In the fifteenth year of the Hongzhi reign, the Ming court was shackled by ancestral precedent and power struggles among the nobility. Under the harsh maritime ban, countless coastal fishing families and sea merchants saw their livelihoods wither, leaving the people mired in hardship. Emperor Hongzhi Zhu Youhuang saw through the court's infighting and knew there was no solution to be found within its walls. At the Imperial Ancestral Temple, he secretly entrusted the imperial clansman Zhu Youfu with a mission: leave the court and find another way to enrich the people and foster enterprise.
Zhu Youfu and his aide Bai Dandang left the capital in a light carriage and headed south. Using the imperial fief court as their foundation, they put into practice a grand strategy of strengthening and expanding the fiefs, gathering foreign peoples and forging alliances with them. Following a trade vision left behind by the Prince of Min a century earlier, they made for Yuegang in southern Fujian. Shedding their identities as imperial clansman and imperial physician, the two passed themselves off as merchants and ventured among ordinary people, experiencing the everyday life of the regions and seeking out fishing families, sea merchants, and visitors from the South Seas. They gathered the scattered remnants of the southeastern fief clans and tried 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 struggle for power that overturns the court overnight, but a long journey across thousands of miles of mountains and seas. As a member of the imperial clan, Zhu Youfu makes his stand among the common people, confronting entrenched local gentry and pirate bands at sea. Step by step, he seeks a way to open the seas so coastal communities can trade in peace and make a living through enterprise. This is not only a realistic epic about the Ming dynasty's quest to build maritime trade routes, but also a journey of self-care and healing, carried by the Ai Hai Lao Ji IP and hidden within the expedition. Along the way, the protagonist encounters every facet of humanity while striving to help the world. He holds true to himself through one obstacle after another, finds peace of mind amid the burdens of the journey, and gives the story a heartwarming, healing core.
The original cultural and creative work The Emperor Wants to Open a Sea Route, from the Yu Fan Court's national-style IP, now begins its grand vision of enriching the people across the mountains and seas of the Ming dynasty.
