Zhu Yuanzhang

He was probably the emperor with the lowest starting point in history. He was so low that he fell into the dust and died. In 1344 AD, there was a severe drought in Huaibei, a plague of locusts blotted out the sun, and then came a plague that swept everything. For Zhu Chongba, within sixteen days, his father, his eldest brother, his eldest nephew and his mother would starve to death. The living people only want to escape, while the dead people cannot even afford an inch of loess to bury themselves in. In order to make a living, he went to Huangjue Temple and became a monk, thinking that it was a monastery to hide from the world, but he found out that it was just a change of clothes and a begging outfit. This book is not a myth, and it does not talk about Zhu Yuanzhang's birthright and his steps on the seven stars. It just tells the story of a low-class boy whose backbone was crushed by the times, how he picked up a knife in the sea of ​​blood and corpses, and how he stood up in an era where he was kneeling and begging for survival. From the rebel infantry in Haozhou City, to King Wu in Yingtian Mansion, and finally to Emperor Hongwu in Fengtian Palace. It took him fifteen years. In the past fifteen years, they have been facing Chen Youliang, who is as fierce as a tiger, Zhang Shicheng, who is as cunning as a fox, and the Meng Yuan cavalry that makes the Han people breathless. He uses the most rustic fighting methods to win the most sophisticated battles, and uses the most ruthless decisions to get rid of the most dangerous enemies. However, being in a stable position is the real Shura field. The second half of the book shows a more complex Zhu Yuanzhang. Like a tireless old cow, he treated memorials as cropland, handling hundreds of political affairs a day, personally setting salary standards for officials, and even stipulating what kind of trees should be planted in the yards and what color clothes should be worn by the common people. He killed Hu Weiyong, abolished the prime minister system that had lasted for thousands of years, and extended the tentacles of power to every capillary in the empire. He paid officials extremely harsh salaries, but punished corrupt officials to the extreme, stripping off their skin and standing at the yamen gate, making the next official's back shiver when he was working. He loves his people like a son because he is the son who crawled out of that quagmire; he kills people like hemp because he has seen the deepest betrayal in the world. He was the most diligent emperor and the loneliest dictator in Chinese history. He gave the Ming Dynasty a pair of bones as hard as iron, but he also injected the genes of suspicion and cruelty into these bones. On the night when Prince Zhu Biao passed away, the sixty-four-year-old iron-blooded emperor burst into tears like an ordinary old father. No matter how many people he kills, some abyss will never be filled. There are warriors on the battlefield and cold calculations of power in the book, but the final destination is a real, contradictory, and twisted person. Reading this novel, you will see how a beggar used the humblest status to accomplish the hardest thing in the worst era: rebuilding the Han Dynasty.