Posted by Frank Jacobs

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/la-empresa-de-china/

Imagine bullfights in Beijing, Chinese conquistadors capturing Constantinople for Spain, and a Habsburg Empire that completely encircled the globe. Spain’s King Philip II certainly did. His fever dream of world domination was called “la Empresa de China,” or “the Chinese Job.” And yes, it was as unhinged as this map suggests.

The plan to turn Ming-dynasty China into an outpost of Habsburg-era Spain didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It was hatched toward the end of the 16th century, when Spain had been on a century-long winning streak of divine luck and ruthless efficiency.

Soon after Columbus stumbled across the Americas (in 1492), Cortés toppled the Aztec Empire (in 1521), and Pizarro did the same with the Inca one (in 1533). Those quick victories seemed nothing less than providential. Could Spain pull off something similar in Asia?

The sheer scale and audacity of the plan were products of Spain’s luckiest century — and may have represented its peak. By the 1540s, Spanish explorers had named the Philippines after their crown prince, the soon-to-be Philip II, who would reign for almost the entire second half of the 16th century. In 1571, they took control of Manila, which they quickly turned into a glittering trade hub, an entrepôt linking Spain’s New World silver with Chinese silks and porcelains.

When Spain absorbed Portugal in 1580, Madrid also gained control over the Portuguese colony of Macau, its first real toehold on the Chinese mainland.

Throughout these heady, expansive years, a gallery of governors, missionaries, and traders fed Madrid a steady stream of intelligence on the fabulous yet still mostly mysterious Chinese Empire. Rather than as a sleeping dragon, China in many of these reports was painted as vast, rich, and soft: a piñata ripe for the whacking.

From that particular strategic mindset sprang a range of plans on how Spain was to engage with China — courtly, high-stakes versions of “kiss, marry, avoid.” In 1588, the Spanish crown merged various Empresas de China into one big, bold invasion plan.

While Philip II certainly must have entertained that plan, he had other fish to fry that same year. For 1588 is also when his Armada catastrophically failed in its invasion of England, and the year in which the revolt against Spanish rule in the Netherlands gathered pace with the establishment of the Dutch Republic.

Essentially, the Empresa was a mash-up of impractical logistics with missionary zeal and geopolitical fantasy. But let us, for a second, entertain that fantasy. What if Spain had tried and succeeded? This map shows Spain’s best-case scenario.

First phase: The Beachhead

A joint Spanish-Portuguese armada sets forth from Madrid’s base in the Philippines. The force, numbering in the tens of thousands, grabs ports in the southern Chinese coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian and starts to push inland.

Second phase: The March to Beijing

In a repeat of the blitzkriegs that won Mexico and Peru for Spain, the Iberian conquistadors march north to Beijing, in some scenarios aided by Japanese auxiliaries. They capture the imperial capital and install a puppet regime, perhaps with Emperor Wanli as its powerless figurehead.

Third phase: The Conversion

In another borrowing from their American playbook, the Spanish use conversion and intermarriage to create a mestizo elite loyal to the Spanish crown. Jesuit involvement is key: These missionaries are intelligence agents as well as evangelists. With their help, Spain pacifies China, which becomes the jewel in the Spanish imperial crown and a strategic platform for further conquest.

Fourth phase: The Grande Finale

China produces the soldiers, Spain leads the way. The mighty Sino-Spanish Empire balloons to rule much of Asia, and then expands westward, across the Central Asian steppes. Eventually, Spanish China makes contact with the Ottomans around the Caspian Sea.

After the opening of the second front in the Ottoman rear, Spain’s European forces swoop in from the west, crushing the Sultan’s might in a global Habsburg death hug.

Had Philip II (or his successors) pulled off this plan, a Spanish world empire would have ringed the planet. You could have traveled from Spain to the Americas, and then on to the Philippines, China, and the former Ottoman holdings in the Middle East and the Balkans, hopscotching across various European territories loyal to the Spanish crown, and never set foot outside Habsburg-controlled lands.

In the end, reason triumphed over adventurism at the Spanish court. The Empresa was discarded as unworkable — and not just because Spain was busy elsewhere. China also wasn’t the pushover that the most enthusiastic spy reports suggested. China famously invented gunpowder, remember. Kudos to Philip II for not succumbing to imperial hubris.

Much of the conquest talk indeed was nothing more than aspirational propaganda. Historians like Birgit Tremml-Werner point out how the Empresa was actually embedded in — and constrained by — wider patterns of trade, diplomacy, and missionary activity. In its dealings with China, Spain typically preferred prudence and trade over conquest and conversion (see “Spain, China, and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644“).

And indeed, the archival record shows Madrid returning again and again to trade-and-mission policies (with a sprinkling of missionary work aimed at establishing and consolidating influence) rather than grand amphibious invasion and continental conquest.

It would indeed seem that the Empresa de China was in fact more about rhetorical leverage for missionaries and merchants than a literal plan of war. This map is where that fantasy collides with a panoply of all-too-real constraints: geographic, logistical, military, and financial.

As a fascinating footnote of history, this obscure what-if offers an important lesson to the present. For it illustrates that the same rule applies to geopolitics as to online advertising: If it sounds too good to be true, it most definitely is.

Strange Maps #1281

This article “The Chinese Job”: Spain’s wild 1580s plan to conquer the world — via Beijing is featured on Big Think.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/la-empresa-de-china/