In the fifteenth year of the Hongzhi reign, the Ming court is trapped by the shackles of ancestral law and the schemes of the powerful. Under the harsh maritime ban, countless fishing households and sea merchants along the coast see their livelihoods wither, and ordinary people are caught in a desperate struggle. Emperor Hongzhi Zhu Youhuang sees through the infighting at court and knows there is no way to find a solution within its walls. In secret at the Ancestral Temple, he entrusts the imperial clansman Zhu Youfu with a confidential mission: leave the court and find another way to enrich the people and foster industry.
Zhu Youfu heads south from the capital with his adviser Bai Dandang, traveling light. Using the imperial fief court as his foundation, he puts into practice a grand strategy of strengthening the fiefs and bringing foreign peoples together, following a trade vision left behind by the Prince of Min a century earlier as he makes for Yuegang in southern Fujian. The two shed their identities as imperial clansmen and imperial physicians, take up the guise of merchants, and venture deep into the streets and among the people. They witness the lives of people across the land, seek out fishing households, sea merchants, and traders from the Southern Seas, gather scattered old ties among the southeastern fief clans, and try to reopen the maritime trade routes long severed by the sea 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 spanning thousands of miles of mountains and seas. Standing among the people as a member of the imperial clan and a lord of a fief, Zhu Youfu confronts entrenched local powers and sea raiders, step by step seeking a path to open the seas so coastal people can trade in safety and build livelihoods. This is not only a realistic epic about the Ming dynasty's quest to establish maritime trade routes, but also a journey of self-care and healing woven into the road, as embodied by the Ai Hai Lao Ji IP. On his journey to help the world, the protagonist sees every facet of human life. Amid countless obstacles, he holds fast to his principles and finds inner peace as he bears the weight of the road ahead, giving the story a warm, healing heart.
Yu Fan Chao's original cultural and creative IP work, The Imperial Fiefs Open the Seas, begins here: a grand plan to enrich the people, set among the mountains and seas of the Ming dynasty.
