The Iron Masked Prince of the Ming Dynasty

On the night of March 18th in the 17th year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng conquered Beijing, but the 17-year-old prince Zhu Cixiang did not die for his country. Escorted by the eunuch Wang Chengen and the German missionary Tang Ruowang, he disguised himself as a servant and boarded a Portuguese merchant ship, crossing the ocean westward to France to seek the power to restore the country. However, the news of Nanming's fall came faster than any reinforcements. The prince, whose dream of restoring the country was shattered, lost his last bargaining chip. King Louis XIV of France turned from a "guest" to a "life prisoner". He ordered a cast iron mask to cover his oriental appearance, and imprisoned him in the Fortress of Pinerolo, the Island of Santa Margherita and the Bastille. For forty years, the iron mask has never been taken off, and no one in the world knows the origin of that face. The whole life of the prince is written, and the whole process of escape, journey to the west, sacrifice, imprisonment and decline is personally narrated from the perspective of "I was present". Along the way, I encountered Tang Ruowang's vacillation, Wang Chengen's loyalty, Lao Jiu's sincerity, Saint-Mars' complex guilt, Louis XIV's cold calculation - every face is a mirror, reflecting how heavy a person's fate can be when a dynasty collapses. Four hundred years later, the iron face was dug up at a construction site in Paris. The inscriptions are still there, the star maps are still there, the manuscripts are still there. Gu Mingyuan and Claire traced the truth, but were blocked by mysterious organizations at all levels - some people did not want the prince to return. The past and present are intertwined, and the pursuit of the murderer and the memory go hand in hand. It is finally revealed on the last page of "Dongming Lu": the prince has already seen through it, he can't come back, and there is no need to come back. This is a mystery and detective novel, and it is also a person's four-hundred-year journey back home. On the day when Iron Man returned to Beijing, the handle of the Big Dipper was still pointing to the east.