ClocktowerEchos — Roleplayer Guild

Name
Hui Jinfu

Age
34

Ethnicity
Han

Government Position
Finance Minster of Guangdong (Former)
Governor of Guangdong (Former)
Lord Jinfu of Guangdong

Personality
Hui is a very calm and collected man with a very open, friendly face. However, under that face he is very cunning and lives under a questionable set of morals. He will betray, manipulate and deceive others to get his way but would rather use more open, direct and less shady methods if he needs to. He does enjoy good company and likes to have intelligent conversations with others however. When dealing with other warlords, he will often try to see if there is a way to make money first or gain something from them with little cost to himself.

Biography
Hui was always a bright kid, always being able to boast he was amongst the smartest children in the village he was born in. However, he would use said intelligence for darker purposes then rest of the villagers would have liked, often extorting or cheat money from the other kids and even adults. However, he was untouchable due to his father's position in the Qing bureaucracy. By the time he was a teenager, he had already accumulated enough wealth to be the richest person in the village by a long shot and set his sights on greater goals.

However, during an Imperial crackdown on corrupted officials, Hui lost much of that money and his parents were unjustly jailed for crimes they did not commit and eventually executed. Seething in rage, he hated the Imperial government in his lost, accepting that what he did was wrong but his parents were innocent. Eventually he wandered into Hong Kong and was picked up by a British merchant family who saw the potential in Hui.

Teaching him English and basic economics, the family raised Hui so well to the point that he unlike many of his peers in the streets would not hate the Westerners. He would take a job at a printing shop and would read up on the news and various books that the shop churned out daily. However, his old habits never disappeared and Hui, now knowing English, conned both Chinese and Western and would eventually go on to sell opium in the name of the British family that picked him up. 

His personality changed and he isolated himself in his ideas and his wealth before being sent to England to study at Oxford. Isolated from his fortunates at home, Hui once again reverted to the boy he was before and learned that people were more useful than just money making and impressed his professors by having tea time talks about subjects ranging from the history of Britain to the mechanics behind a steam engine to predicting the market for soap.

After five years in England, he came back to China to become a was quickly swept up by the local government to help the economy and deal with the westerners. Still angry at how his parents were killed for what he believed as little reason, he plotted to overthrow the suffering, local government on its last legs and with the help of some supporters and foreign contacts, became the governor of Guangdong province. Now with the Republic weakening, Hui saw it as the perfect chance to escape the grasp of the RoC and claiming a title of "Warlord" for himself as he ruled over like an Emperor in his own right. Now, with Guangdong in his hand, he looks to the rest of China and rests his gaze upon the Imperial City so he can reforge a nation he believes is "long over due to rest".

Other
Even without his seat of Warlord of Guandong, he is a very influential man with many contacts and supporters both Chinese and foreign.
Tea time is an important daily ritual for Hui due to his time in Britain. He has never once missed tea time or at least some variation of it not matter what as happened.
He has a huge amount of fund at his disposal due to him having a huge monopoly on trade and industry in the area.
He tends to be at odds with most Chinese people as he is very a pro-Western man in a very conservative land but is trying to get people to embrace new ideas but has actively been showing people what westernization could bring by building power plants and improving city services amongst other things
He personally owns and uses a German Borchardt C-93 pistol and a Swiss Schmidt-Rubin Rifle, noted to be quite a good shot with both of these.
In most cases, Hui will be seen outside with his cane which contains a hidden sword that will come out is he holds down the handle and pulls it out.
During his time in England, he developed a small taste for Pin-up posters and hides several of them in his personal room and office.

Fanrong Domain

Location
Guangdong Province

Description
An average province in terms of wealth with both an open-mind to both central China and the outside world, Hui has implemented a number of idea and polices to try and rapidly increase the city's wealth and westernization by investing in the city itself, sometimes with western business partners. He has supported the creating of city services like rail roads and a modern sewer system, while financing (along with some western associated) the begins of heavy industrial factories. Despite his best efforts, some more conservatives-minded people in the province are criticizing him and his "barbaric western ways" and often manage to force projects to move more slowly in one way or another. Hui has managed to get one or two factories up and running though, albeit not at max efficiency. Most industrial stuff is still reliant on large workshops.

Hui's as funded city projects through a clever, if not morally questionable method of using fake opium and knock-off foreign imports. After creating what is "fake opium" (stuff that is only meant to look like it but lacks any of the drug's actual properties), he has some of his men sell the fake opium as real opium, making good profit margins as opium is expensive but people can't tell the difference between real and fake until after the deal. As for foreign imports, Hui has men who sell cheap knock-offs of actual European goods and sells them at the same price. Due to a lack of Chinese who can tell the difference and with Europeans getting a cut of the money, this is a very reliable way for Hui to earn his money. However, much of the money the province makes goes directly to him.

The province also has a carefully managed tax and tariff system which makes money off of anything that is not locally produced. While both of them are meant to be a happy equilibrium for both Chinese and European merchants, officials constantly adjust the tax rate on a daily basis little by little like a stock market. Hui himself champions this method as "stock market taxation" and stating it allows for more flexible and fair taxing of goods. His supporters agree with the method saying it can help make the city rich while his critics point out some very obvious flaws of having an unstable tax rate that almost seems like it is set by Hui's mood.

Population
19.5 Million

Natural Resources
Guangdong is blessed with plentiful natural resources like forests that produce timber, palm oil and rubber with many minerals such as wolfram, tin, antimony, bismuth, molybdenum, copper, lead, zinc, oil shale, salt, and sulphur. The nearby ocean provide oyster, abalone, pearl, sea horse, and other sea products. Many of these resources are beginning to be exploited with the constructions of several plantations, mines, lumber mills and foundries. Hui's shrewd business dealings allows the province to milk every cent out of foreigners and other merchants for the resources and goods that are produced.

While the province is no means a bread basket, it grows a fair deal of crops to supports its people (with outside a bit of help of course) and its trade through cash crops. Rice, corn, sorghum, millet, wheat, sugar cane, peanuts, soybeans, sesame and various tropical and sub-tropical fruits are its main food crops with silk cocoons, ambary hemp, jute, tea and pepper being its main. Westerners have introduced tabacco, coffee, cacao, and potatoes to the region and there are several small-scale farms and plantations which Hui hopes to one day solidify them into a more unified and centralized system.

Major Exports
Guangdong's original major exports were sea and crop products however more recently, it has become more "industrialized" with rubber, minerals, metals and cash crops holding high profits. Due to its location near Hong Kong and Macao, trading foreign imports from Europe and the rest of the world to inner China has also become quite a lucrative venture for those who can cash in on it.

Military Forces

While much of the army is inexperienced and unproven, Hui Jinfu's connections to the west allow him to arm them with some of the best weapons available. Although much of his armies are still traditional, Hui hopes to one day have a completely modernized army trained by hired Western officers and veterans.

His doctrine is to force the enemy to come to him either by sabotaging their position or bombarding them out. Infantry and calvary wise he often employs feints, ambushes, and sneak attacks and will try to avoid direct, open combat unless needed. Many of his units blends Western and Chinese equipment and ideas as well as some original ideas he picked up from others in conversation or his own brain during his personal musings.  

Navy wise, much of his ships are actually old Japanese ships from the Boshin War. Again, several contacts were called, favors made and coin dropped for these ships to be brought to Guangdong and made combat-worthy again.

Army

Size of Army: 1 Million (Around a fifth)
Standardisation and Professionalism: 25%
General Weapons: 

The British Lee-Enfield Mk.I Rifle is the most common amongst Domain soldiers, most acquired though Hui's contacts and trade business and are directly imported from Britain or Indian Factories owned by the British. The Gewehr 98 is also a fairly well-used rifle although its British cousin is more common. Frontline troops are more likely to use the Lee-Enfield while reserves tend to be equipped with Gewehrs until more Lee-Enfield Rifles are acquired.

Thanks to Hui's near massive wealth, machine guns aren't too uncommon. Rechambered Madsen machine guns are given to elite infantry squads while most other normal infantry squads will have a cart-mounted Maxim machine gun. The cart-mounts allow troops to quickly transport the larger Maxim quickly from place to place and only requires a crew of two or three to man as compared to the normal five or six while also giving the team a good place to put extra ammunition, parts and water as well as a small shield useful against a bullets.

Some piece of British artillery have also made their way into the Domain's army such as the Ordnance BL 15 pounder. Hui's army also posses a small number powerful QF 1-pounder "pom-pom" auto-cannons usually used as defensive equipment. While not true artillery, the Domain's military is experimenting with the use of European Elephant Guns although have hit a major road block in the form that once someone takes a shot from it, they don't want to fire it again due to the immense recoil.

Pistols are considered officer weapons but many officers use carbines and shortened rifles over the revolvers and handguns on the front lines since they don't provide adequate fire-power at longer ranges. Similarity Domain Dragoons also use said carbines while on horseback and on foot, proving they are good shots in both firing positions. 

Traditional weapons such as the repeating crossbow and melee weapons are still in use but are being phased out. The Domain's army still fields around 3 divisions worth of repeating crossbow men who act like machine guns with their primary objective to suppress enemies. Melee cavalry is still used to some extend in the way of lancers and carbine-armed dragoons.

Domain Rifles

Domain Sharshooters

Domain Shock Troopers

Domain Spearmen

Mounted Carbine Cavalry

Mounted Lancers

Ordnance BL 15 pounder

QF 15 Pounder Mk.I

Organisation: 

The Domain's army is divided up as follows:
10 Armies with 100,000 Troops
25 Divisions per Army with 4000 Troops per Army
4 Regiments per Division with 1000 troops per Regiment
20 Platoons per Regiment with 50 Troops per Platoon
4 Squads per Platoon with 12 Troops per squad each consisting of 8 Rifles, 2 on the MG, a Sniper and the Squad Leader. (The two that are part of the squads are the Platoon Leader and the Messenger)

Officers are hand-selected by hired European advisors and veterans who are then honed with a year's worth of intense officer and leadership training. Squad leaders on the other hand are simply the highest ranking infantry unit in the squad with the most experience. Platoon Leaders are veteran soldiers given an abbreviated version of the leadership and officer training.

Training for most soldiers lasts about 9 months of basic training (BT) with and additional 3 months should the soldier choose to pursue a specialized role like sniper, machine gunner, grenadier, cavalry, artillery, etc. It should be noted that cavalry units are given some lessons on how to handle and ride horses in BT and use the extra 3 months to learn how to fight atop a horse.

Logistically, the Domain's army is in one of the best positions in possibly all of China. Not only is huge profits derived from the trade that goes on in the province, the Europeans traders bring a near constant supplies of whatever cannot be produced in local factories. Because the army only uses two types of bullets, the  British .303 round and the German 7.92x57mm Mauser round, there is little confusion in resupplies. Factories also pump out new copies of rifles on a daily basis with some machine gun factories beginning to open their doors. Artillery on the other hand is still all foreign imports although some parts have been successfully recreated.

Navy

Size of Navy: 700,000 (Includes support units like naval guns and dry dock workers)
Standardisation and Professionalism: 25%
Number of Capital Ship: The Haikulong (Sea Dragon) - A converted Chinese Junk with modern cannons and a iron plates and a steam engine
Number of Escort Ships: 3 Kanarin Maru-class iron-plated corvettes, 4 Kasuga-class Iron-plated Corvettes, 2 Roanoke-Class Ironclad Monitor, 8 Chiyodagat-Class gunboats with torpedo. 

Chiyodagata-Class

Kanarin Maru-Class

Kasuga-Class

Roanoke-Class

Other
Hui is current in the process of armoring up all of his ships and trying to get more modern ships into his navy.
Hui often contracts pirates to bolster his forces and wreck havoc on his enemies' navies however he does not list them as part of the official navy.
*War Rafts are large, sampan-styled rafts with iron roofs and enough space to fit a few men and windows fire small cannons or guns from. They are ideal for sailing along rivers and coasts but are unsuited for open sea especially in choppy weather.

PS: Lennon you're a fucking moron. You are not sempai, you are unworthy of being a sempai.
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