The Mender of Heaven: Jia Baoyu’s Rise and Fall in the Officialdom

Finance whiz Zhao Yunlan dies suddenly and is reborn as Jia Baoyu. The sentient jade activates when he smashes it to make his resolve clear, revealing a vision of his family’s ruin. To overturn the ending of “a vast, barren land, utterly clean,” he pursues the imperial examinations with one hand and business battles with the other. Double-entry bookkeeping exposes the Jia family’s festering corruption, while maritime trade through the Xue family earns him his first fortune, drawing the covetous attention of Prince Zhongshun’s household. Just as he achieves the glory of placing first in all three imperial examinations, news of Yuanchun’s sudden death arrives, followed by an imperial decree to confiscate the family’s estate!

In this desperate situation, he turns the Grand View Garden into a spy network. Daiyu uses poetry to pass secret messages from the palace, Baochai keeps the accounts in the Bamboo Lodge, and Miaoyu hides evidence of political enemies’ crimes in her teacups. When soldiers storm the Rongguo Mansion, the sentient jade suddenly projects irrefutable evidence that the emperor embezzled frontier funds, shaking the entire court. Prince Zhongshun falls, and Jia Baoyu atones for his crimes by taking charge of the Ministry of Revenue. Yet he trades the fields granted by the emperor for Zhinen’er’s steamed-bun chain, saying, “Gold and silver corrode. The people’s support is the true protection for an official.”

After ten years of ups and downs, he reforms the tax system and is condemned for “competing with merchants for profit.” He lifts the maritime ban and narrowly escapes assassination, yet when war breaks out along the Nine Frontiers, he uses supply-chain thinking to solve the army’s grain shortages. In the end, as Grand Secretary, he watches bun shops feed a thousand impoverished scholars and tells Jia Lan, who will carry on his reforms, with a smile: “The stone that mends Heaven does not mend the dragon throne. It mends the hearth fires of ordinary folk.”