Late Qing: From Huai Army Aide to the Most Powerful Official

After transmigrating to 1862, he carried Li Hongzhang out of a pile of corpses and became the youngest aide in the Huai Army.

Empress Dowager Cixi praised him as "a pillar of the nation," Westerners feared him as "the Fox of the East," and his colleagues envied the emperor's unflagging favor toward him.

Over the next thirty years, he took charge of the Ministry of Revenue, spearheaded modernization, and entered the Grand Council. His power towered over the court, making him the most dazzling statesman of the late Qing dynasty's revival.

No one knew that Tan Sitong, "executed" at the Caishikou execution grounds, was at that very moment revising The Blueprint for Founding the Nation in his secret chamber.

While buying giant warships for the Beiyang Fleet, he replaced every gunner with one of his own men.

He would turn this tottering edifice into a graveyard for an entire age with his own hands.

This was one man's forty-year-long, tailor-made gentle trap for three thousand years of imperial rule.