Great Ming: From Tumu Fortress to Asia

In the fourteenth year of the Zhengtong era, he knelt at Tumu Fortress and shouted for the gates to be opened. His cry rang out: “I command you: Do not open the city gates! Hold them at all costs! Not one of you is to surrender!”

Twenty-three years later, he stood in the Fengtian Hall and declared, “Asia belongs to the Great Ming.”

It took him forty-four years to make that journey.

From one man to an empire;

from a prisoner to the master of an entire continent.