A Bravosi Abroad: The Constitutional Monarchy of His Majesty Steven He - Day 1

But first, perhaps an introduction is in order? My name is Prof. Aleki Ogilvy and I was born and raised in Zalora-Bravo (well, technically Mount Zalor but it's all one country nowadays). I'm a literature professor at the University of Abergain (on an extended sabbatical) and a published sci-fi author, with such works as Seven Seeds are Sown and, oh, a little thing A Town Called Sunrise, yes, it was a book first, my book! But ever since I was little, I have always loved travelling as well as writing, which is why I've decided to pursue my passion and become a travel writer! My goal is to visit each and every nation in the NUK and write about my experiences and I have been given a grant by HRM's government to do exactly that! I won't be going alone either, I'll be brining my dog Angus with me.

Me and Angus on Day 3 of this trip!

But enough about me.

Now, when considering all of the places I could have visited on my first outing as an official Travel Writer for the NUK, one might wonder why I chose Huang of all places, as the islands have a mysterious and somewhat negative reputation in most of the world. Well, I would point out that my own Zalora-Bravo, too, has a bad reputation and is considered to be... a tad obscure, so I must admit I felt a curiosity about it! And boy, did I find out a lot on this trip! Some of what I found made me laugh, some made me cry, but most made me VERY impressed and not a just a small bit jealous! But I'm getting ahead of myself aren't I? Let's begin, shall we?

Zalor Media presents,

In partnership with the New United Kingdom:

A Bravosi Abroad - Huang

by Aleki Ogilvy

Day 1

There are three ways to enter the Constitutional Monarchy of His Majesty Steven He. The first two are obvious, by sea or by air, but there's a third way: rail! The Sakura-Lóng Underwater Railway is a railway running from Shanghai, China to Kyushu, Japan. Begun in 2014 and completed in 2021, the Railway is mostly underwater, but surfaces and briefly stops in Huang, which I should mention is the official name for not only the big island the entire archipelago. The SLUR is also one of the fastest trains in the world, with a maximum speed of 360km an hour!

The SLUR's route, rising to the surface in Huang.

And before you ask, yes, they are aware of the railway's rather unfortunate acronym when translated into English.

Following my non-stop four-hour flight from Abergain to Tokyo and a shorter flight to Kyushu, my journey truly began as I stepped into the central hub of Kyushu's rail system, Hakata Station, though first I had to let Angus out of his cage for a short walk and a pee at nearby Dekimachi Park, poor fellow! After getting the pup back in his cage and checked, I rode down the long escalators, showed my passport and ID at a couple security checkpoints, got scanned, and boarded the train.

One of the SLUR's two high-speed bullet trains.

The train ride was rather boring with no scenery out the window to grab the attention. If fact, the ride was so smooth, you might be forgiven to think you hadn't left the station at all, but an hour and a half after boarding, we were told over the PA, in both Chinese Mandarin and Japanese (both of which were translated to English by my Dragoonzi Universal Translator, produced in Shipgod) that disembarkation would begin immediately and we were all promptly hurried (politely) off the train so that they could board more passengers and proceed to Shanghai.

As I stepped out of the train, I felt a rush of excitement and curiosity. I was finally in here! I wondered what this island nation had to offer, and what surprises and secrets it had in store. I grabbed my luggage, which included poor Angus still caged, and looked around the terminal for a bit.

The SLUR terminal at Ziluólán Station in Steven Town, Huang is large and very modern, with a high ceiling and bright silver walls which have strangely pleasing geometric patterns engraved on them. And speaking of walls, each one had giant portraits of King Steven He in various poses and postures, some riding a horse, some standing beside an ornate desk, and there was even one of him reclining on a chaise lounge of some sort and being fed grapes by a servant! He seemed to be everywhere all at once, watching over his people. I also saw advertisements for the many attractions and landmarks of Huang and its capital, from posters for the Royal Museum of He to boat tours around the harbor and posted flyers for a local H-pop concert, all of it written in Chinese Mandarin as well as English, which is not surprising considering Huang's past role as a British royal possession, in fact, just over two thirds of the adult population speak English.

One of Ziluólán Station's main terminals.

At customs, I had to show my passport again, and had to pay an excise tax to officially enter the country, though it's halved for citizens of NUK and ASEAN countries. The customs agent, while not exactly friendly, was polite, and the only smile she gave was at the end when she said in accented English "Welcome to Huang, the land of the King!" She handed me a brochure that, again, had a picture of His Majesty on the front and the slogan "Huang: the Paradise of the East." I thanked her, feeling a mix of excitement and apprehension, just what kind of land was this and what kind of king was he?

After clearing customs and excise, I retrieved my belongings from the carousel, and finally let poor Angus out of his cage! That's the last he'll be seeing of that for a while! We saw the sun for the first time in hours and soon felt the warm and sunny climate. After seeing the outside of the Ziluólán Station, I was struck for the first time by just how different this land is compared to most of the rest of the world. There were no cars, and the roads that I could see from the concourse didn't seem to be made with cars in mind at all. Instead, the people of the capital use public transport streetcars and subways or ride bicycles. I found out later that actual automobiles are exclusively for emergency services and the royal family only. Being a Bravosi, and thus a citizen of the largest automobile exporter in the NUK, where every household has at least two cars not including dune buggies (as outside the cities Zalora-Bravo is mostly desert and mountains) it was quite a shock, let me tell you!

Nothing I generated came out like I wanted so just use your imagination and mentally add more people and ignore the little girl riding her bike headlong into the path of an oncoming streetcar

After taking a minute to get my bearings, I found the tramstop which included a map of the various tramlines and spent the next hour navigating my way through the city until we arrived at my hotel, the historic Peirce-Hawthorne, located in the illustrious (and perhaps infamous) Leighton Heights district in Old Victoria. It's the place where I would be staying for the first two nights of the trip. Despite the opulent and slightly intimidating facade, the atmosphere inside is quite warm and lovely and, most importantly, pet-friendly!

The historic and enormous Peirce-Hawthorne Hotel, a place closely associated with British Imperialism in Huang.

After finding my suite and letting Angus sniff every square centimeter of it, I ventured back down to the lobby and met with Arthur Chandalava, my tour guide for the evening. You see, the Peirce-Hawthorne is not just a working hotel, it's also a world-class museum, dedicated specifically to Huang's British Colonial Era.

Arthur explained the history of Huang as we drifted through the exhibit.

While their soldiers were handedly winning the Second Opium War in 1857, the British Parliament was already thinking about what territorial concessions they could squeeze out of Qing China this time. Their prize for winning the first war had been Hong Kong, as well as the ability to sell their opium to Qing China, but what should they demand this time? All they knew was that whatever they chose, it would need to be important enough that it's loss would hurt the Emperor so much that he would never dream of crossing the British Empire ever again! As Arthur explained it, with a bit of humor as he affected a posh English accent, that one minister pointed to a large island chain in the East China Sea and asked the PM, Lord Palmerston, "how about this island up here, old chap?"

The islands haven't been the same ever since!

For millennia beforehand, Huang had been the rope in a tug of war between Japan and China, and whenever war broke out between the two nations, which was fairly often, it was Huang where the first battles were fought, and it was Huang that suffered the most devastation. This kept the archipelago's population and development both relatively low, which kept it weak enough that it was never able to fully break free of either power for very long. Huang was originally controlled by China during the Tang dynasty, but they lost it during the reign of the southern Song dynasty. Nearing the Ming Dynasty, where China attempted to conquer Japan, they were ultimately unsuccessful in their main goal but managed to get Huang back. The nearly four hundred years of relative peace that followed allowed the islands to truly flourish for the first time, but Japan's concurrent prolonged period of self-imposed isolation also prevented Huang from becoming the massive center of trade it would one day become. By the time China surrendered at the end of the Second Opium War, Britain was practically salivating at the thought of the islands being theirs, and after some very tough negotiating, walked away from the table with Huang as a Royal Possession in 1858. It would remain one until 1993.

The British rule of Huang pre-WW2 was marked by both prosperity and oppression. The island became flooded with foreign investment, as well as immigrants from Britain and its other colonies and possessions (Arthur's family emigrated from India, for example). By 1880, 10% of the population of twelve million were of European descent. The town of Huánglóng was bulldozed to make room for a new city, Victoria, where the population was segregated with the native Huangens living in the poorer neighborhoods and slums while the Englishmen resided in the comparatively opulent Leighton Heights, where they could look down on their native subjects both figuratively and literally. The British imposed stiff taxes and did their best to keep the native population from having a say in their own, supposedly democratic, government, requiring that ballots be written only in English and that prospective voters pass tests which became progressively more complicated and difficult, tests that Huang's white residents were usually not given. However, the people of Huang persisted, learning the new language, and eventually proved adept at Britain's labyrinthine-at-times legal and political systems.

Arthur then took me to an exhibit at the far end of the museum. Unlike the rest of the museum, which does it's best to capture the opulence and grandiosity of the hotel in its prime, in this part, this exhibit is dismal. Instead of rich artwork and fabrics, the walls are bare apart from graffiti and several holes, some of which were covered over with Japanese WW2 propaganda posters, the windows boarded up and covered in barbed wire and the floors littered with spend shell casings and dark red stains. One of the rooms looked like a torture chamber, while another was filled with cages that, while big enough for a human, were small enough that you couldn't stand fully upright or lay completely flat in them. The juxtaposition of the two sides of the museum was shocking, and I was left speechless for a moment as I took it all in. Arthur filled the silence, explaining the dark history of the museum during Japanese occupation in WW2.

This is the best the AI could do, note the comically large shells and open windows, they were NOT in the prompt! Still, it captures the general atmosphere I was going for at least.

Being so close to Japan, Huang was one its first conquests following their declaration of war on Great Britain and the rest of the Allied Powers. The invasion began on December 7th, 1941, and by that time, Japan had already controlled Korea, Manchuria, and much of Indochina and Indonesia. It had been a foregone conclusion for months that the invasion would happen, but the Brits were busy defending their home isles and could not put up an effective defense and knew it. The islands held out for only eight days under the immense Japanese onslaught before surrendering.

During occupation, the hotel was used by the Japanese as a military headquarters as well as a prison, and many of the hotel's staff and guests were its first prisoners, and by the end of the war, most had been tortured and executed by the Japanese. The hotel's valuables, artwork and furniture were either looted or destroyed, and its signature dome was damaged by a bomb and collapsed. By the end of the war, the Peirce-Hawthorne had been fully converted into a military base/prison. In 1948, a full three years after the war, it was fully restored and had its grand reopening, but the dark reputation it had gained during the war proved difficult to erase, and in the minds of many, the old days of glitz and glamor were over.

The hotel struggled following the war and looked to other sectors to stay afloat. Almost a third of the hotel was remodeled as a casino following its reopening, and a portion of the grounds surrounding it was converted into a studio backlot, with much of the rest eventually being used for apartment housing, it also hosted and televised the first Miss Huang pageant in 1952 and has done so ever since. Following the Coup of 1993 (more about that will be in my Day 4 entry) the casino was converted into the museum following King Steven I's decree outlawing gambling.

Our tour ended about an hour after it began, and I thanked Arthur before making my way back to my suite, as it was getting late. After taking Angus for a walk and getting us both something to eat, I turned in for the night after looking over my schedule for Day 2 of the trip, where I would be taking not one, not two, but three separate tours of the capital city of Steven Town.

OOC: Well, that's the end of Day 1! Stay tuned for Day 2! If the rest of the days are this long, I think it's best that they have separate entries.