I Want to Open Up the Sea 3

In the fifteenth year of Hongzhi, the Ming court was trapped by the shackles of ancestral law and power struggles among the nobility. Under strict maritime bans, the livelihoods of countless coastal fishing households and merchants dwindled, and the people were mired in hardship. Emperor Hongzhi Zhu Youhuang saw through the court's internal strife and knew that no solution could be found within its walls. In secret, at the Imperial Ancestral Temple, he entrusted the imperial clansman Zhu Youfu with a confidential mission: leave the court and seek another path to enrich the people and grow the economy.

Zhu Youfu and his advisor Bai Dan set out from the capital in an unassuming carriage and headed south. Using the imperial fiefs as their foundation, they put into practice a grand strategy of promoting the fiefs and uniting foreign peoples. Following a trade plan left behind by Prince Min a century earlier, they made for Yuegang in southern Fujian. Shedding their identities as imperial clansman and imperial physician, the two became merchants. They ventured into the streets and among the people, experiencing the everyday life of all regions, visiting fishing households, sea merchants, and visitors from the Southern Seas, and gathering the scattered old lineages of the southeastern fiefs as they sought to reopen the cross-sea trade routes long severed by the maritime ban.

This book has no transmigration and no modern golden finger. It is not a fierce political struggle that overturns the court overnight, but a long journey across thousands of miles of mountains and seas. As an imperial clansman and prince of a fief, Zhu Youfu establishes himself among the people, faces entrenched local magnates and sea raiders, and step by step seeks a path to open the seas, bringing stable trade and livelihoods to the coastal people. This is not only a realistic epic of the Ming search for maritime trade routes, but also a journey of self-acceptance and healing hidden within the expedition. As he travels to help the people, the protagonist sees every facet of human life. He holds fast to his principles through countless obstacles and finds peace of mind while bearing the weight of his mission, giving the story a warm and healing emotional core.

The original work, I Want to Open a Sea Trade Route, begins here: a grand vision to enrich the people, set between the mountains and seas of the Ming.