Non Asian Andermani

kzt wrote:David said at Honorcon that the language of the AE is German. The starting planet for the AI (which I can't remember right now) was largely Chinese, but he said that even there the public language was German. People might speak Mandarin (or something - unclear which dialect) at home, but everyone speaks German.

Honor Among Enemies wrote:The Empire was not, Honor thought wryly, your run of the mill monarchy, but despite the occasional quirks in its gallop, the House of Anderman had, by and large, done well by its people. For one thing, its members were wise enough to grant an enormous degree of local autonomy to their various conquests, and they'd shown a positive knack for picking up systems which were already in trouble for one reason or another. Like the Gregor Republic in Gregor-B. The entire system had fallen apart in a particularly messy civil war before the IAN moved in and declared peace, and like so much else about the Empire, that tendency to "rescue" their conquests went back to Gustav I and Potsdam itself.

Before Gustav Anderman and his fleet moved in on it, Potsdam had been named Kuan Yin, after the Chinese goddess of mercy. Which had been one of the more ironic names anyone ever assigned a planet, for the ethnic Chinese who'd settled it had found themselves in a trap as deadly as the one which had almost killed the Graysons' ancestors.
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That made him quite acceptable to the natives of Kuan Yin as their new Emperor. His foibles didn't bother them—they would have been prepared to forgive outright lunacy—and they became very loyal subjects. He'd started out by raising and exporting the one product he fully understood—competent, skillfully led mercenaries—and then gone into the conquistador business on his own. By the time of his death, New Berlin had been the capital of a six-system empire, and the Empire had done nothing but grow, sometimes unspectacularly but always steadily, ever since.

Duckk wrote:There are plenty of non-Chinese descent citizens. For one, Gustav Anderman's original mercenary crew. For another, the Andermani Empire is based on annexation of their neighbors, so a lot of their neighbors would have a different ethnic mix. If anything, the bulk of the Andermani Empire is something other than Chinese.

Weird Harold wrote:

Duckk wrote:There are plenty of non-Chinese descent citizens. For one, Gustav Anderman's original mercenary crew. For another, the Andermani Empire is based on annexation of their neighbors, so a lot of their neighbors would have a different ethnic mix. If anything, the bulk of the Andermani Empire is something other than Chinese.

I think that the false impression of all Andermani as ethnic Chinese is that we've only directly seen Andermani nobility/elite, mostly drawn from Kuan Yin/Potsdam where Gustav I and his original mercenary band have intermarried with the ethnic Chinese population extensively.

Hasek wrote:After 300 years id expect at least some non Asian Andermani to move into that elite category, and given the Andermani's level of internal autonomy id think most of the worlds would have kept a large part of their own culture. Maybe well see some in later books...

Weird Harold wrote:

Duckk wrote:There are plenty of non-Chinese descent citizens. For one, Gustav Anderman's original mercenary crew. For another, the Andermani Empire is based on annexation of their neighbors, so a lot of their neighbors would have a different ethnic mix. If anything, the bulk of the Andermani Empire is something other than Chinese.

I think that the false impression of all Andermani as ethnic Chinese is that we've only directly seen Andermani nobility/elite, mostly drawn from Kuan Yin/Potsdam where Gustav I and his original mercenary band have intermarried with the ethnic Chinese population extensively.

JeffEngel wrote:Is this an issue because there's an expectation of more diversity in people's ethnic backgrounds (to the extent that 20+ centuries in space haven't put those through a massive shuffle), or because there's an expectation of more diverse names?

If it's sheer ethnicity, then yeah, we're just seeing New Potsdam natives, or at least people whose ancestry probably tends largely to go back to that mix. (And, if you're going to assume our familiar ethnic groups are kinda intact in 1920 P.D., about 1 in 5 people are ethnic Chinese now, so even the ancestry from elsewhere may get you that often anyway.)