Great Ming: Father and Son Bring Gunboat Technology to Sweep Through the Wanli Era

A lightning strike at the Forbidden City sends Lin Zhiyuan, a vice dean of engineering, and his video-creator son Lin Qiyuan back to the twentieth year of Wanli. They arrive as impoverished scholars, carrying a two-terabyte library. First they make cement to shore up dikes in exchange for farmland, then build water-powered cotton gins and spinning jennies, producing a hundred jin of yarn a day and shaking up the Songjiang cloth market. Hunted by Japanese pirates, the Imperial Weaving Bureau, and Neo-Confucian factions, the father and son enter the civil service examinations through the study of practical science. They replace matchlock barrels with rifling, upgrade cast iron into boring machines, and build six-inch “Solar Eclipse” cannons with a range of over a thousand li. At the Battle of Chongming, chain shot shatters the enemy’s sails; at Longtun in Bozhou, three shots blast apart a stone gate; outside Pyongyang, grapeshot blankets Japanese cannon crews, crushing them with a technological advantage from another age. Along the way, they issue stocks, introduce silver notes, and abolish mining taxes, transforming Ming finances. The father rises to Vice Minister of War, while the heroine, Shen Zhiwei, becomes the richest commoner in the land, yet refuses to make romance her whole life. Three great battles and thirteen leaps in technology turn the late Ming into a semi-industrial empire. With the Solar Eclipse cannon unleashed, the East is dawning. The father and son set sail, and the sea of stars awaits.