Agate Empire
The Agatha Empire is the place where Twoflowers and The Luggage come from, one of the protagonists of the novels Color of Magic and Fantastic Light. It is mentioned for the first time in The Color of Magic but without entering to explore it beyond the place from which comes Dosflores. It appears briefly in Mort and is the main stage of Interesting times. It is located in the Continent Counterweight.
The Agate Empire is similar to feudal Japan or Imperial China. The name is a pun on the term Jade Empire, in to ancient China. It is surrounded by a vast wall ( to the Great Wall of China). The agateans have the belief that anyone outside the empire should be an invisible ghost vampire (probably a pun on the Cantonese word Gwailo, Ghost Man).
The bark of the Agate Empire consists mainly of gold, octiron and other heavy metals. In Ankh-Morpork and its surroundings, the Empire is known as the place from where the gold comes (in English a play of words is made calling it Aurient, a mixture of Orient (Orient) and aurum, gold in Latin). The exchange rates between the Ankh-Morpork dollar and the currency of the Empire, the rhinu, have never been established because solid gold coins are worth much less on the Continent Counterweight than on the Sto. This makes when Dosflores visits Ankh-Morpork the author describes us on several occasions that with what he pays for spending a night in an inn, would equal the price of building a chain of hotels in the city. The Empire was founded by the emperor A Sunshine Mirror thousands of years ago and until relatively recently it was ruled by a series of families of the somewhat psychotic nobility (the Hong, Sung, Fang, Tang and the McSweeney), in constant struggle and maneuvering to be emperor. They considered that politics is similar to chess; the goal was to put the opponent in an unsustainable position, and the best way to do that is to take as many pieces of the opponent as possible. And it does not matter if you sacrifice your own pawns.
As in our feudal Japan, the Emperor is seen as a god, and could do whatever he wanted. In view of how grossly inventive a nobleman should be to get to this point, it was not a good thing. In The Color of Magic and Mort the Emperor is a young idealist. But in Interesting times it has been replaced by a rather crazy old man. During interesting times, Cohen the Barbarian was declared Emperor (Ghengis Cohen), and began to change the system to one in which a sensible barbarian can feel comfortable. Many peasants consider it the pre-incarnation of a Sun Mirror (the Agateans believe in a reincarnation in which the soul makes a journey backwards in time). Since the events of The Last Hero, it can be assumed that Cohen is no longer an emperor. The details of his replacement are unknown, although it is implied that most of the functions of government had already been taken over by his Grand Visir Dosflores at the time of his departure.
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