Great Ming: Shocked to Discover I'm Zhu Yuanzhang's Younger Uncle!

Guys, you have to hear this! Zhu Shi had just passed his driving test and hadn’t even had a chance to show off on the highway when a heavy truck sent him straight to Haozhou at the end of the Yuan dynasty.

When he opened his eyes, hunger and cold hit him all at once. Luckily, landlord Liu took him in as a farmhand. He planned to get by using the medical, military engineering, and agricultural knowledge he’d secretly committed to memory, improving farm tools and food storage, and amazing the villagers with his wound-cleaning and bandaging skills. But nine years later, he ran into a “nephew” with a face full of wrinkles who’d been thrown in prison. Zhu Shi was stunned. Wasn’t that Zhu Yuanzhang?! And was he really the future Hongwu Emperor’s long-lost younger uncle?

From the start, he had the identity of an “imperial uncle” and a head full of modern scientific knowledge, taught to him by his grandfather and parents: his mother was a medical scientist, his father a weapons expert, and his grandfather an agricultural scientist. Famine? Introduce sweet potatoes and corn, and get hybrid rice going to fill the granaries of the Ming dynasty to overflowing! War? Put black powder recipes to work and build firearms and cannons on assembly lines, crushing Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng! Plague? Clean wounds, stitch them up, isolate the sick, compile a medical book, and train army doctors to cut the death rate in half.

From behind-the-scenes strategist in the Haozhou military camp to the founding Duke of Xingguo of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Shi has this to say: With his big nephew, he can build a career and, along the way, set up firearms, an academy of sciences, and global voyages. Bring forward the script for an empire on which the sun never sets by four hundred years? Well... it doesn’t seem impossible.

But one day, when Zhu Yuanzhang holds up a freshly drawn world map and asks, “Uncle, should we go set up shop in those barbarian lands overseas?” Zhu Shi rubs his chin and thinks it over. How about setting a small goal first: plant the Ming dragon banner across all four oceans?