On My First Day as the Chongzhen Emperor, I Turned the Imperial Palace into a Tourist Attraction

On my first day as the Chongzhen Emperor, I turned the imperial palace into a tourist attraction. Tickets cost one hundred wen, with the ticket office and parking lot outside Yongding Gate. Shuttle tickets cost fifty wen. Iced tea in the attraction costs thirty wen a cup, with straws as thick as you could want and ice cubes as big as you could want. If one cup isn’t enough, you’ll have to buy another. In my first month as the Chongzhen Emperor, I developed a royal villa community around the palace. The Ministry of Works’ vice minister handled the design. Live next door to the emperor and watch the grand secretaries attend court from your window every day. Take a stroll through the imperial garden whenever you like. Your children and grandchildren qualify for admission to the Royal Elementary School, where Hanlin scholars teach and they study alongside the imperial princes and grandsons. Tuition alone costs over a thousand taels a year. If you get sick, you can go straight to the imperial physician. In a word, expensive! A visit for a common cold costs over a hundred taels. The neighbors either ride horses or travel in sedan chairs. If you don’t ride in a four-bearer sedan chair, you’ll be too embarrassed to greet them. A community like this, starting at a thousand taels per square meter, isn’t expensive, is it? And don’t complain: without a Beijing household registration, you can’t buy a place anyway! In my first year as the Chongzhen Emperor, I built a Maginot Line in northern Beizhili, nestled against mountains and rivers and integrated into the land itself. Trenches and barbed wire, surface fortifications, underground tunnels connecting in every direction, steel and iron bones, impregnable defenses. The Later Jin army would be driven to despair... In my tenth year as the Chongzhen Emperor, the Ming dynasty had been revived and reached its zenith. Wherever our armies marched, the barbarians submitted. Three blows shatter the rebel spirit: I am a soldier of the Ming! How could the mighty Ming dynasty, vast and prosperous throughout history, have died from poverty? There’s no problem in this world that money can’t solve. If there is, then there must not be enough money. Chongzhen: In this world, no one understands the Ming better than I do, and no one is better at making money.