The Oirot Homeland

The above represents some work I put in this last December, where I managed to add the two small provinces of Oirad and Torghut, which can be found to the center right of the map.  Both comprise a tiny corner of China ~ and the center of the Oirot or Dzungarian power that ruled this part of the world for some four centuries (post Mongols up to the late 18th century).

Putting together the research, the change in color scheme to represent the desert, sorting out the mess of what were mountains, plains and river courses, this ended up being about 40-50 hours of work.  Whereupon I quit in disgust.  I'm not that happy with the color scheme, which tends to meld together making it difficult to discern one element from the next.  I cannot seem to improve upon it without either creating either a garish look or obscuring the hexes beyond use as hexes.  The research was a bitch; what little there is consists of conflicting reports that disagree about dates, borders, the existence and names of places, the actual location of deserts and a hodgepodge of other details that ~ for the time, broke me. I haven't even been able to look at this long enough to post it.

I get that both China and Russia would both want to keep this region they share in absolute, total obscurity.  China reports every city on the border here as having at least half a million people, even a million or more ... which is simply ludicrous.  Russian sources are worse, being both inconsistent and plainly lying about the height, location and number of mountains, lakes and routes.  All this on top of the topography itself being about as chaotic as any place I've found.  This has to be the most annoying part of the world I've ever mapped ~ including my bitching about Tibet in 2017.

Of late I have not done much mapmaking.  I lost much of 2017 due to the steady demise of my laptop at that time, and most of 2018 because I foolishly signed up for Windows 10 version of Publisher, which made working with images of this side flatly impossible.  I do hope to do more mapmaking this year, but I admit it isn't high on my motivation scale.  Digging back into this mess above promises to be no picnic, sorting out more of China and then Mongolia, that mess of pink empty hexes on the far right.

For those unfamiliar with my map-making practices, the pink hexes are roughed in civilized regions that haven't been mapped, the white hexes are those for which I have zero information, the circles, arrows and dotted lines are guidelines for elevation, river courses and other imaging ... all of which is designed so that if I drop a map for five years, I can step back in and remember what the hell I was doing the last time I was mapping this place.

I have to admit; I miss mapping Africa.  Africa made a lot more sense than this place.

I'm just whining, right?  Yeah, that ... that's probably fair.