The moment Li Mingyuan, a graduate student in the history department, touched his fingertips on the museum's dragon robe, an electric current tore through time and space - when he opened his eyes, he saw the young emperor Zhao Chen sitting on the dragon throne of the Dajing Dynasty.
The empress dowager who listens to the government behind the curtain is eyeing the emperor, the father-in-law with military power has hidden murderous intentions, the factions in the court are intertwined, and the cause of the death of the late emperor is a mystery... Deep inside the palace, every step is a life and death game. Pretending to have amnesia, he used modern thinking to solve ancient dilemmas: improving the sanitary standards of the imperial kitchen to stabilize people's hearts, using the running account method to expose corruption in disaster relief, and using segmented embankment building techniques to quell the Yellow River floods.
The road to becoming a pro-government was full of thorns. He revolutionized the imperial examination with "copying in name", restructured taxation with "sharing people into acres", and ignited the technological fire with "Gewuyuan". From the struggle for power in the court to the war on the frontier, from the improvement of rice seeds to the sailing of the navy, this emperor with a modern soul moved step by step amid doubts and murderous intentions. He married Tibet, opened up the Western Regions, compiled encyclopedias, circulated banknotes in the market, and ordered police patrols to guard the streets, and finally built the fragmented dynasty into a prosperous empire that came from all over the world.
When he was in his old age, he stood on the observatory. On one side was the bright world he had created with his own hands, and on the other was the modern hometown that haunted him. This imperial journey that spans thousands of years is full of intrigues and ideals, and also contains every ordinary person's ultimate imagination of "change" - if you hold supreme power, can you make history turn to a brighter turning point?
