On the third day of July in the sixth year of Chenghua, in the Anle Hall in the west corner of the Forbidden City, the cry of a baby was masked by the sound of heavy rain. His mother was Ji, the daughter of a local official in Guangxi, and his father was the emperor Xianzong of the current dynasty. However, the child was pronounced "non-existent" from the moment he landed - because there was a woman in the palace, Concubine Wan Gui, who could not allow any prince to live.
For the next five years, he was secretly nurtured by the deposed Empress Wu and his biological mother, and lived in the shadow of this palace. Not seeing the light of day, not hearing his name, like a cub dormant in a corner, he has learned the most important rule of survival: silence.
He was made a prince at the age of six, and his mother died suddenly in the same year. He ascended the throne at the age of eighteen and changed his name to Yuan Hongzhi the following year.
This is Ming Xiaozong Zhu Youtang - the only emperor in Chinese history who rose from an outcast in the cold palace to a nine-five-year-old emperor. He was also the short but bright light in the middle of the Ming Dynasty.
"The Eighteen Years of Hongzhi" takes his eighteen years as an emperor as its latitude and longitude, telling the story of how a soul who moved from darkness to light completed reconciliation with the past at the pinnacle of power. The novel is based on real historical materials, referring to "History of the Ming Dynasty", "Records of the Ming Dynasty" and Ming Dynasty notes and documents, to restore a flesh-and-blood Emperor Hongzhi: he was diligent and listened to the government at the imperial gate every morning; he was frugal and refused to change his imperial robe until it turned white; he was generous and only had one queen in his life and did not accept concubines; he was also lonely, crying alone in front of his biological mother's relics late at night, without anyone seeing him.
Eighteen years is too short for an emperor. But for a child who once lived in the shadows, these eighteen years were the light he spent his whole life in exchange for.
