In the seventh year of Emperor Yongchang's reign, Yan Changgeng, a scholar from a poor family, passed three yuan and won the first prize. However, he did not indulge in party disputes like his colleagues. Instead, he was shocked to find that the insufficient copper content in the imperial coins led to inflation, the Ordnance Bureau's arrow-making pass rate was only 30%, and the water transport losses were as high as 50%.
Yan Changgeng knew very well that moral articles alone could not save the country. He used his past life memories (implying an engineering background) to quietly launch the "Dayong Revival Plan" in an important place in the Hanlin Academy.
The first step is "anti-corruption ERP". He took advantage of the opportunity of patrolling the south of the Yangtze River to abolish traditional running accounts, introduce double-entry accounting and auditing systems, use mathematical models to accurately identify moths, and transform millions of taels of silver into "working capital" for the royal family and the court.
The second step is "military industry standardization". Facing the weak border defense, he established "tolerance standards", promoted blast furnace steelmaking and hydraulic forging hammers, turned weapon production that originally relied on the craftsman's touch into a standardized assembly line, and created the "Dayong Elite" that crushed the barbarians.
The third step is "talent KPI". He reformed the imperial examination and added three subjects: "arithmetic, studying things, and laws", breaking the gentry's monopoly on officialdom, and establishing a "cadre selection assembly line" based on meritocracy.
From the "cruel officials" despised by Qingliu to the "regent" with overwhelming power, Yan Changgeng used cold data and efficient systems to transform a terminally ill dynasty into an indestructible powerful machine.
