[Female-Oriented Historical Fiction] [Reborn in the Late Qing] [No System] [Power Fantasy About Strengthening the Nation] [Court Intrigue]
In 1839, on the eve of the destruction of the opium at Humen, Zhaohua, a researcher of modern history, is reborn as a daughter of the Daoguang Emperor.
She knows that once the opium in the pools is destroyed, British merchants will turn their losses into gunboats. After that will come cessions of territory and indemnities, the burning of the Old Summer Palace, the disastrous defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, and a century of blood and tears across China's land.
The entire court assumes she has rushed before the emperor to stop Lin Zexu. Instead, Zhaohua slaps a coastal defense map onto the imperial desk. "Destroy the opium as planned, but prepare for war ahead of time. The law cannot bow to drug dealers, and our soldiers must not pay with their lives for the court's rotten accounts!"
When military pay is embezzled, she follows the ledgers to expose the parasites. When gunpowder is adulterated, she tests the cannons in public and uncovers 280,000 jin of defective munitions. When foreign warships bear down on the coast, she measures their range, strengthens coastal defenses, and trains a new army, making the great powers calculate the cost of war before they strike.
Some laugh that a princess knows nothing of state affairs. She forces corrupt officials to cough up silver with her account books, silences the appeasement faction with military reports, then turns the foreign powers' own treaties against them.
She builds factories, manufactures guns and cannons, lays railways, establishes banks, opens schools for girls, and builds a navy. But Zhaohua understands that saving Humen is not victory, and repelling Britain once is not victory either. If the nation can rely only on one clear-eyed princess, then after she dies, the old history will return.
So she uses imperial authority to pry open the old era, then personally locks that authority inside a system of institutions.
Many years later, Chinese fleets sail past Humen, and that old timeline has already been changed beyond recognition.
Posterity asks if she always knew China would win.
Zhaohua closes the timeline. "I only knew that we were supposed to lose."
