Transmigrating to the Northern Song with a modern understanding of infrastructure, Su Chen sees people relying on the weather for their livelihoods, grain rotting in leaky storehouses, and merchant ships struggling to unload their cargo. He is determined to use his own hands and a single manual to plant the seeds of “infrastructure for the people” throughout the Great Song!
From driving greedy landowners out of the countryside and building terraced fields with bamboo reinforcement and rammed earth, so that old farmers in Jianghuai can smile over their new rice and say they can afford to find wives for their grandsons, to rescuing the market in Bianjing by reforming the mutual-guarantee paper currency system and easing people’s hardships, so Aunt Zhang can buy meat without lugging around a sack of old banknotes; then on to building warehouses and docks at Quanzhou Port, attracting overseas merchants eager to cooperate, even European traders rushing to place orders for improved curved-shaft plows!
Su Qinghuan is by his side along the way. She helps connect him with the spice trade and organize case studies on people’s livelihoods. The two waste no time on coy romantic talk, discussing only things like “how to optimize the warehouse plan” and “how to negotiate overseas orders,” making their life together sweet in its own way as infrastructure partners. He takes on three disciples to pass down his core techniques and teaches his young son to draw waterwheel plans. Even people in Africa grow golden corn using the rainwater irrigation systems he designed!
There is no technology wildly out of place for the era, only clever improvements suited to the Great Song. There are no melodramatic misunderstandings, only the solid satisfaction of seeing people’s lives improve. Watch Su Chen rise from a village craftsman to make Quanzhou Port the greatest port in the East, spread infrastructure techniques across Europe and Asia, and ensure that his founding ideal of “infrastructure for the people” becomes the warm legacy of a century of the Great Song. The further you follow this Northern Song infrastructure journey, the more satisfying and heartwarming it gets!
