The Master of Time Travel: Records of the Late Qing Dynasty to the Millennium

In Shanghai in 1908, Zhou Mingxuan, who had crossed the ocean, stood in front of the ruins of the Yuan Fengrun bank account, holding half of a broken silkworm coupon. This piece of paper with a bead pattern printed on it is his only connection with this precarious era - the four words "Industry to save the country" written in rouge on the back of the note by his father before his death are seeping into his blood with the gunfire on the Bund. From the cotton accounts of the silkworm farmers in the south of the Yangtze River to the sterling checks of the foreign bankers, Zhou Mingxuan used the "physical finance" of the Federation to tear open the iron curtain of foreign monopoly. The micro-carvings of Jewish silversmiths to prevent counterfeiting, the code-word transactions of Cao Gang helmsmen, and the abacus codes of overseas students all intertwined into an invisible line of defense against financial plunder in the shadow of the reparations of the "Xinchou Treaty". When Sheng Xuanhuai's edict on "state-owned railways" triggered a frenzy of bank runs, and when counterfeit silver coins from foreign banks flooded the Shiliupu Pier, Zhou Mingxuan immersed the Hehui coupons in the Yangtze River water, revealing not only the promise of "three dou of rice per coupon", but also the bottom line of people's livelihood torn to pieces by the great powers. The sound of the abacus in the accounting room, the longitude and latitude of the Jiangnan loom, and the remittance orders from overseas Chinese finally sounded the death knell of the old financial system under the gunfire at the top of Wuchang City. This is not a simple currency war. When the bead of the union coupon collided with the dragon pattern of Longyang, and when the strands of silkworm silk entangled the golden thread of the British pound, a game about the right to survival had already been foreshadowed in the undercurrent of the late Qing Dynasty - those rice ears and gears printed on the coupon surface would eventually be forged into a new financial backbone in the rolling mill of history.