Keywords: bloody purges, restructuring power, military rule in the capital, technological enlightenment
In the second year of Chongzhen, before the noose was looped around his neck at Coal Hill, he awoke.
His first blade fell on the Shanxi merchants. He drenched the capital in blood, then burned land deeds to ash and scattered them among the refugees. Titles were awarded for military merit: one enemy head earned ten mu of farmland, and the thirty thousand phantom posts in the Beijing Army were filled with actual men. He slammed steam engine blueprints down in front of Xu Guangqi. They would not build trains first, but killing machines.
In three years, he pacified Liaodong, piling up Huang Taiji's heads into a monument. In ten years, he swept across Mongolia, laying rails all the way to Guihua City. In twenty years, he marched west, blasting open the gates of the Caspian Sea with artillery. In thirty years, the dragon flag of the Great Ming flew on the banks of the Danube. In fifty years, steam-powered ironclads crossed the Atlantic, and Aztec gold was shipped back to the Forbidden City.
This was no rescue of a dying nation. It was armed colonization. He used war to sustain war, feeding the Industrial Revolution on the flesh and blood of enemy nations. The military and the state became one, with every village forging swords and guns. Expand, redistribute land, then expand again, until the edge of the world, until the stars and seas.
An age of prosperity won through slaughter, a Great Ming built through conquest.
