Nanyang 1398: The Malacca Maritime Empire

In the late fourteenth century, the currents of the Age of Exploration are stirring beneath the surface.

The Majapahit Empire is weakened by internal strife, while Siamese armies steadily close in. In the power vacuum left by the collapse of the old hegemon in the South Seas, Parameswara, the future founder of a kingdom, is fleeing through the dense forests with more than a thousand exiles.

More than a century later, the cannons of Western colonizers will soon shatter the peace of these waters, bringing centuries of subjugation.

The thirty-first year of Hongwu, Old Port.

The pirate king Chen Zuyi is using the pretense of offering protection to slowly devour a sea merchant family's business, like a blunt knife slicing away at their livelihood.

Yet no one knows that this seemingly small family is in fact the last surviving branch of the royal house of Srivijaya, a kingdom already destroyed. They have hidden their identities and lived in obscurity.

The protagonist arrives at this moment, becoming the family's fourteen-year-old young master, just as pirates are closing in on their door.

Unwilling to sit and wait for death in this desperate predicament, and determined to carve out a haven for his fellow Chinese and the Malay people before the colonial onslaught a century later, he leads the only people he has, around 120 Chinese and enslaved people, into the crocodile-infested, miasma-choked swamps of Malacca.

In the wilderness, he will use statecraft far ahead of its time to establish order;

venture deep into the Ming Empire to find the great mathematicians and gifted natural philosophers stifled by the imperial examination system and hereditary artisan status;

and fuse the crafts and techniques of China with the axioms of ancient Greece and the books of the Arab world.

Through meticulous institutional design and the difficult blending of knowledge from East and West, he will build a highly efficient state apparatus and directly confront the colonial storm sweeping across the globe.

The story begins in a stifling, oppressive mourning hall in Old Port, with the smiling extortion of the Chen family's steward, who calls it protection but intends to swallow the family whole.