Great Ming: Writing My Own Destiny

In the thirty-first year of Hongwu, the founding emperor passed away. Kneeling before the funeral altar, twenty-one-year-old Crown Prince Zhu Yunwen was flooded with memories of another life. In his previous life, he had read the History of the Ming Dynasty so many times its pages had turned soft. That book recorded how his life would end: in the first year of Jianwen, Prince of Yan launched his campaign to claim the throne; in the fourth, his army entered Nanjing and a fire broke out in the palace. The official history left the Jianwen Emperor with just a vague half-sentence: The emperor escaped, and his whereabouts remain unknown. Enthroned at twenty-one, his dynasty lost four years later. Who would want that deal? Fortunately, someone else had already written the book, but he could shape the empire himself. He had a rough idea of the policies Zhu Di would later implement: the Grand Secretariat, pacifying Jiaozhi, moving the capital north, five campaigns beyond the northern frontier, and compiling the Great Canon. So he would beat his fourth uncle to the punch and handle them all himself, without paying the price Zhu Di had. The ministers’ authority was set down in black and white in the imperial edicts, and military orders could not intrude upon the Grand Secretariat. Three great academies offered another path into government service, drawing talented people from across the realm. Even the secret edict that would have leaked was replaced by a clandestine intelligence network that answered only to the emperor. But the book had crossed the cycle of reincarnation, and what it remembered was only an outline. The farther into the future it went, the blurrier it became. The day he could no longer copy the answers, he would have to write them himself. Forty-nine years, from the funeral hall to his abdication. He turned an emperor who lived for only four volumes in the book into someone the book had never described He wrote the history of the Great Ming himself.