It’s incredible enough that Alexander the Great and the Macedonians subdued the immense swathes of territory that they did but if he’d had the support of his troops could he have pushed all the way to the Pacific Ocean and even possibly Hellenized China eventually? Was China united at that time or is this the time of the Warring States that I vaguely recall seeing mentioned? If so they may well have been ripe for the plucking.
If his soldiers had been willing is it feasible that Alexander could have conquered China & SE Asia?
Presuming he actually was stopped by a mutiny as opposed to you know, losing, which IMO is far more likely. No.
Never say never, but I rather doubt it. He had his hands full with Porus and the Nanda state he was advancing on was considerably larger and wealthier. Even if he had taken that massive kingdom, he then would have the siren song of the rest of India to slog through. I just don’t see how that could be done quickly - it took Chandragupta Maurya and his successors a few decades to establish dominance on the peninsula and even that was incomplete in a sense.
When he had fabulously wealthy and densely populated India to deal with I don’t see China really emerging on his radar. If it had the Qin state was first on the line of march in western China and was the 800 lb gorilla of the Warring States Period( and the eventual victor ). They would have been no pushover.
But really between Alexander’s propensity of leading from the front, his likely alcoholism, and his paranoid and pretty bright officer corps being dragged farther and farther from home, he almost certainly would have succumbed to something before long. Wounds, disease or poisoning - maybe all of them :p. He would have died on campaign eventually and I’d bet on sooner rather than later.
Now if he had weathered the illness/possible poisoning that actually laid him low, Southern Europe and North Africa might have been at great threat. His troops would have better tolerated that sort of campaign and a Hellenistic empire spanning the Mediterranean would have been a more likely proposition that a India/China empire.
He had plans for invading Arabia at the time of his death and early recon was being done.
Here is a wiki on the Warring States period. I suppose based on when Alexander actually died, he’d be invading sometime during the Wars of Wei:
So, to get to your OP, I don’t think they would have been ripe for the plucking, though obviously it was a period of strife in China. The thing is, logistically I don’t see how, even if Alexander could first conquer all of India (which I seriously doubt) AND completely incorporate into his empire AND be able to draw on the resources of the region, how he’d then get from his conquered territory to China with a large enough army to do much. They may look close on a map (if you think that Tibet is actually part of China ‘since ancient times’), but it’s really horrible terrain to try and slog an army through. I suppose he could have built up a huge navy and perhaps conquered all of south east Asia, but that wouldn’t have been very easy either. And basically he’d have to be able to draw huge amounts of men and material from his newly conquered territories to do it, since his original Macedonian Greeks would be pretty much spent to take India and it would be a stone cold bitch to resupply forces and material all the way from Greece to India, let alone China.
A more realistic campaign for a surviving Alexander would be North Africa and Mediterranean Europe…basically get the drop on what the Roman Empire would be with the exception of, say all of the inland territories, just go for the coastal areas. he might have been able to pull something like that off before he shuffled from this mortal coil, though my WAG is, even had he survived he’d have needed to take some serious time off from adding new territories to consolidate his gains and put his house in order.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire formed the vast majority of Alexander’s conquests. Alexander was already familiar with its political structure, which made it relatively easy to take over the reins of power and turn the local population to his side. Progress would have been more difficult in the less familiar and less unified states to the east.
Well, if you want to unite China’s Warring States 100 years before the First Emperor did, invading it from outside would be one way to do it…of course, you’d be facing several armies that are each at least an order of magnitude larger than Alexander’s, on home turf, even if they weren’t united.
And if you’re really fucking unlucky, one of those armies will still be commanded by Sun Bin.
My prediction: 2300 years later, an archaelogical dig comes across an arrow-peppered corpse, still clutching a torch, next to an ancient tree carved with 亚历山大死在这棵树下
How is he going to get there? There is a little mountain range in between China and India.
The closest and easiest pass nearby is the Khunjerab Pass. It has a road, built in the 1960’s. The elevation is between 15-16,000 feet.
I have always called bullshit on Alex’s story. he says he beat Poru and then his soldiers refused to go further.
Invaders coming into the Sub-continent from the NW
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Had to get through the Khybar Pass and past the Indus and its tributaries neaer modern Islamabad, in the Himalayan foothills. Alex did that
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Typically faced the first major resistance at Jehlum river the largest of said triburaries. Which is where he says he fought Poru…
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If you get by that the Jehlum river, you leave the Himalayas and its foothills and enter flat terrain. You reach high ground outside Delhi at a place called Panipat, the last defendable position in N India. Break through there and start planning a corornation.
Anyone who lost at any time vbefore said cornoation, returns by the route he came from, its reletively easy to use the terrain to cover the Armies retreat.
What does Alex do? He decides to go, South. Across the Indus basin. With huge, by-anaywhere-but-South-Asia standards, mountian ranges, which lead to hot and parched deserts. Getting to the Indus Delta. And having to fight multiple battles with certifably insane locals (they still are). To get to Karachi…which is still 2000 years away from being built. Then turns west, to go through Makaran coast, which to this day, after years of investments and road building, looks like.
Something no before or after has ever attempted. I call bullshit. They lost and got trapped. And had to find their way out. ANd later wrote propaganda to.
He could go the Central Asian route (the later Silk Road) - he certainly had Central Asian nomad types from the western steppes in his army - Scythians, for one. He’d also fought (and won)in the region.
Going on would be difficult, facing much more populous states and his army had already been away from home for half a lifetime.
Frankly I was surprised that they didn’t return home and go “Now that we’ve conquered places 3,000 miles away, how about we take places closer to home like Italy or Egypt?”
Well, he HAD already taken Egypt :). It is quite likely Sicily/Magna Grecia would have been next on the platter, or at least reasonably soon as a major part of the Greek world. Though who knows.
Oh and re:China, it is rather uncertain if any contact had been made with the “west” prior to the Greco-Bactrian state maybe a hundred years after Alexander’s death.
As far as Porus goes, it is certainty that Alexander established some sort of dominion is far western India because Seleucus ultimately bargained the rights to those territories away for war elephants after failing to hold them by military means. Alexander may not have been very well-informed about Indian geography, but I think it is safe to say he won in India. Though by his own admission it wasn’t easy and Gandhara wasn’t Nanda. Had he instead run up against Chandragupta after the establishment of the Mauryan empire, it may well have been just too much for him.
Again, bullshit. 
If there is one thing Alexander excelled at, it was in reconnoitring. Did it better than probably anyone before the Romans. He always had an excellent idea of the land, people and terrain he was going to face.
And the rule of thumb in the classical world was always to return the way you came, hell Xenophone wrote a whole book on it. You are telling me Alexander lost it so badly, that he did not do even basic reconnoitring, had to fight battles all the way and basically orientated his axis of movement perpendicular to his lines of communication? Come on. Nor am I sure just what actual conrol Seleucus or anyone else had. Until Menander.
And the description of the battles, the terrain in Poru’s Kingdom is not conducive to the types of battles described.
Re China from C Asia; well its a LONG march across steppe, and then a 1000 miles march across the desert. Might be worse than taking your chances on the Himalayas.
When he was in Persia or its periphery, sure. One wonders if his presumably Persian informants were in anyway as well informed about the situation on the far side of the Hindu Kush. Also, Alex was an impulsive one ;).
Regardless, Alexander installed Peithon( the less famous one )as satrap on the Indus and the latter purportedly put down at least one rebellion. Hard to see how that would have worked for a decade plus if the Macedonians hadn’t managed to establish some measure of control. Said control didn’t last very long - but sources( well, Arrian’s sources at least and whatever source Justin used )agree it was there.
Several hordes seemed to manage the reverse direction just fine.
The logistics and foraging capabilities of a Mongol army (or similar) were completely different than a Greek/Macedonian army (we are also talking about a thousand years+ difference in time), so not sure pointing out that it was done in the other way is really meaningful. I highly doubt the Macedonian Greeks could have easily used what passed for the Silk Road (wasn’t it first used in the 2nd century BC?)…certainly it didn’t have the infrastructure of watering holes and forts/shelter it would over a thousand years later when the Mongols used it.
I don’t know much about China in this time period, or how far west their various territories went with which clan (or even what the various nomadic peoples in the region had for territory or how they would have felt with a large Greek army moving through and foraging in the region), but I don’t really see any viable way Alexander could have moved an army and set up stockpiles and forts and the like for a jump off to invade China from this direction. Certainly he couldn’t move through the mountainous regions between India and Tibet (even leaving aside the people there).
The issue being addressed was one of terrain (vs the Himalayas). Logistics is left as an exercise for the reader :).
Strictly speaking, yes. But the precursor was in use for 2 millennia before that.
The Mongols were *far *from the first steppe horde to reach Europe. Hell, the very Europeans they were threatening were largely descended from the first invasion by steppe dwellers, if you buy into both the Kurgan hypothesis and demic diffusion.
He’d have to do it piecemeal, as a long-term plan. Which he wasn’t actually all that good at, seemingly.
But if you are going to talk capabilities you have to look at the respective logistics and foraging abilities of the two. Like I said, a Macedonian Greek army didn’t move or support itself in a similar way to a Mongol army, so saying that a Mongol or similarly structured army could and did traverse the silk road doesn’t mean Alexander could push his own army in its entirety through the same terrain. To be sure, parts of Alexander’s army would have had similar capabilities, since he had central Asian auxiliaries, but the bulk of his army was composed of foot soldiers that differed from the Mongol armies foot soldiers and didn’t have the same cavalry components.
Ok, I didn’t know that. Not sure if the same support infrastructure was in place at this time, so perhaps this would have been a viable route for Alexander to bring his army through. Still not sure if the fact that the Mongols and other armies similarly structured making it through means Alex could get his through though.
I’m aware that others used this route, but the Mongols were the first as far as I know to push a very large (i.e. 10’s of thousands to 100’s of thousands) force through the area in an invasion, which is what we’d be talking about with the Greeks. Many of the earlier ones that I’m aware of coming from central Asia west were more like tribal migrations or large scale raids.
It would be hideously difficult. I concede, though, that perhaps going the silk road would be slightly less impossible than trying to push through the Himalayas.
Of course, I have a lot of doubts he could have conquered India either, which he’d have needed to do as a first step in what the OP is asking, even if he’d have lived to a ripe old age.
It is believed by many historians that his army was depleted, exhausted, and riddled with illness. Since there was no “mechanized infantry” in those days, they had to walk countless hundreds of miles in all kinds of weather as well as fight battles.
The Huns were as much an invasion as the Mongols were, I’d say.
They Huns were a multi-century migration and conquest, not an invasion like the Mongol’s, at least that’s my recollection. I suppose it was a similar scale, but, again, I’m not seeing a parallel to moving a Greek army to conquer China.
At any rate, I think we are in agreement at least that the OP’s question is a resounding ‘no’…even had Alexander lived I don’t think there is a viable way for him to conquer China or south east Asia.