The disproportionally large number of of aristocratic decision makers and small amount of taxes their represented group had to pay, caused the deadlock of the assembly. There was truly a "locked gate" somewhere someday that excluded some assembly representatives to enter a building somewhere, and those excluded members went to a tennis court to talk and protest. Later they spread out through the streets of Paris and created a Bastille day. That action turned the Age of Exploration into the Age of Revolution and it was said by some that the age of revolution did not end until fall of Berlin Wall and Collapse of the Soviet Union.

Very soon, those French revolutionized their country and the Jacobins started chopping off the heads of many people, until they chopped off too many heads that their own heads were chopped off by someone else soon. Chaos and confusion set in France and Western Europe until Napoleon Bonaparte lit a match to light up an atmosphere that was already passing the flash point. Europe started going through War and Peace, with Year 93 type of revolutionaries decorating the landscape. What a time of Les Miserable and Monte Cristal!

Like every Hannibal will finally meet his Scipio Africanus, or 诸葛亮 will meet his 司马懿, Napoleon will meet his match of Kutuzov in the East and Arthur Weasley or Duke of Willington in the West. Defeats of Napoleon in Russian and later at Waterloo, made Russia and Britain even more dominant than before and those two Empires turned their expansion towards Asia. Another by-product of Napoleonic wars was to produce a unified Prussia, which became the nightmare of France for the next century and a half to come.

British were unchallenged on the sea and it was amazing that a representative of corporate Britain, namely this East India company could single-handedly made a country of India into a colony and started a war with the American states. The company imported opium into China not too long after the Napoleonic era.

Quite a number of Chinese people liked opium, or rather got addicted to it thinking that was some kind of fashion or cool fad. But some in the government disliked it quite a lot, especially dislike the fact of losing money over such a worthless kind of merchandise. Then there was the Opium War in China in the Far East 道光/林则徐 鸦片战争. The original intention of the Chinese government was to burn opium before they are out of the wooden boxes. But to their dismay, they had opened a Pandora's box full of surprises that were soon obvious to most of the European countries. The surprises were the discoveries of how inept then Chinese 清 government and army were, and how far backward Eastern Asia had fell behind after Industrial Revolution. Treaties after treaties, European powers were able to rob more treasure out of China and other Asian countries. After discovering how easy it was to impose unequal treaties upon this used to be powerhouse of Asia, Westerners turned their sail towards Japan also and that country soon fell into the victim status soon.

About the time of the Second Opium War and the period of 道光/咸丰 太平天国 曾国藩/左宗棠/李鸿章, there was one commodore Perry from US navigated a gun boat into Japan and demanded "trade", which was a nice way of saying demanded "submission". Japanese fought but couldn't win, therefore made a lot of concessions like rest of Asian countries to Latin derived language-speaking people. Such humiliation prompted Japan to radically cut its ties with Asian neighbors and its own culture heritage. After overthrowing the existing shogunate government, the entire nation from emperor all the way down to average citizens got rid of lavish luxuries and cumbersome governmental organizations, to start mimicking and copying Western culture from clothing, education to even organizational structures 明治维新.

US continued to expand westward on American continent and had wars with Mexicans, a war which trained many excellent soldiers and officers, including Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, William T. Sherman and many other West Pointers, to fight their next great war among brothers. About the time Russia started a emancipation reform to get rid of serfdom, Civil War broke out in United States of America, not for getting rid of slavery initially, but for uniting the country which was about to fall apart. After a few years of fighting, Lincoln made the war into a war of emancipation and gained the final victory, then was assassinated. At the beginning of the war, and long after, Lee was highly respected because it was said that both North and South offered him the position of commander, he took the position in South only because his home state Virginia went with South, even though he himself did not own any slaves, and was said to be willing to free everyone of them if that was the cause of the dispute. Later historians said America needed the war among brothers, because only the wild fire of that scale could have forged a nation as strong as a super power, otherwise, look at South America.

For his great leadership and unwavering determination to unite the nation, Lincoln was later regarded as the greatest president ever in US, even ahead of its founding fathers like George Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc. U.S. Grant got the immediate benefit of becoming another war-time general turned head of states, with legacy of heading an administration that was incredibly corrupted during the "Gilded Age"' Even though his family did not become filthy rich, and in fact lost a lot of money during the process of industrialization in US, it was said, the entrance exam questions for public servants during the Grant administration included: "Do you know General Grant?", "Do you know Mrs. Grant?", "Do you know any relatives of General Grant?".

It was said Grant was a stark contrast of Lee. Lee was tall and handsome, top of his class in West Point, from a noble heritage, articulate, a successful at a young age, but had to endure humiliation of defeat as an old man, but still highly respected by many. Grant was short and scruffy, bottom of his class in West Point, son of a butcher (but resented seeing blood), quiet with little words until poverty drove him to write a memoir before his death, an failure before 40, but became the top general, top politician and top traveler in his later years, ranked as one of the worst presidents in US history.

Military wise though, both generals were brilliant and professional, with Lee having the strong engineering background and Grant being quartermaster for many years during American-Mexican war. They brought up armies with ample energy that couldn't stop fighting after the Civil War. Because Grant was very lenient on rebel armies, regarding them as fellow country men again after their laying down their weapons, he was widely praised. Then many veterans of the Civil War with surplus energy but no wars to release, embarked on their journeys towards West into the Indian populated areas or went for the Gold Rush. The venturing by ex-Civil War soldiers left many cowboy and Indian stories for later generations to write about, including George Custer's small army getting wiped out by Crazy Horse in the battle of Little Bighorn. "How the West was won" was answered by killing off buffaloes, building railroads and removing the way of living for the Native Americans.

The Civil War casualty number was unusually high, because both sides started using firm arms heavily while still using the old troop formations to march and conduct frontal assaults. Besides, medical technology was not catching up fast enough with the reality of the war, for instance: practice of disinfection was horrific if reviewed by later standards. One surgical knife could be used on multiple wounded soldiers without cleaning. Such operations could have caused many unnecessary amputations or death because of infection. Some Europeans watched the American Civil War from afar and laughed at the two sides as two groups of untrained mobs trying to get themselves killed. They decided to demonstrate how to do it the right way and then started preparing wars of their own.

Napoleon III wanted to let rest of the world know that the Bonaparte's family still got it, so he launched this war against Bismark led Prussia -- the up-star of Europe. Getting beat, the disastrous war was accompanied by more revolutions for France. Communists in Paris built a commune to start experimenting communism. French nationalists ached for the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine area, which was passed back and forth between French and German in the next while.

China after gotten beat by the Europeans for several times, with large territorial and monetary concessions to especially Russian, Britain and France, decided to start a reformation called 洋务运动. But the royal family and nobles were still living in luxury for the most part while letting the poor bear the brunt of the burden for restoring the dignity of the declining kingdom. The reformation was proven to be half-hearted and unsuccessful at best, as China was beaten by Japan, its Eastern Asian fellow student of the Western technology and culture. China was defeated in Sino-Japanese War 慈禧/甲午风云 surprising many Western media and government observers. Even many people outside of China bet Japan to lose, but Japanese seemed to keep marching on with victory after victory in Korea on land, and easily defeated the weak Chinese navy, more mentally than physically/militarily on the sea.

The treaty 马关条约 after the Sino-Japanese war was the harshest unequal treaties imposed upon Chinese after the defeat of the Opium war. Afterwards, China sank deeper and deeper into misery and Japan started on a course of becoming the new colonial power, that was grown out of Asia. But since most of the areas in the world were already carved out by old colonial powers, Japan had to colonize its Asian neighbors. In doing so, Japan started denouncing its own Asian culture heritage and got on the wrong foot with its neighbors quickly.