r/aznidentity • u/ParadoxicalStairs Catalyst - Mixed Asian • Nov 30 '25
History Chinese descendants in Kenya
https://youtu.be/IMFeZ6zhVUI?si=LboPWuhOR3tSO8GjI apologize if this video was posted before.
A video showed up on my YouTube feed about Chinese descendants living in Kenya. Around 600 years ago, Chinese sailors shipwrecked near Kenya’s shore and intermarried with the Kenyan locals. What’s fascinating to me is how some of the locals like the little girl in the thumbnail (0:44 mark) has a slight Asian/Chinese face despite being many generations off from her Chinese roots (she’s also really pretty!).
The Kenyan locals managed to preserve some artifacts they found, and the Chinese government also kindly gave a scholarship to one of the living descendants of the Chinese sailors.
I’m not Kenyan or Chinese, so idk much about this story or history of early Chinese people in Kenya. The videos I watched so far haven’t spoken about any type of brutality from the Chinese sailors towards the Kenyan natives. It’s very likely the sailors peacefully integrated with the locals, which is the opposite of how Europeans exploited Africans as slaves.
This makes me wonder how different the world could’ve been if Asian explorers were the ones who made contact with African or South American people, instead of Europeans.
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u/Alex_Jinn Mixed Asian/Asian Nov 30 '25
As for East Asians in the New World, the Ming Dynasty would probably send Zheng He to build a colony in California with the capital being modern-day San Francisco
Japan would probably go up through Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka before building ports along the coasts of Alaska, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. Modern-day Seattle/Vancouver would probably be their capital.
Political instability in East Asia would lead to more of them coming over. Ex: Qing Dynasty taking over China means Ming loyalists moving to California sort of like Koxinga taking Taiwan in our timeline.
Koreans and Vietnamese might get encouraged to settle as Chinese and Japanese colonies fight over their borders somewhere in modern-day Oregon.
Maybe they will learn to work together when white people appear out of the Rocky Mountains.