Garunggu (C. 尜榮古) is a city in Yongganguo in the northwestern Earth Kingdom.

Name

The name Garunggu is a Yonggan word for a type of mythological bird, which was conflated with the giant Elephant Birds, which range over the far south of Yonggan State, Abka State, and the nearby plains. The transcription into common characters 尜榮古 has no specific meaning other than in reference to the city, as they were chosen for their phonetic values to match the native Yonggan name.

History

Although a fair-sized town by the standards of historically rather rural Yongganguo, Garunggu was not a particularly important town before the Earth Kingdom Civil War. Census records of the early Hao Ting show a stable population of around six thousand households, with the town having grown from around half that in the late Ri dynasty thanks to an influx of bannermen and their families returning from elsewhere in the Earth Kingdom after the fall of their conquest dynasty. Although Garunggu sometimes received visits from the court of the Yonggan Khaghan and was, for a time, the seat of the Jala Khan, the it was never the capital of the Yonggan State before the Civil War - the capital was, instead, in the city of Gainan.

During the Civil War, the Nara Khagan of the Yonggan sided with Qin the Conqueror in attempting to overthrow the Hao Ting dynasty. After Qin's death, the khagan tried to position his grandson - also a descendant of Qin via one of his daughters - as a successor to the late hegemon. This regime, which included several other western and northwestern polities, was called the Northern Khaganate. Embroiled in conflict with rival successors of Qin and the resurgent Hao Ting, the Northern Khaganate was defeated after years of bloody fighting, and the 46th Earth King imposed harsh punitive measures against those he perceived as its ringleaders. The Nara clan of Yonggan were exiled to the desert, and their lands confiscated by the central government. This included much of the forested and agricultural countryside surrounding Garunggu. The Hao Ting settled the demobilized veterans of the Royal Earth Army and other royalists in most of the former Nara lands, hoping to pacify the region through settler colonialism. The Yonggan state, which had hitherto been controlled as a feudal subject of the Earth King through the indigenous khagan, was reconstituted as a directly-governed province. Rather than building the new governor's yamen in the traditional capital of Gainan, the Hao Ting made Garunggu the new administrative capital instead. Ostensibly, this was because Gainan had just been sacked and Garunggu had better lines of communication with the Central Earth Kingdom, but privately, the court wished to move the seat of power far from native elites and to a location that would be nearer the lands they had awarded to the Zhongzu and Nanzu settlers for clearing and agriculture. Garunggu itself was relatively little damaged when it was taken by the Royal Earth Army, and in any case, it had been long enough since the battle that conditions there were already stable at the time a new capital was needed, in contrast to the situation prevailing in recently-sacked Gainan.

Geography

Garunggu is located on a limestone promontory formed by tectonic movement, no longer active, to which the lake and river valley, and the hilly condition of Southeastern Yonggan State, are also related. There are a number of solution caves in the promontory, mostly forming as pit caves and along faults in the rock.

Demographics

In the centuries since the Civil War and becoming the capital, the population has grown to become the third largest city in Yongganguo, and home to about 65,000 people, a narrow majority of them descendants of the royalist settlers, who form a plurality in the wider region. There are many Yonggan still living in the city as well - forming the second-largest ethnic group - and most families are of somewhat mixed ethnic descent. A minority of the settler families have not intermarried with the indigenous population. There is a significant Ganjinese minority, centered on a neighborhood called Little Gansanjiao, though they are distributed throughout the city.

Points of Interest

As part of Avatar Kyoshi's reforms of the Hao Ting, some infrastructural improvements were made to Yongganguo and to Garunggu in particular, including the development of a magnificent Earth Sage temple and monastery complex. Since the disestablishment of the Earth Sages, it has become a Royal Learning Hall.

The Holy Scarab Temple (Enduri Febigi Temple) is likely the oldest structure in the city, and the spirit there, also called Speaks-with-Many, is known for their oracles and distinctive cult. That being said, the city is much less important to the Yonggan spiritually than the traditional capital of Gainan, and there are nowadays more shrines relating to Zhongzu folk spirituality than Yonggan religious sites. The temple predates the city by almost any definition.