This…. was a painful card, from a research aspect. It was suggested that the card be based on a trade treaty (a la Commodore Perry, etc.), which I readily accepted and doodled something out. Then I started doing research on just *what* details should be included.
At first, I was going to go the easy route (a la Commodore Perry), but the more I read into him, the less I wanted to use him as a base model. So then I went into the economic history of Vietnam, of which the treaties were mostly dominated by France. Since that little bit of imperialism did absolutely not wrong at all or have any lasting impacts (this is sarcasm), I didn’t feel comfortable using them either.
But then, it hit me! The Portuguese! They were trading with EVERYONE back then! And lo, I found they began trades with Vietnam back in the mid-1600s! So I switched to research the Portuguese Navy. They’re the oldest navy in the world, so surely there’s lots of easy to find references on their uniforms and so forth!
I scoured the internet, supplemented with an extraordinarily small amount of naval knowledge, and came up with a confusing mess of information, most of which was related to the army, not the Navy. So finally, I happened upon some vacation photos (which made me feel like a complete and utter creeper) of some naval uniforms from a Portuguese museum. I gave in and just used that as my references for Amber’s hat. The most I know is that, because the base uniform color was a deep green, it was probably a early-to-mid-1800s uniform. From the style of the hat (basing is on infantry/etc references), it’s an officer’s hat from the early-1800s (there was a duty-gorget), which means very little.
As for the ship they’re on, I originally doodled it based on the carrack, used by basically the entirety of Europe in the 1600s, Portugal included. Then there was a shuffle of my references while I moved it… the ship design got a little deformed into a weird galleon-hybrid. (The colors were also chosen rather arbitrarily after absently look at various ship models from around 1700. There’s no hidden meanings!)
By the time I got to the trade papers, I just slapped some orange ribbon and a red wax seal out of desperation. So there’s also no inherent details there!
BUT AS FOR WHAT I DO ABSOLUTELY KNOW: the background is Hạ Long Bay, located in northern Vietnam.
