As a history buff who has been obsessed with Ming history for a long time, I have been trying to deconstruct the 276-year rise and fall of the Ming Dynasty from a unique perspective. The creation of "Dreams in the Ancestral Temple" originated from an accidental imagination: when Zhu Yuanzhang saw his descendants gathered in the ancestral temple, how would the founding emperor who rose from the grass evaluate their merits and demerits? This "historical imagination" finally gave birth to this novel that combines the texture of official history with the wild interest of the world.
