The machinery of power in the Great Ming Dynasty ground forward, swept along by a surging undercurrent of corruption. Shen Mingyuan, a poor-born youth, gripped the magnetic compass his father had left him and a copy of The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art. Wielding surveying as his blade, he tore open the shadowy dealings behind clan land grabs. He used magnetic powder to expose cheating in the imperial examinations, revived ancient papermaking methods to track weapons smuggling, and used a chain water-level gauge to lay bare the festering corruption in the Yellow River flood-control works. In an age shackled by the maxim that “all pursuits are base, only study is noble,” he used an unpublished manuscript of The Exploitation of the Works of Nature as a spark, awakened public awareness with the four-column bookkeeping method, and denounced the rottenness of the rigid eight-legged essay at the Hall of Supreme Harmony, citing the Tangut script for comparison. From secret rooms in ancestral halls to the Yellow River embankments, from examination fraud cases to battles over imperial power, a transformation with cutting-edge technology as its spear and practical learning as its shield is quietly setting the land of Ming ablaze.
