“Your Majesty, do you want to be the emperor of the Great Ming, or the president of Earth?”
In the tenth year of the Yongle reign, on a rainy night, Su Jing, a Hanlin Academy lecturer, brought a crude wooden globe into the Fengtian Hall. In that moment, the ambition of the Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di, was utterly ignited, and the fate of the Great Ming Empire was changed forever.
This is no dreary historical drama, but a headlong saga of civilizational conquest. Su Jing, a transmigrator, becomes the Great Ming's foremost strategist under the title of “Chief Grand Secretary of the Secretariat.” He governs not with the Four Books and Five Classics, but by buying the Western Regions through “economic warfare,” sweeping across Central Asia with “volley-fire tactics,” reaping Europe through a “financial scissors effect,” and taking the Americas without bloodshed by claiming kinship with the Shang dynasty.
Under Su Jing's “persuasion” and planning:
Zheng He's treasure ships become battleships bristling with cannons, and the Strait of Malacca becomes the Great Ming's maritime tollbooth.
Prince Han Zhu Gaoxu no longer rebels. Instead, he becomes a hardworking pioneer on the North American plains.
Steam-engine blueprints and the law of universal gravitation are slipped into the Yongle Encyclopedia, turning it into a “server” for human civilization.
The gold bricks in the Forbidden City really are paved with gold from the Inca Empire, and monarchs from every nation tremble at the foot of Mount Tai.
From heading west beyond Yang Pass to crossing the Atlantic, from the roar of steam locomotives to the creation of an empire on which the sun never sets: watch the maddest ruler-and-minister duo use cannons to preach the truth, capital to set the rules, and Chinese civilization to reshape the world order.
Wherever the sun and moon shine, there is Han land; wherever humanity goes, Chinese is spoken. This is more than the Great Ming's golden age: it is the golden starting point of human history.
