Making Money, Making Trouble, and Keeping My Cool in the Ming Dynasty

Lin Yuan dies suddenly and transmigrates, becoming a low-ranking clerk responsible for the accounts at the Shuntian Prefecture prison, the very prison he manages. His superiors want an audit, his colleagues want to shift the blame, and the prisoners are plotting a revolt. He has nothing to his name except a modern person's knack for process management: duty rosters, a points system, performance reviews, and information disclosure. Three years later, the Shuntian Prefecture prison has become the Ming Dynasty's first model prison, and the government office is begging him to supply its services. Then he is reported for “privately gathering prisoners and plotting treason,” and ends up locked in his own prison for the second time. On the day he gets out, the emperor comes in person to bail him out. After that, there is no turning back. He opens restaurants with advance-payment plans, starts a newspaper to shape public opinion, and establishes a bank that issues exchange notes, making the Jiangnan gentry his sworn enemies along the way. He builds a steam engine to roast ducks, but uses his telescope to spot beacon fires on the border. He helps a fun-loving emperor win the Battle of Yingzhou and suppress the Prince of Ning's rebellion. For the first time, he also seriously tallies an account no one had ever bothered to calculate: how many people died, how much silver was spent, and how many schools that silver could have built. Forty years later, with white hair, he sits in the Ming Imperial Academy of Sciences and tells a group of young students: “Back then, all I wanted was to be a lazy nobody.”