Yes ? If there was virgin land to be exploited, the Chinese could better support such operations. We have such proof such as Zheng shipyard at Palembang.(err, can't recall the exact island offhand and Google not helping )
BUT the Chinese couldn't have expanded and conquered such lands, because unlike the Spanish colonisation of South America, or the English and etc, SEA was full and not vulnerable to measles,smallpox and plague.
India sure. But Europe had what ? 4 major linguistic groups and 6 ethnic? Ming China had 8 and 12.
To put it simply, China had Turks, Mongols and other nomads, Caucasians during the Tang Dynasty due to their expansion into the Greco Dacian kingdoms , ON top of Han Chinese and Aborigines, although Qing and Ming China conquest had also niche groups of the original Aborigines on top of Polynesian natives.
Mandarin was the lingua franca of the Qing dynasty, an invading culture, although the Ming used it as well.
There's a reason why the Great 300 Tang poems sounds so flat in Mandarin. The actual language tones is closer to Cantonese but it's not Cantonese.
It's also why the songs sound so weird in Mandarin and require nonsensical words such as xi invented.
The Tang poem also include gems such as how the author hears his home dialect and is delighted to meet a fellow villager, again, the Imperial examination was critiqued as being biased because the oral examination was biased against Southern candidates because of language issues. An Lushan racial background .
Hell. The reason why Han China is so prized, is partially because Imperial China after the 16 kingdoms had become so different and divided , that a mythical golden age was needed as a unifying symbol, aka HRE and Rome.
Five Barbarians - Wikipedia
