* In Ayutthaya, a Greek adventurer called Constantine Phaulkon, who had fought for the Dutch and the English, had become the top aide to King Narai, hinting to Louis that he could convert the kingdom to Catholicism if Louis sent French troops to guard against the English EIC. Narai and Louis exchanged embassies, and 1,300 French soldiers arrived in Thailand. But Phaulkon’s domination provoked a coup in 1688 by Phetracha, royal cousin and elephant corps commander, who overthrew the king, murdered his sons, executed Phaulkon and, marrying Narai’s daughter, usurped the throne – thus defying French imperialism and ending Louis’s dream. One of Narai’s ambassadors to Louis, Kosa Pan, was the great-grandfather of Rama I, the king who in 1788 would found the dynasty that still rules Thailand today.
* Shivaji had conquered much of southern-central India from coast to coast, setting up his ashta pradhan, a modern council of ministers led by a peshwa, chief minister, who organized the building of hundreds of forts and the commissioning of a navy from the Portuguese, manned by Malabar pirates and commanded by a Portuguese renegade. All this was funded by tribute and conquest, and by lucrative raids on English and Dutch factories in Surat and Bombay that interfered with Mughal profits. Ruling as much of southern India as had great medieval kings like the Cholas, Shivaji aspired to the crown, but his Bhonsale family had been mere village chiefs; the Brahmins regarded him as a member of the shudra (farmer) caste; only a kshatriya could be a king. So Shivaji persuaded a respected pandit to invent his kshatriya genealogy and took the title chhatrapati – Lord of the Parasol – equivalent to emperor.
* Scarring was an advantage: smallpox was so deadly that it became usual to choose emperors who had already survived a bout of the disease.
* Few rulers have mastered all the facets of power so well and thought about them so deeply. ‘Be kind from afar and keep able ones near,’ he advised his successor, ‘nourish the people, think of the profit of all as being the real profit; be considerate to officials and act as father to the people and maintain the balance between principle and expedience,’ adding with dry humour: ‘That’s all there is to it.’ Kangxi carefully supervised the history of the dynasty. History remained a dangerous pursuit in China. ‘It’s the emperor in whose reign the history is written who is finally responsible and will be blamed by posterity if there are distortions and errors.’ When the historian Dai Mingshi criticized Manchu rule, Kangxi ordered his execution – ‘the only scholar I executed’ – though ‘The Board of Punishment recommended Dai be put to lingering death and all his male relations over sixteen be executed, females and children enslaved, but I was merciful and lowered it to beheading.’
* When the Manchus had taken northern China from the Ming, an extraordinary polyglot pirate, Zheng Zhilong, had backed a Ming emperor in the south. Zheng started as a translator for the Dutch VOC, which he helped seize Taiwan from the Portuguese, and then moved on to building a fleet of 400 warships and his own army. Protected by a bodyguard of enslaved Africans escaped from the Portuguese, he led the piratical cartel Shibazhi of 800 ships, which was not dissimilar to the Dutch or English trading companies, and which then defeated the Dutch, whereupon he enrolled as admiral for the southern Ming. In 1645 the Manchus persuaded him to defect but his dementedly ferocious son Zheng Sen, half Japanese and trained as a samurai, took over the command, with the title Koxinga (Lord of the Imperial Name), of the southern coast, fighting the Manchus for fifteen years. Then in 1661, just as Louis XIV started his rule, Fujian, on the south-western coast, fell to the Manchus and Koxinga expelled the Dutch from Taiwan. Many of the Dutch wives were enslaved as Chinese concubines. Syphilitic, unstable yet capable, Koxinga killed a Dutch missionary and took his daughter as concubine. Advised by a renegade Italian friar, he established his own kingdom which blocked the expansion of Kangxi’s China. In the twenty-first century, China, again defied by an independent Taiwan, promotes the example of Kangxi.
Afsharis and Manchus, Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs
HOGMOUTH LEOPOLD, GUNPOWDER SOBIESKI AND QUEEN CLEOPATRA: THE LAST GREAT CHARGE
