Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Compared to moving stuff overland (which is pound for pound more than an order of magnitude more expensive than transport by sea and significantly slower to boot), paying countless trade duties along the way, risking the occasional politically motivated trade embargo, and occasionally stopping for a few months as winters closed down important mountain passes, it was faster and cheaper.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

The mark up would still have been enormous and I would have assumed prohibitive.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

There are lots of people who see "Big ship with sailors on it" and think it looks more expensive than a few men with packhorses. The important factors include the much larger amount that the ship can carry per person working, the lack of cost for the animals and their feed, and the faster travel and relative lack of people taxing or stealing from you.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

How different is walrus ivory from elephant ivory? I've assume it's fairly hard to tell the difference, but I don't actually know, and I'd like to. If it's pretty similar, then the Chinese already have plenty of ivory from Indian elephants.

Slaves are expensive to move long distance, because food is non-abundant in a medieval economy (although perhaps at medieval tech levels food could be semi-abundant in China due to rice farming techniques). Unless they have some magical hibernation trick (actually used in a John Christopher alt history novel, about Chinese exploring the Americas, via self-hypnosis induced hibernation), only truly exceptional slaves are worth moving huge distances.

Although for sexual purposes exoticness does have a high value in itself. I could see pretty young women (and a few young men) being transported to China, and pretty Chinese transported back the other way. But other than that, you'd need slaves with exceptional skills, and those are rare.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

In Denmark, one word for navigation is orientation, which literally means to find the East - to find the direction from which desirable valuables (such as silk) comes: The Orient.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

You'd be assuming wrong. Of course they didn't move low-value density stuff, but items such as pepper aren't exactly high-value density, and AFAIK silk isn't much more value-dense than pepper. It's just a question of the goods being moved being sufficiently exotic at the other end, and markers of high status (capital-S Status in systems such as GURPS and Sagatafl) and prestige, that people are willing to pay a high price for them.

(Note that in a medival context, some of the route was probably overland - one reason that so many people were horny to own Jerusalem had nothing to do with religion, but was because it was an important transit hub on the East-West route during medieval times. I imagine the goods were moved by ship along the south Asian coast, to Araby or thereabouts, then overland to Jerusalem or sometimes some other port, then by ship from there again.)

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

GURPS Low-Tech, at least the 3E version, says the transport cost of moving something by river is 5 times lower than moving overland, and 5 times lower again (25 times total) by ocean.

I found that extremely useful to know, from a worldbuilding and worldbuilding'ish perspective, back when I first bought it about 13-15 years ago, and it hadn't been obvious to me before I read it.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It's easier to get when you've played Patrician III. Overland is a small part but the difference between small and large ships is not. I usually use small ones but I specialize in luxuries and use bulk cargo as "kintledge"(New England term for cargo bought to avoid having an empty hold).

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Possibly. I haven't fleshed out all the magical aspects of the campaign world yet, but I will need to do that eventually. The Big Bad of the European domain is a lich masquerading as a living king, and his Evil Plot is to gather one master practitioner of every magical art in the realms to split the dimensions, and so certainly the Hua interest him, because their omission from his project could mean an unrepresented magical art. (So far my theoretical "flavors" of magical arts that the Hua use would be Fengshui style geomancy, yin-yang internal/external chi-based arts, and Celestial divine favor which is partially represented by the Dragon as interlocutor between the gods and men. If you can suggest any further ones, I'd be happy to hear them!)

This can be left wide open. I'm happy to have a situation where the Hua are squabbling over a vacant or weak Imperial seat, with several kingdoms observing surface courtesies to peace, but jockeying for power behind the scenes. The merchants who came over to the West would already be considered fairly low-ranking folk in the Hua bureaucracy, so it's entirely possible that they're also willing to break various other taboos, including studying foreign academic/religious texts, copying foreign tech, and intermarrying with foreign folks.

One possibility is that the Hua society is extremely rigid and circumscribed, and the chaos and volatility of the European-style countries is a powerful contrast: revolutions in thought and deed lead to change and suffering, but also to advances and further knowledge.

Another possibility is that this could be a revamp of the "ageing Emperor seeks immortality elixir" trope, from Earth's Qin dynasty. This could lead to very interesting interactions if you consider the European leader has already found a (partial) solution on his own through lichdom. If an undead king comes up against an undead emperor, who wins? That sort of thing.

But this is probably hijacking my own thread, so I move quickly on to the issue of the goods themselves...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Very good - these could all go nicely into a trade balance for the Hua.

One other (completely random) thing that I remembered offhand was this: on a sidequest, the PCs encountered a fledgling crop farm in the foothills, which had transplanted drug crops and was trying to make them grow in the European-style domain's climates. I didn't actually specify what drug crop it was (and this side quest already happened about half a year ago), but it could certainly lend itself to interesting historical echoes if an opium trade sprang up...