The Ming Dynasty's Debt King: I Use Candlestick Charts to Cut Down Imperial Power

The story of Lin Mo, a Wall Street trader who transmigrates to the late Ming dynasty and rises from a salt merchant’s live-in son-in-law to a financial titan who shakes the realm.

On his wedding day, he sees his bride, Zhang Wanzhao, framed by her own family and about to be drowned in a pond. Then the “macroeconomic simulator” in his mind suddenly activates, revealing the crises and opportunities of the late Ming salt market. A Ming-era government bond dismissed as worthless paper becomes his first weapon. Using compound interest formulas and legal statutes, he squeezes eighty thousand taels of silver from a money house, exposes his father-in-law’s salt-licence scam, reaps profits from Jiangnan’s salt merchants with “futures contracts,” and sets a trap to take control of the Canal Gang’s illicit salt trade. As the salt market collapses, he builds his own business empire. From the Jiangnan Salt Merchants’ Alliance to the “banknote revolution,” he uses modern financial thinking to remake the late Ming’s commercial rules. After meeting Chen Yuanyuan, a mathematical prodigy, the two join forces to investigate examination fraud and uncover corruption in military grain supplies. When Wei Zhongxian’s “invitation” arrives, Lin Mo heads north to the capital with five hundred thousand taels of silver, ready to face the eight great Shanxi merchant houses that monopolize the money houses. He sets his sights on the massive loopholes in Liaodong’s military grain supply. He uses candlestick charts to analyze court intrigue and futures strategies to short the foundations of imperial power,

setting off a late Ming “subprime crisis” amid the tangled worlds of salt licences and government bonds, silver and ledgers. When a Wall Street operator meets the tottering Ming dynasty, will finance strangle imperial power, or will the inexorable tide of history swallow everything?

This high-stakes gamble across time has only just begun.