I Transmigrated to the Late Qing, and Built My Fortune on a Pack of Spicy Strips

Can a pack of spicy strips save a country? Lin Yuan transmigrates to the aftermath of China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, and decides to find out.

As foreign goods flood the market and silver drains overseas, he is determined to use this flash of red to cut a way through. Starting with a spicy-strip shop at a Guangzhou wharf, he gathers refugees and teaches them skills, using profits from “Yuan Ji” to secretly fund young students sent to America and buy machine blueprints. When the British East India Company covets his recipe, he says, “This stuff is for feeding Chinese people.”

As foreign powers squeeze wealth from the country with opium, he expands his spicy-strip factory into a food industrial park, linking chili cultivation, grain and oil processing, and machinery manufacturing. Foreigners mock him for making nothing but snacks, but he uses industry to show this land that Chinese factories can feed their people and give them a backbone.

From the Thirteen Factories district to the Shanghai concessions, an economic battle without gunfire begins with a pack of spicy strips. This is a conquest of the taste buds, and the story of a national industry stubbornly putting down roots in the cracks.