In 1852, at the Xiamen docks, Chen Yaohua, a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, transmigrates. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself sold as a “coolie.” The next morning, he’ll be loaded onto a ship and sent to a tin mine in Borneo to die.
In the ship’s lower deck, three hundred countrymen are crammed into a space barely big enough to stand in. Those who die of disease are tossed straight into the sea. When everyone else has given up, Chen Yaohua clenches his fist. He has studied history and knows this road leads to mountains of corpses. He has also studied engineering and knows how to turn knowledge into power.
After a revolt in the dead of night, he leads the survivors into the interior of Borneo. Starting with the first furnace of molten iron and the first barrel of gunpowder, they carve out a foothold in the rainforest. When Dutch warships appear on the horizon, the man who was once a “coolie” is standing atop a newly built artillery fort. Behind him are five thousand new troops, two steam gunboats, and a republic that has just been born.
Seventy years later, at the Paris Peace Conference, the representative of this nation, risen from a sea of blood, sits at the negotiating table as an equal among the great powers. Everyone remembers his words:
“A country’s fate has never been determined by the size of its land, but by whether the people on that land have the backbone to stand up.”
No procrastination in the early stage The book is dead, is it over?
The writing is very good, the creativity and structure are very good, let me read it