Welcome to the Sanhaiverse!

Background

The Sanhaiverse isn't a multiverse, contrary to its name. It's just a set of three alternate history projects that I came up with during my undergraduate studies as I was coping with taking physical chemistry and biochemistry at the same time. It was not a pleasant time academically speaking, so I made it worse by coming up with three related but still separate alternate history projects in the little spare time I had.

All three projects share a few commonalities because I originally just wanted to justify the existence of a Chinese-dominated California. Actually, this started out because I read a Lan Sizhui/OFC fic and really wanted to write my own, but I couldn't figure out how to plot a normal, modern AU, childhood friends to lovers Lan Sizhui/OFC fic, so I added swords and cultivation to help me out a bit. Then that turned into, "Well, since this is my fic, I get to choose the alternate history!" and it just spiraled out of control from there.

That's pretty much where the similarities end. They all accomplish my goal of Chinese California, just in different ways. Sure, certain figures are shared across all three of them, but they might not necessarily end up in the same places. For example, in projects 1 and 2, Towako Oohashi is a descendant of an exiled onmyoji clan from Japan, but in project 1, she becomes the leader of Fongzong while in project 2, she becomes the leader of Bungloi. The Hetalia-styled personifications of every nation, particularly Fongzong, are present under different names in projects 2 and 3. Every project has the nation of Fongzong, which is where Fongzongese developed, but in projects 1 and 2, Fongzong is a republic of predominantly indigenous peoples with some Asian immigrants, while in project 3, Fongzong is an empire in the style of imperial China. Projects 1 and 2 are a bit more similar because I actually made magic a real thing there, while in project 3, there's no magic.

Project 2 is actually just a redo of project 1 because I wrote myself into a plot hole that I couldn't get out of in a satisfying way, so project 1 is basically defunct. (I made the magical art of divination a little too overpowered, and that led to some serious privacy concerns, so I had to nerf divination in project 2.) Project 3 started out as an AU of project 2 for the express purpose of writing an arranged marriage royalty AU between the Hetalia personifications of Russia and what I called the Sanhai Confederation. I'll nickname project 2 the Sanhai Confederation timeline and project 3 the Empire of Fongzong timeline.

Divergences from IRL history

Sanhai Confederation

The first thing with this timeline is that magic exists so I could justify cultivation being a real thing here, but that's not the main divergence from real world history. The main divergence is that to achieve Chinese California, some sailors from the Ming treasure voyages ended up on the west coast of North America with no real way of going back, so they just stayed and discovered the continent about a century before Europeans did (except the Basques because I don't remember when they showed up).