Chapter 1618: The Great Ming's Fifty Years of Prosperity

The night was already very deep, and the whole of Laoshan Palace lay in stillness. Only Zhu Cilang, who had spent his entire life worrying about his country and his people, still lay in the great bed in the bedchamber of Yanshan Palace with his eyes open, unable to sleep. He rested his hands behind his head and stared fixedly at the ceiling. Beside him, Wu Ake had also woken. She found her aging husband still lost in thought — she did not know whether he was worrying about the country and the people, or whether he could not bear to hand the throne over to the lucky Crown Prince.

The coffin of the Chongzhen Retired Emperor had been laid in the underground palace of the imperial tomb at Wolong Mountain for nearly three months now... and the present time had already reached the second month of the fifty-third year of Hongxing of the Great Ming!

Just a few days earlier, the last great matter of Zhu Cilang's reign, the Charter of the Celestial Alliance, had been signed and brought into force by the rulers of the various vassal states in Yingtian Prefecture and the high ministers representing those rulers, together with Zhu Cilang and Zhu Hexing.

Although negotiations on organizing the "Celestial Alliance Army" had not yet begun, the great policy directions had all been settled. Organizing the celestial troops was merely a matter of detail — the related negotiations might continue for many years, and the agreements reached could not possibly settle everything once and for all.

Therefore Zhu Cilang could not use this as an excuse to postpone his retirement yet again. Before Chongzhen was buried, he had told the lucky Crown Prince that he would step down once the funeral affairs were finished. But after burying Chongzhen, he had become somewhat reluctant... after all, when one has done a job for more than fifty years, how can one simply retire just like that? He had grown attached to the throne of the Ming Emperor!

Besides, the people of the Great Ming could not bear to part with him either!

He was truly a great sovereign and sage ruler who had received his mandate in the midst of peril and turned back the tide when all seemed lost... After his death, his temple name would most likely be Shengzu — and he would fully deserve to be Shengzu, because he was a true Confucian sage. The Zilun Gewu Pian, which revived Confucianism, was his own work. After Confucius and Mencius, he was the next Confucian sage.

A sage as sovereign, who had also revived the Great Ming realm and pushed the nation's power to its zenith, surpassing every previous dynasty — such civil and military achievements were beyond even Emperor Wu of Han or Emperor Taizong of Tang. So his temple name could only be Shengzu!

To be ruled by such a sage-ancestor was truly a blessing the Ming people had cultivated over many lifetimes... Could they bear to let Emperor Zhu step down just like that?

And so Zhu Cilang, who understood the people's hearts so well, had no choice but to reluctantly carry on for another two or three months, postponing the abdication date until after the signing of the Charter of the Celestial Alliance...

Wu Ake, who had been with Zhu Cilang for more than twenty years, knew her husband's mind all too well. She laid a hand over and said in a low, laughing voice: "Your Majesty, why are you still not asleep? Is it that you cannot bear to give up the great throne, so much so that you lie awake through the night?"

Zhu Cilang turned his head and glared half-annoyed at the Noble Consort he had favored for more than twenty years, then sighed and said: "Do you think We are one who clings to power? We are merely uneasy... We are called the sovereign of the Ming restoration, but in truth We are a founder of a realm like Emperor Guangwu of Han. And the realm We have founded is more glorious and flourishing than any dynasty before or since — even the realm founded by Genghis Khan falls far short of Ours. But anyone who thinks the Great Ming can now rest easy, and peacefully enjoy peace and prosperity, is gravely mistaken! For the present age is truly a transformation unseen in two thousand years!

If the Ming realm were without Us, the consequences would be unthinkable! Yet even with a sage sovereign such as Us, who has managed to seize back the lost opportunities and open up so many vassal states and territories overseas... this transformation unseen in two thousand years is not merely the discovery of the New World and the opening of new sea routes!"

If it were only the transformation brought by the Age of Discovery, Zhu Cilang would not be worried in the slightest.

Because the realm he had won was already vast enough, and he had also created the Huaxia system — if there were only a single Great Ming, it would not only be difficult to govern so much territory and so many people, but there would also be the problems of being unable to test alternatives and unable to tolerate mistakes.

In the course of a civilization's development, it always encounters various possible paths forward... Which way is better to go? This is a question of crossing the river by feeling for the stones. And there are many routes across the river; without walking them, no one can know where the water is deep and where it is shallow.

A unified civilization, however, encounters the predicament of being unable to test alternatives and unable to tolerate mistakes — unification is in fact also a development path worth trying. But because the Celestial civilization has too few samples, and moreover is one state dominating all others, what gets unified is not just the single state of Huaxia, but the entire civilization.

This situation has caused the Huaxia civilization to lose its ability to test alternatives, and its capacity to tolerate mistakes is likewise very low. Huaxia is not like Europe, where there is a great profusion of all sorts of strange states — empires, kingdoms, republics, city-states, papal states, prince-bishoprics, grand duchies, and so on. Moreover, under the same name, the paths pursued may still differ. Thus a single Christian civilization has many different development paths... Even if most of those paths ultimately lead into dead ends, as long as a few paths succeed, the civilization as a whole has a way forward.

And those countries that took the wrong path, because they have successful countries within the same civilization to use as reference, find it relatively easy to carry out reforms and change their development path.

By comparison, Huaxia, this unified civilization, must advance with great caution... One wrong step, and the whole game is lost!

Under such circumstances, seeking stability rather than change naturally became the mainstream thinking of the Huaxia civilization.

This development path of one state dominating all others, in Zhu Cilang's view, was simply putting all the eggs in one basket — far too risky!

So after he took power, he began to pursue a colonial path of diversified investment, continuously colonizing new states, and he also deliberately guided the various colonial states onto different development paths, producing kingdoms, federated states, republics, duchies, khanates, united kingdoms, and all sorts of other states.

Moreover, these states were scattered quite far apart. Under the present conditions of transportation, unifying them all was simply impossible.

Thus the diversity of development paths for the Huaxia civilization had been secured!

And with it came the possibility of testing alternatives and the capacity to tolerate mistakes... In Zhu Cilang's view, the ability to test alternatives and the possibility of tolerating mistakes were more important to a civilization than a single pre-planned "path to success."

Because there are too many accidental factors in the long river of history. Even if a plan is perfect at the outset, in the course of development it may still go astray for all sorts of reasons.

Therefore Zhu Cilang did not change the Ming's "absolute monarchy," but instead created a group of brother states for the Ming to use as reference — if politics is a science, then of course experiments should be done first! The brother states Zhu Cilang promoted, in a certain sense, were each and every one an experimental subject.

They and the Ming all belong to the same cultural sphere, sharing the same script and the same race, and even their ruling families are much the same. They know one another thoroughly, so learning from one another is naturally easy.

But Zhu Cilang knew that the transformation unseen in two thousand years facing the Huaxia civilization was not merely the change brought by the Age of Discovery — there was also industrialization!

A steam engine that could be used to pump water had already appeared in England!

Moreover, the Republic of England in recent years had benefited from the great market of the Roman Empire, and its domestic manufactories had developed with extreme rapidity. Because England's population was insufficient and its labor supply not very abundant, the manufactory owners were keen on purchasing and building all kinds of machinery. Driven by these manufactory owners, England's metallurgy and machine-building industries had always been relatively advanced.

In the Great Ming Empire, however, where labor was abundant, the manufactory owners had plenty of hardworking and diligent laborers, so their demand for machinery was relatively weak. Although Zhu Cilang had spent a good deal of money encouraging craftsmen to study machinery, and had also made great efforts to import England's most advanced machines for imitation and reproduction,

the Great Ming in the field of machine-building was still, without question, behind the Republic of England.

The transformation of the Industrial Revolution was about to arrive, and for the Huaxia civilization this was yet another enormous challenge!

Zhu Cilang sighed: "The Industrial Revolution is coming, and We are old... The road ahead must be walked by Hexing, Yiyou, and the others themselves! Whether We abdicate or not no longer matters!"

The End