Alexander VS Qin dynasty

Didnt it take quite a while though?

IIRC, Qin Shi Huang had a son who was supposed to follow him, but that son screwed up, and we had Warring States 2.0 which lead to the founder of the Han dynasty winning.

I agree that China was able to bounce back as a nation, (well, if you see the Manchu and Yuan dynasties as "Chinese" which I imagine would be a contentested agreement, if you see them as another challenger, than the bouncing back part occassionally took quite long),
Alexanders empire (no mistake, the Seleukids and Ptolemids successors where quite major players until the Romans came),
fell after him due to beeing significantly more heterogenous (I know that westerners like me tend to underestimate difference between East Asians, but I daresay that the difference between Macedonians and Persians were a bit greater than those between most ethnicities in Qin Shi Huangs empire), not having a formalized beurocracy (which I believe Qin Shi Huang spend a lot of time in implementing, well, he did get to live a bit longer than Alexander too ;D ) and not having instituted a clear law of succession.

Alexander also died while attempting to implement some kind of "theorcracy/god King-hood" with him at the head, dieing while attempting such a reform usually leads to empire desintegration.



P.S. imho, If Alexander "attacks" or invades China he would die to logistics alone (supplieng someone through Gobi or the Himalaya in the Antique, sure way to end up dead), if Qin Shi Huang attacks Alexander, the higher organisation may be able to actually get a certain amount of troops into battle, but those would be to far away to be constantly supported, and would likely loose too.
If the Persian Empire had not created a significant amount of infrastructure, Alexander would not have reached the Indus in the first place...

Mightypeon said:

Didnt it take quite a while though?

IIRC, Qin Shi Huang had a son who was supposed to follow him, but that son screwed up, and we had Warring States 2.0 which lead to the founder of the Han dynasty winning.

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The whole thing did not take as long as you think. Qin Shi Huang died in 210BC and Liu Bang defeated Xiang Yu and established Han dynasty in 202 BC. That's merely 8 years. That's nothing compared to 200 years of fighting in the Warring states. The fighting that topk place after Qin and before Han dynasty was more like civil war than fighting between established states as in the Warring States.

Mightypeon said:

P.S. imho, If Alexander "attacks" or invades China he would die to logistics alone (supplieng someone through Gobi or the Himalaya in the Antique, sure way to end up dead), if Qin Shi Huang attacks Alexander, the higher organisation may be able to actually get a certain amount of troops into battle, but those would be to far away to be constantly supported, and would likely loose too.
If the Persian Empire had not created a significant amount of infrastructure, Alexander would not have reached the Indus in the first place...

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That is very true, which is why Alexander never tried to invade China in real history.

@ Vesicles: Thanks for the heads up, I somehow confused it with the San Gou Zi period, which took a wee bit longer.


Concerning logistical matters imho, if anyone wishes to conquer China, he has to come from the North/North East (like the Mongols) or from the west with significant naval superiority.
The logistic constrains of the lands in Chinas immidiate west would propably even overpower a modern army, and the terrain in the South appears to be not that applicable for massive offensive warfare (not that there werent massive clashes with the Vietnamese throughout history).

Off topic, I greatly wondered why there are few (known to me) reports about naval battles between China and Vietnam, given that controlling the costs seems like a good way to circumvent annoying jungles.

Maybe the reason is quite straight forward... there is no need for the naval forces. China forces can reach Vietnam through land... which is simpler. Not that at ancient time China had great naval forces (Ming Navy is the finest in the world at its era).

Vietnam might not have a great navy at that time... for naval crashes to happen, both needed to have functioning and powerful navies... which obviously Vietnam is lacking.

(I might be wrong though).

Well, Vietnam was a tributary state of China in the imperial eras. The only reason China would have had to fight Vietnam would be to occupy it, or to install a friendly regime, and both of those means ground troops. Maybe China made use of navies to land its troops, but it's doubtful that Vietnam had the naval forces to challenge China.

In modern times, PRC did clash with Vietnam over the Spratly islands.

Last night on Spike, there was an episode of Deadliest Warriors, they compared Alexander and Huns. It was basically a comparison of various weapon systems, including long range, medium range and short range weapons. Weapons were tested by ancient weapon experts invited to the show. I was shocked some Alexander experts took a crossbow-like weapon and claimed that Alexander used these. Of course, the typical weapons on the Alexander side included long pikes and sharp short blades. On the Hun side, they got compound bows and short swords, etc. Biomedical engineers measured all the parameter, such as penetrating power, speed, etc. Then they plugged the parameters into a complex computer simulation program that was specifically designed to simulate actual fighting between two sides. Although it was more of a face-to-face between two small groups of warriors (not large formations), it was actually a comprehensive comparison between two complete weapon systems. The simulation was run 1000 times to eliminate any "luck" factor. In the end, the Hun won 596 times and Alexander won 404 times. So Huns got the edge at the end.

The experts concluded that it was the long range and short weapons by the Huns that won the fight. Although the medium range weapons of the Alexander, namely pikes, was highly effective and possessed overwhelming advantage over the medium range weapons of the Huns, it simply cannot overcome the advantage of the medium (compound bow) and short range (sword of the Mars) weapons of the Huns.

vesicles said:

Last night on Spike, there was an episode of Deadliest Warriors, they compared Alexander and Huns. It was basically a comparison of various weapon systems, including long range, medium range and short range weapons. Weapons were tested by ancient weapon experts invited to the show. I was shocked some Alexander experts took a crossbow-like weapon and claimed that Alexander used these. Of course, the typical weapons on the Alexander side included long pikes and sharp short blades. On the Hun side, they got compound bows and short swords, etc. Biomedical engineers measured all the parameter, such as penetrating power, speed, etc. Then they plugged the parameters into a complex computer simulation program that was specifically designed to simulate actual fighting between two sides. Although it was more of a face-to-face between two small groups of warriors (not large formations), it was actually a comprehensive comparison between two complete weapon systems. The simulation was run 1000 times to eliminate any "luck" factor. In the end, the Hun won 596 times and Alexander won 404 times. So Huns got the edge at the end.

The experts concluded that it was the long range and short weapons by the Huns that won the fight. Although the medium range weapons of the Alexander, namely pikes, was highly effective and possessed overwhelming advantage over the medium range weapons of the Huns, it simply cannot overcome the advantage of the medium (compound bow) and short range (sword of the Mars) weapons of the Huns.

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To be honest the match up between Alexander and the Huns is a bit anachronistic. The Huns came to Europe during the times of the Roman Empire while Alexander was in power a long time before that .

Anyhow the Greeks did develop a crossbow like weapon, the gastrophetes or belly bow. The device used the same release mechanism as the Roman ballista but employed a bow for power instead of torsion springs. The device looks awkward (the trigger is mounted on the top and side ways) and I don't think it was employed on the same scale as the Qin crossbow, which employed a better mechanism for a handfired device.

I agreed with what Siegecrossbow had said... and to add to that opinion, no simulation in the world could actually include the following criteria,

1) Training received,
2) Moral of the troops,
3) Experience of the troops as a whole,
4) Skills of the commanders,

The most these simulation could do was to put these variable as equals. Which is obviously not the case. Because many wars are actually won by troops with inferior weapons, trainings, etc, but with brilliant commanders, high moral, etc. (One famous war was the Chinese communist army against the Nationalist Army in the 1945s to 1949 during the chinese civil war, whereby the Nationalist Army was equipped by the US and had much better weapons which include, fighters, bombers, tanks, etc, against the communist peasant army).

So by merely comparing firepower or weapon advantage is not enough to say which army is better. Such was the mistake many have make throughout history.

rhino123 said:

I agreed with what Siegecrossbow had said... and to add to that opinion, no simulation in the world could actually include the following criteria,

1) Training received,
2) Moral of the troops,
3) Experience of the troops as a whole,
4) Skills of the commanders,

The most these simulation could do was to put these variable as equals. Which is obviously not the case. Because many wars are actually won by troops with inferior weapons, trainings, etc, but with brilliant commanders, high moral, etc. (One famous war was the Chinese communist army against the Nationalist Army in the 1945s to 1949 during the chinese civil war, whereby the Nationalist Army was equipped by the US and had much better weapons which include, fighters, bombers, tanks, etc, against the communist peasant army).

So by merely comparing firepower or weapon advantage is not enough to say which army is better. Such was the mistake many have make throughout history.

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Yes, I agree that simulation cannot simulate actual battles. However, neither Alexander nor any of his potential adversary is alive nowadays to have a face-off and satisfy our curiosity. Compared to our way of comparing Alexander vs. so-and-so (simply speculating and imagining), a computer simulation is a much better way of comparison and, to be honest, IMHO, is the ONLY logical method left to us.

Also, I would imagine this particular program has been verified by testing historical battle that actually happened and the outcome, in most cases, agrees with what actually happened. I know we do this when completing a molecular dynamic simulation for a protein. Once complete, we would compare the simulated structural changes to those discovered experimentally (by crystallography and NMR). Then the next step would be to run simulations on things that cannot be tested experimentally. So although simulations have shortcomings, they do have their use, especially when combined with statistics.