Liu Jin almost starved to death in Wangbao Village, Shaanxi Province when he was six years old. An old eunuch took him back to the palace and gave him a life. Decades later, he became the most powerful person in the Ming Empire - the eunuch of the ceremonial department. He investigated corruption, cleared the land, rectified the salt administration, raised the national treasury from less than one million taels to more than six million, and offended all those who deserved to be offended. Five years later, he was executed with 3,357 blows. The found dragon robes and jade seals were stuffed into his home in advance by political opponents. The official history left two words for him: traitor.
Zhu Houzhao became the prince at the age of two and ascended the throne at the age of fifteen. For sixteen years, he fought crickets in the leopard room, tamed tigers and leopards, drank wine and listened to music - all the civil and military officials in the dynasty said he was a foolish king. No one knows that the orders to "fine rice", "clear the abbot", and "rectify salt" came from the leopard room. He pushed Liu Jin to the front desk to take the scolding for him, hiding it from everyone with his ridiculous face. He personally went to the battlefield and won the largest foreign war in the mid-Ming Dynasty. After his death, he was honored as "Wuzong" by the ministers. In the history books, his name is Zhengde - later generations only remember the word "mediocre".
Liu Jin is dead. Zhu Houzhao also died. But they brought the empire back from the brink. Those blocked holes became the basis for Zhang Juzheng's reforms half a century later.
This is the story of two people destroying themselves in their own way.
It is also a story about an empire that was held on by two pairs of hands that should not have appeared in the forefront of history before it collapsed.
