::Sound of a door cracking open. A cloud of dust puffs up. Coughing is heard::
(man, I need to clean up in here more often. . . )
I felt the need to write something here that was neither editing, scientific, or political to our world. As such, something I am sure is fascinating to everyone!
International Trade in Arcanis
I was recently reviewing old mods for reasons, and I came to the adventure known as "Judgement", an A1: Crusade! mod set in Censure. In this mod, the ethnically Khitani House Zhuan makes an appearance and it got me thinking: why would there be such a large body of foreigners so far from their homeland? Now, there have been many discussions of this over the ages, ranging from a northern sea route that skirts the Unsealed Lands, as the most recent map shows it stretches to what must be the arctic of Onara, to captured Khitani in an early war that just set up shop there. In this little essay I intend to discuss how trade worked in the ancient days, and what is for me an entirely reasonable theory on how such a large number of Khitani ended up on the other side of the world.
First, a primer on how trade worked in the ancient world.
Based on what archeological records we have, there has been evidence of long distance (hundreds of miles at least) trade in our world that long predates written language and records. In fact, it is from the few records that we have on this trade that we believe modern writing as we know it evolved. In the ancient days (before about 3300 BCE) trade goods were often accompanied by little tags or tokens which had pictograms and scratches to indicate what was in it. These were done as many of these trade goods were in jars sealed with clay or similar material to prevent theft. As such, you had the tags to tell the recipient what was in it, and how many, and if there wasn’t that much they know they would have been cheated. For example, if you had a jar with 10 pears in it, you’d have a clay or wooden tag with crudely drawn lemon and 10 slashes. Eventually that symbol of a lemon begins to be used as that sound ‘pear/pair/etc’ and the symbols become more abstract and BOOM, writing as we know it is born.
To go back to international trade, we begin to see how trade started in the day. Even before writing, people were ordering material and getting others to bring it to them. A person in Town A sends agents or hires nomads to travel to Town B and pick up an order of obsidian or tin or wood. That group of agents then goes, picks up the order (possibly bringing trade goods in exchange if they are not already paid for), and then brings them back to Town A. The tags show what the order was when picked up in Town B to prove that the agents (or anyone else) didn’t try to cheat person in Town A, and there you go you have international trade.
There is, however, an upper limit to how far trade can realistically go. The average person can walk no more than about 20 miles per day on an average day. To travel even 100 miles takes 5 days of these kind of days, which puts an upper limit on a ‘on foot’ or ‘with a donkey or camel’ to maybe trips of 200 miles (10 days travel) for specific goods. This of course changes over time with the advent of better roads, sea travel, river networks, the domestication of horses vs. other pack animals, and so on, but ultimately it still makes individual trips relatively short distance by our standards. To remedy this, you build trade networks.
In this context, a trade network is a series of short hops for trade goods to travel, with agents/nomads/etc only travelling relatively short distances to bring trade to these hub cities, and from there they hop from one city or trading post to the next until they reach their final destination. You see great examples of this in our history in the form of the Silk Road cities like Samarkand, Kashgar, Turfan, and so on. In this network, products from thousands of miles away can make it to market, brought between cities by dedicated caravans, tribes, and nomads, then bought by merchants in that city, and then reexported to the next city along the line by another group. At each point, the price of the product goes up as merchants buy and sell at a profit, so the further away the item comes from, the more expensive it is, but it allows for long distance trade. Examples of this is silk from China becoming popular in the Mediterranean world, despite there being so much territory between China and the Levant.
But Bergie, you say, wouldn’t this raise the price to the point it would become prohibitive? Yes. However, our ancestors were just as smart as we are now, so they came up with many ways of dealing with this. There were many instances of ‘trade houses’ or even whole ethnic groups which pop up around all of these trading networks throughout our world, throughout history. These groups send representatives of their group (family, culture, religion) to these trading cities, and act as the intermediates. In this case, Merchant A sells an item to a caravan run by his own group. This caravan goes from Town A to Town B, and ‘resells’ the item to Merchant B of the same group essentially at cost (or only with a slight mark-up). This means that these trading groups are able to undercut the price of items that aren’t carried by their own group, decreasing price, and allowing them to gain immence profits as they essentially undercut the competition. It is from here that groups like Jews and Arameans along the Silk Road, and Assyrians before them in the Near Eastern Trade networks, grew to prominence.
For reference, this was also the beginning of banking houses and other similar groups. If you have a group you trust (maybe a son or uncle) in a far away city, you do not need to bring money with you when you go on a trade mission. You go carrying just as much money as you need to get to the far-off place, then when in that place you borrow from those of the same group as you already there. You all are part of the same ‘corporation’, after all. Eventually, people even not from the same group tap into this, bringing receipts from Town A to Town B, saying they cashed in 100 gold in Town A, so they can get 100 gold in Town B, allowing them to travel more lightly.
Okay, real world history done with (I’m probably going to perjure myself later, but oh well), how does this affect Arcanis?
The average merchant on Onara does not have access to the many magical means of transportation such as portals or spells that the rich and powerful do, and even those magical means do not allow for bulk transport of items as they are cost-prohibitive to use. As such, goods and services move as they do in our world: through muscle, wind, or river current.
We know from the Blessed Lands Book that there exist two major Trade Routes in the Blessed Lands which bring goods between the Khitani Lands and the Known Lands (former Coryani imperial territories). The northern route represents a much more direct trade route from the Khitani Lands, starting at the Ququil Lumer Mill (and likely the surrounding towns and villages), skirting the Vastwood forest, and ending at the Pilgrim’s Pass in modern Almeric. The southern route seems to travel primarily to the lands beyond the First City, beginning at the Harbour of the First City and travelling to the same Pilgrim’s Pass along the Corlathian Mountains.
Using what we have learned earlier in this essay, we know that these ‘depots’ like the Habour, First City, and even the Qoquil Lumber Mill must be like our Samarkands and Turfan’s. Goods are brought there over land (the Fervidus Hills for the north, the Sea of Lanterns for the south), bought by local merchant factors, and then shipped further down the line using caravans run by those same factors. Unlike in our world, however, great cities have not sprung up in the Blessed Lands, but these still pass by major landmarks such as the Citadels of Hurrian and Larissa, which themselves must have also built up ‘castle towns’ around them to support those fortifications (think Winterfell in A Song of Ice and Fire series). Additionally, we know there are Andyar villages all throughout the Blessed Lands, as well as semi-nomadic groups like the Maghir who continue to exist in the land between settlements who can also act as waystations and agents to carry goods. This lack of cities, though, can be somewhat countered betcause the trade routes in question are only between 300 and 450 miles long within the Blessed Lands, meaning that they can be travelled in roughly a month. Even in our world, most of these major trading cities were somewhere between 150 to 200 miles apart, and Central Asia is more lush and fertile than much of the Blessed Lands.
So what about the Zhuan and Censure?
Well, there are two major theories on my part on where THEY came from, as Khitani about as far away from Khitan as you can be, and these two options depend on if they arrived prior to the foundation of the Coryani Empire, or after it.
If the Zhuan have existed in the Hinterlands before the foundation of the Coryani Empire, they most likely arrived as merchant factors, similar to the Jews and Arameans in our world, from the lands that are now the Unsealed Lands/Fiendish Expanse. Before the Time of Terror, the entire northern part of Onara was steppeland similar to our own Central Asian Steppes. These lands were inhabited by the people who would now be known as the Axunites, Yhing Hir, and the Riders of Himmetah, and was a direct route between Khitan and what are now the Known Lands. Here, these nomadic horse tribes (taking the same role as the Turkic, Mongolian, Indo-Iranian tribes of our world) would likely act as go-betweens in the trade between Khitan and the areas that are now Canceri, the Hinterlands, and Milandir, but almost certainly the Khitani would send their own representatives along with these routes as described above. When the Godswall Mountains were raised at the end of the Time of Terror, there must have been Khitani left trapped in the Hinterlands, and it is possible that from THIS group, the Zhuan are descended.
The second major theory I have is what if they arrived AFTER the foundation of the Empire and the raising of the Godswall Mountains? In this case, there are two situations that would cause this: the above mentioned sending merchant factors along trade routes method, or another more. . . invasive method: forced relocation. In this second method, it was common in our world for defeated enemy groups to be forcefully relocated deep into your territory, often onto land that was not at that time being worked to bring it under cultivation. Examples of this in our world is the exiling of the Judean ruling class to Babylon following the Babylonian conquest of Judea, or the many Greek communities founded by the Persians in what is now the Middle East following the Greco-Persian War (some as far away as modern Uzbekistan!).
Assuming the second method, we know that the Coryani Empire fought two wars with the Khitani Empire. The First Coryani-Khitani War of 398 I.C., and the Second War which was fought for over 40 years between 764 and 806 I.C. It is possible that the ancestors of the Zhuan were captured in one of these two wars (timeline wise, probably the second one) and resettled in Coryani territory as either POW’s or in a population transfer as outlined above. The fact that they ended up in Censure, which even in the 700’s I.C. was a penal colony of the Empire, suggests to me that they were more POW’s than simply resettled populations, but it could go either way. When Censure became independent in the chaotic years at the end of the Second Coryani-Khitani War as the Empire broke up, the Zhuan were already a powerful and populous group in that city/region, becoming a major trading power.
Either method, the Zhuan ended up being one of the Six (now Five) Great Houses of Censure, and maintain a large and well-populated Khitani population in that city. Also, regardless of when their population came to the region, they seem to have established themselves in the role discussed above as the local representatives of their group (Khitani) in the region, so traders representing Khitani interests almost have to deal with them. They would run the overland exotic trade from the Empire at least as far as the edge of the Hinterlands (if not all the way to the Pilgrim’s Pass), allowing them to undercut non-Khitani, making a profit.
Moving away from the Zhuan, I figured I’d have a few side discussions about trade around Onara in other areas, notably sea trade. Onara generally, and the Known Lands specifically, seem to have a robust but largely coastal sea-based trade not dissimilar to the kind that existed in Europe between the Roman conquest of Gaul and Britain and the Viking Conquests. Because the Coryani do not (as far as we know) trade with far-off nations beyond the sea, and mostly only trade by sea between other Onaran ports like Savona, Censure, Midake, and Plexus, you see sea trade routes very similar to the land-based trade routes described above. For example, since you rarely need to travel out of sight of land when going from Savona to, say, Censure, you would develop ships that sacrifice durability and endurance (like a Galleon) for increased cargo capacity. These ships are designed for short hops between ports through mostly calm seas, carrying the maximum amount of cargo their (relatively) fragile hulls can carry. You wouldn’t see ships travelling directly from Plexus or Metra all the way to Pearlspar in the Hinterlands, instead each ship would travel a relatively short route to a nearby port, offload their cargo, load up with local cargo, and go back to where they came.
Because of this, you are almost never going to see large ocean-going vessels like Tall Ships in our world because there is no need to travel long distance. As far as we know in canon, there are no trade routes which go further south from the Known Lands than the elorii lands of Entaris, and certainly none that round the Southern Continent like an Arcanis Cape of Good Hope. In fact, in a mod from a few years ago, we got a glimpse of a world beyond what we knew while travelling into those Southern Waters that suggest that, while trade with the Known Lands is occurring, it is not very common and few ever make that trip.
On the subject of ocean-going travel, I should also bring upriver routes into the discussion. In our world, rivers like the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, Mississippi, Rhine, Yellow (Huang He), and Amazon have been major arteries of trade for as long as they have been known to exist. The same is true in the Known Lands and beyond. We know that Khitan is a land of many major rivers, and even the Coryani Empire links much of its civilization on the Corvus River, linking such major centres as Plexus, Panari, Coryan-the-Cities, and even Solanos Mor together. We know that many of these cities—especially Plexus and Old Coryan—have major river ports, with Plexus operating as the major trading hub to move goods from within the Empire to lands like the League of Princes. These river routes tend to be very fast, and because they are reasonably predictable, can move massive amounts of goods (even very perishable ones) very quickly over long distances on large, shallow-bottom barges and boats. As such, you can in theory get fresh fruit from the tropical Western Lands to Grand Coryan rapidly, and possibly even faster than you could get similar fruit from a city like Savona which lacks these river routes!
As a final thought before I log off (as I am already around 3000 words), I should bring up a point that was brought up some years ago in a discussion with val Holryn/Eric about how people could become rich on trade, especially in context of the Shadow Towns of the Western Lands. As stated above, trade routes tend to promote outpost/waypoint hubs where caravans meet after a few hundred miles of travel. In these hubs, goods are bought, sold, and move back and forth. These hubs tend to attract many merchants who aim to buy low and sell high. However, when multiple people are doing this, your profit margins can be very low relatively speaking. After all, if you have multiple trading houses trying to break into the silk market, if they sell too high, their competition will undersell them, taking the business.
One way that merchants get around this is to invest in. . . alternate means of gaining funds in these cities (both land hubs and ports), many of these we would generally consider borderline criminal. For example, most ports even today charge ‘port fees’ to use their facilities. Boats coming in have to pay to dock, merchants have to pay labourers to load and unload, there are warehouse fees, etc. The same is true with a lot of land cities, where to enter the city you have to pay to get in. This means that these local merchants/lords/etc are earning money from people for the RIGHT to trade, and not only on trade goods themselves.
Additionally, many of these people will resort to straight up strong-arm, protection racket tactics, saying that if you don’t pay their ‘fee’, then there is a risk that your caravan/ship will be attacked by raiders of some sort. There were many instances of merchants along the Silk Road in our world who had. . . understandings with local horse tribes to help remove some of their competition or undesirable people who didn’t pay the proper fees. With this, you can squeeze a lot of money without even selling or trading anything, simply being the most convenient stop on a trade route. Of course, if you do this too much, you risk being undercut by competition or by other powers who wreck your little monopoly. A good example of this was the economic destruction of Rhodes by Rome when the Roman Senate decided to make the nearby port of Delos their preferred port of call because the Rhodians were not bowing enough to Roman domination.
Anyway, I could go way more into this, but I should probably get to other more economically for me productive topics. Still, it was nice to have a little foray into a random topic.
_________________ Cody Bergman Legends of Arcanis Campaign Staff Initial Author Contact/Adventure Vetting
Haakon Marcus val'Virdan, Divine Holy Judge of Nier Ruma val'Vasik, Martial Crusader and Master of the Spear Jorma Osterman, Arcane Coryani Battlemage
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