Great Ming: Guard the Sea Gate, and You’ll Secure the Dynasty’s Future

In the thirty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign, Japanese pirates are ravaging the southeast coast.

Shen Huaishan, a veteran of the coastal defenses, is framed for colluding with the pirates and dies in prison. His son, Shen Yan, is branded by his clansmen as “the spawn of a pirate traitor.” His family fortune is seized, his younger sister nearly sold as a concubine to a salt merchant, and a military order sends him to stand night watch at Haimen Beacon, the most dangerous post on the coast.

Everyone thinks he will be dead within three days. But with only half of his father's Coastal Defense Notes, Shen Yan studies the tides, reads the reef channels, audits the ledgers, and lights the warning beacons. Starting with seven elderly, wounded soldiers, he protects villages, rescues his sister, slays pirates, uncovers a salt merchant's secret accounts, and investigates the garrison's phantom payroll.

Others tell him to guard Haimen and await his death. Instead, he turns a ruined beacon tower into the foremost banner of the southeastern coastal defenses.

Years later, pirates, wealthy merchants, corrupt officials, the Yan faction, and long-standing military ills all bear down in turn, while the Ming dynasty teeters on the brink of collapse.

Looking back at the Haimen Beacon where it all began, Shen Yan says only:

“Gaps are patched one at a time. A dynasty's fortunes are sustained one day at a time, too.”