Daming: I Really Just Want to Be a Salted Fish.

This book is an "anti-conventional and funny historical text" disguised as a "hard-core Ming Dynasty industrial empire". The protagonist Zhu Qiyu is the "ultimate salted fish" with the soul of a modern comedian. All his grand reforms (constitutional monarchy, industrial revolution, overseas enfeoffment) are not for the sake of eternal life, but for "once and for all leaving the work to civil servants and capitalists, so that he can sleep peacefully." This sense of dislocation of being "forced to be rolled up into an emperor for eternity" is the biggest laugh and joy point in the book.