The Ming Dynasty Arms Dealer

I skipped through a chapter where the protagonist tells Xu Guangqi that Confucianism is a useless and frivolous subject that harms the country and its people. It's true that Xu Guangqi liked Western learning, but he was also a leading Confucian scholar, a Jinshi (a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations), and had spent most of his life studying Confucianism. Was it appropriate to tell him that?

Instead of developing, they just play it safe and cause trouble all the time. I don't understand what the author was thinking. They had millions of dollars to spend on development, but instead of hiring people, they could have tens of thousands of soldiers with guns and cannons. Who would they be afraid of then?

A mere seventh-rank official dares to accept millions of taels of silver? Are you serious? Or are they silver notes? Does such a large bank even exist? This is outrageous, I can't stand it anymore.

The synopsis is well-written, but the content is truly speechless. It's better than most new books, but that's about it.

Using a cannon to launch potato chunks to plant potatoes? Seriously?

Those who fawn over modern Western philosophy to denigrate Confucianism are either blind followers who have never read Confucian classics, or they are lackeys of the West.

Silver wasn't worth that much during the Tianqi era, and bribes to Grand Secretaries during the Chongzhen era only amounted to ten or twenty thousand taels. How could the Salt Commissioner dare to accept three hundred thousand taels from a single household?

Confucianism lacks scholarship and concrete ideas. Confucianism is a set of ideas that pursues conservatism, but it is about getting others, namely ordinary people, to be conservative. Like India's caste system, it is a professional weapon for ruling others; it begins to decline the moment it is promoted.

Confucianists are politicians; they've studied internal power struggles for millennia and have a wealth of experience in infighting. If you want to fight them, how can you succeed without studying Confucianism? Therefore, Confucianism is useful. Don't tell me you, a person of later generations, are knowledgeable and intelligent; Confucianists will bring your intelligence down to their level and then defeat you with their rich experience.

Seeing "Business" in the book title piqued my curiosity, so I checked the table of contents, and it turned out to be pretty much what I expected. Guess why agriculture has been prioritized over commerce for thousands of years? It must be because people were foolish and didn't know how good commerce was.