaigns of Tukal Khan and the election of his son, Khaadur, to leadership of a collection of herding tribes known as the Bayar Federation in the 9th century. Starting from the heartlands north of Kaojiang, the Bayars conquered their neighboring tribes before expanding south and then west, overrunning the Ochranic mainland quickly and reaching Eastern Belisaria and Eastern Scipia by the end of the century.
The Bayarid conquest would have a profound effect on the political, social, and economic effect of Greater Chuya, solidifying the growth and influence of trade centers in what are now Samakent, Ozhe, Ashana, and Baotu and developing a trade network that introduced points further south to the natural bounty of the Untsangasari heartland, as well as facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas from East Ochran to the Periclean Basin and Belisaria. This route, already in existance prior the conquest but finally much safer to utilize due to the unified political control and security the Bayarids brought, was known as the Jade Road.
In the late 1000's and early 1100's, the Bayarid Empire was experiencing a growing loss of stability as infighting over the Khagan's throne and power struggles between the institutions that ran the empire limited the ability of the Khagan and their subordinates to properly administer the realm. Local warlords increasingly asserted their own control and the once purely-administrative divisions of the Empire (the five Hordes) increasingly began to act as politically-distinct entities, even warring amongst themselves, even as pre-Bayarid polities reasserted themselves for independence. By 1147, the Empire had ceased to be in all but name, existing only in the insistant claims of the rulers of the five hordes to each be the rightful "Khagan of the Bayars".
Most relevant to Untsangasar, one of these Hordes, located in the northeast of Ochran and accordingly named the White Horde, maintained a tenuous grasp on hegemony over the nomads of the Ochranic North and Interior, even as the southern Green Horde, western Red Horde, central Blue Horde, and eastern Golden Horde began to squabble for dominance.
White Horde
For the ensuing three centuries, the White Horde would exist largely separate from the power-struggle unfolding in Central and Southern Ochran, fending off the odd incursion or invasion attempt by the Blue Horde and Golden Horde, although even these ceased within the first century as both found themselves preoccupied elsewhere. As the other states mutated over time into proper successor states, the White Horde remained a relatively loosely-organized confederation of many of the Bayar's Chuyan subject peoples.
In the 1200's they began to lose ground in the west to the Nanjut Federation, reducing the White Horde to a more northeasterly state, increasingly known as Aspanaken (land of horses). As the Nanjuts, Lo state to the south, Ozhkhanate, and Qavar Khanate to the west unified into the Great Road Khaganate (Uluujol). Aspanaken faced immense pressure by the mid-1400's to accept Uluujoli suzerainty, and, with the offer of a marital alliance in 1461, succumed to that pressure, first entering into a personal union with Uluujol before being incorporated as several provinces of the Uluujoljeri.
Uluujol
The area comprising much of modern Untsangasar would be part of the Uluujoli realm for almost the next three centuries. Although the Khagan in Ozhe often claimed to control the lands all the way to the Boreian Sea and the Makrian Coast, in practice the disparate peoples of the Makrian Coast and the Far North largely ignored their new overlord, either complying with the bare minimum tributary requirements to be left alone or, on occasion, defying them entirely, leading to punitive expeditions by Uluujoli forces in 1484-1489, 1513-1515, 1561-1568, 1601-1605, with the sporadic restlessness largely petering out by the early 17th century. Meanwhile, most of the southern lands of modern Untsangasar in fact comprised part of the Uluujoli core realms, and the Jade Road cities of Ozhe, Samakent, Ashana, Baotu grew rich and cosmopolitan. As the wealth gained by the Khaganate accumulated, this also led to more serious attempts to urbanize and administer more disparate peoples; it was in the 1500's that Xem-Peldir was transformed into an administrative capital for the Turvan Banner, and similar efforts prompted the founding of Yakushari in 1632 at the empire's extreme northeastern border.
Still, this prosperity had no sooner begun to spread than the Khaganate's own polyglot nature and vast size began to exact its toll with interest on the state. As the 17th century unfolded, palace coups and squabbling for power in Ozhe saw the Khagans become weaker and consequently saw their power reach less and less far. Tribute slowed and eventually stopped from many of the Yezo, Nibkh, Shutkot, and Dehtkil peoples of the coasts, and when forces loyal to local leaders drove the Khagan's armies out of Xem-Peldir and Yakushari in 1698, there was little recourse. Imperial forces in Tengrekhot were increasingly isolated, and although an expedition from the south briefly reestablished the Khagan's authority in Xem-Peldir in 1702, this only led to the First Kurultai of the Untsan Gasar the following year.
Independence and Consolidation
Considered in many ways to be the beginnings of the Khaganate of Untsan Gasar, the First Kurultai was held on the site of what would become modern Ka'ankhot, a meeting of the leaders of the tribes increasingly united against the Uluujoli Khagan. Representatives came from the principle leading peoples, the Zhurjiins, Yakus, Turvans, Ebengis, Xets, Hyugs, Nai-Nais, Bayars, Yezos, Dehtkils, Ubiks, Shutkots, and even from several Lo and Xigchu communities in the empire's periphery, to organize against the Uluujoli Khagan. At the Kurultai, a nobleman of the Zhurjiin/Turvan Yu clan named Nurhaci arranged to have his son Nikan proclaimed Khagan of the Untsan Gasar.
Early the next year, with a sizable army assembled from the allied peoples of the Untsan Gasar, Nurhaci and Nikan struck west, besieging Tengrekhot. The sacred city, whose garrison was already isolated and weakened by hard campaigns into the countryside and the still reeling from a harsh winter, quickly surrendered. When the news arrived in Ozhe, it threw the imperial court into a panic: the great fear was that the rebel forces would strike south for the rich trade hub of Baotu, especially when a force under Nurhaci left Tengrekhot, heading south, as spring turned to summer. Desperate, Uluujoli Khagan Ozkan VI dispatched a large army to defend the vital waypoint on the Jade Road.
It was a feint. As the garrison in Xem-Peldir was largely stripped out to bolster the force due for Baotu, the city was nearly undefended when Nikan arrived with a force of his own, finding the gates thrown open by a still-restive Turvan populace that had been biding its time. The force relieving Baotu realized it had been deceived, but there was no opportunity to counter-attack, as the Great Road Khaganate's issues mounted and revolts and resistance grew throughout the empire. Seeking to stabilize his western and southern flanks in 1706, Ozkan VI conducted a negotiation with Nikan in which, in exchange for Nikan reducing his title to merely "Khan of the Untsan Gasar" and falling back to Tengrekhot, Ozkan would recognize him as a client ruler, fully legitimized, offering his sister Duygu to Nikan as a bride. With the rebellion having largely achieved its objectives, the offer was accepted. Ozkan was able to, in some places, stop the bleeding late in the 18th century's first decade, but it would be a hollow victory: the Khaganate was in increasingly dire financial straits and the peoples of the periphery were only growing more restive.
With the war concluded with Uluujol, the new Untsangasar Khanate had other matters to see to. Nikan sought to connect the allied peoples of the khanate, ostensibly in the interests of mutual defense but, ultimately in the service of centralization. Nikan and Duygu would prove a well-suited pair of rulers with both a broad vision and, as it turned out, a rather passionate marriage resulting in eleven children and the foundations of a new dynasty. Other key objectives were the foundation of a new port at the largely Lo-inhabited fishing village of Haeshenway, as well as negotiating the use and expansion of the Yezo town of Satporpet, and seizing the town of Urajio, largely occupied by Tsurushiman explorers. They built themselves a capital at the site of the First Kurultai, naming it Kaghankhot, or "City of the Khagan" and set about reaching out to the Tsurushimans and Mutulese traders operating in the Makrian at that point.
By the middle of the century, the increasingly-small rump of the Uluujoli realm was under attack and teetering on the brink of total collapse. With new powers rising in the west eyeing the moribund former empire, Nikan, at Duygu's urging, ordered the invasion and seizure of the Uluujoli heartland. A campaign led by their fierce daughter and future Khatun Aysen seized Ashana, then Ozhe, before racing for Samakent. In the span of only eight months, the former Uluujoli capital had fallen to Untsangasari forces, and the once-mighty Great Road Khaganate was no more by the time the New Year of 1744 came.
Khuvirgalt
Despite the early efforts of Nikan I and Duygu and their immediate successors to the throne, Aysen Khagan and her son Altan Khagan