South of Beiyang: Reviving China

[Turning the Nation’s Fate Around] + [Wild Reimagining] + [A Transformed Late Qing]

In the third year of Tongzhi, Na Xi, the Empress Dowager, gives birth to a son in the Imperial Grain Garden outside the Forbidden City. To conceal this shocking scandal, she gives her second son to Prince Chun to raise. Several years later, the Tongzhi Emperor, Aisin-Gioro Zaichun, who frequents the Eight Great Hutongs, contracts a terrible illness and dies.

Na Xi’s second son ascends the throne without a hitch, becoming the Guangxu Emperor.

The rise of the story’s protagonist, Xu Muzhi, the Guangxu Emperor’s biological father and the current Viceroy of Liangjiang, begins with his joining the Xiang Army to suppress the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom...

P.S. Xu Muzhi is a native Han Chinese from Hunan with extraordinary martial prowess, but he has no System and is, by the standards of core socialist values, a good person. Na Xi transmigrated from the modern era. She is a female university student who grows up to become a notorious empress. Ethnicity: Han. Major: Visual Communication Design.

Characters appearing early on: Xu Muzhi, Na Xi, Zeng Guofan, Hu Yunyi, Li Hongzhang, Shi Dakai, Heavenly King Hong, Yang Xiuqing, Wei Changhui, Fu Shanxiang, Fu Jiantang, Hu Xueyan, Prince Seng... See if you can match them to their real-life counterparts!