From the Start, a Ninth-Rank County Magistrate: I Launch an Industrial Revolution

A sleepless engineering PhD dies suddenly and wakes up as a newly appointed county magistrate in Qingchuan County, Jiangnan, in the Ming Dynasty. Qingchuan is truly prosperous: sails crowd the canal, and the government treasury overflows with silver. But Qingchuan is also nearly impossible to change: every field has an owner, every clothmaker has a guild, and the rules have been set for a hundred years. The north is demanding winter clothing, foreign powers are eyeing his designs, and the city's weavers are clutching their shuttles, waiting to laugh at the new twenty-four-year-old magistrate. Luckily, he has a book called the Records of Heavenly Craft with him. He must accomplish one task to unlock each new blueprint. The first blueprint is a shuttle that can fly. As soon as it hits the streets, rumors spread everywhere: the official shuttles issued in Qingchuan are cursed. The second is a multi-spindle spinning machine that turns eight strands at once, helping ease the yarn shortage. The third is a large water-powered spinning wheel that channels the river into the workshops, where its wheels turn by themselves and yarn pours out. The jeers never stop, but the machines grow louder with each passing day, weaving Jiangnan inch by inch into the world's workshop. Years later, fleets carrying envoys from the Western oceans anchor on the Qingchuan River year after year. They demand no land and ask for no profits; they only want to come ashore and see for themselves how the thing once denounced as a cursed shuttle grew into everything here today. Someone asks Su Chen, “Aren't you afraid that once your apprentices learn the trade, they'll put you out of work?” He points to the rows of craftsmen's names on the stone monument by the bridge. “They can take the machines, but they can't take the hands that make them. The art of creation has always been in people's hands.”