Chapter 1620: A Life of Glory, a Dream

"Xingfu" was Zhu Hexing's reign era. He was the "Lucky Emperor," after all — naturally a sovereign blessed with good fortune. And he had taken over a realm in the midst of a golden age of restoration, so the Xingfu era name could not have been more fitting.

As the saying goes, there are only wrongly chosen names, never wrongly given nicknames. The "Lucky Emperor" Zhu Hexing truly was a child of fortune. From the moment he was born, he had an exceptionally stable and well-paid job — Crown Prince of the Great Ming. He held that post for over fifty years. At first he was sheltered by his father and mother, with no need to worry about losing his position. Later he married the capable Ding Yuying and Ding Yuru sisters, and with their support he not only performed the duties of Crown Prince solidly, but also gradually began taking over from his imperial father, Zhu Cilang.

By the fifty-third year of Hongxing, the long-enduring Crown Prince had finally become emperor. After a grandly conducted internal abdication, he became the eighteenth emperor of the Great Ming Empire — and also its most steady and mature one. He was already past fifty when he ascended the throne, and above him there was still a patriarch in his seventies helping to keep watch. At his side were two consorts with years of political experience to assist him. In the court, his imperial uncle and Chancellor Zhu Cixuan held the fort, and there were a host of uncles, brothers, and cousins stationed in all directions — some were lords of tributary kingdoms, some rulers of established states, some held Ming military governorships, and some were Chiliarchs of ten thousand or one thousand households. They were scattered across the far corners of the earth!

It was fortunate indeed that the prolific Emperor Fuzong had been so fertile; otherwise there would not have been so many close relatives available to live off the imperial house!

And the Celestial Alliance that Zhu Cilang had thrown together before his formal retirement had, in the ten years since Zhu Hexing's enthronement, continued to function smoothly.

Through the Celestial Alliance and the Celestial Army, the Great Ming Empire and the several dozen large and small tributary states beneath it had formed a system of "collective security." Tributary states on the fringes of Celestial civilization, when they came into conflict with enemy states outside the civilized sphere, could call upon the Celestial Army through the Celestial Alliance — they did not even need to appeal directly to the Alliance Assembly in Yingtian Prefecture; they could simply seek aid from the regional Alliance leader responsible for their area.

These regional Alliance leaders could order the Governor-General's headquarters of the Alliance joint forces to dispatch troops. The Celestial Army units under these Governor-General's headquarters were drawn from the regular armies of all Alliance member states. The main force, of course, came from the Great Ming, but troops from other states also participated.

The Celestial Army forces normally stationed in a given sector were composed of the tributary-state troops belonging to that sector's regional Alliance, plus a joint force contributed by the Great Ming and the non-frontline states directly under Ming control — Japan, Joseon, Jeju, Annam, Chenla, and Laos. Though the numbers were not large, they were all elite troops of formidable fighting strength!

In addition, in sectors requiring naval power, a Combined Fleet would also be deployed. In peacetime, however, the Combined Fleet was not under the jurisdiction of the Governor-General's headquarters subordinate to the Celestial Alliance, but was commanded by an Admiral appointed by the Ming Ministry of the Navy.

As for the military expenses of the Celestial Army, they were shared among the Alliance member states according to their respective fiscal revenues. The wealthy bore a bit more, the poor a bit less.

Thanks to the existence of this collective fighting mechanism, the Celestial Alliance won one foreign war after another in the ten years after the Xingfu Emperor took the throne!

First, in the inaugural year of Xingfu, troops were dispatched to intervene in the Roman–Ottoman War! Of course, the Celestial Alliance forces were not going to go directly to Europe to fight the Roman Empire. They used the tactic of making a feint to the east while striking in the west, launching an offensive against the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in New Spain!

This war lasted five years, from the first year of Xingfu all the way to the fifth year of Xingfu, before the two sides signed a treaty under the mediation of Queen Marie Anne of Hungary and Archduke Henry of Austria.

Under this peace treaty, the territory of the Qing Kingdom extended several hundred li further south along the Pacific, all the way to San Salvador. However, the dream of the King of Qing, Zhu Cihuan, to seize the Silver Mountain and enter the capital of Mexico was not realized, and could only be left to his descendants to fulfill.

And the Xingfu Emperor Zhu Hexing obtained a colony in far-off South America — a private reserve he had carved out for his own sons! The territory was not large, but it was an important foothold, located on the land of what would later be Ecuador's Santa Elena Province.

The second war of the Xingfu era was the "Battle of the Immortal Isles," which broke out in the sixth year of Xingfu. The so-called "Immortal Isles" were in fact what later generations would call the Hawaiian Islands. The reason they were called the Immortal Isles was a legend that had emerged when Japan submitted to the Ming — it was said that on the great ocean more than ten thousand li southeast of Japan there were two immortal isles, "Yingzhou" and "Fangzhang," inhabited by immortals from whom one could obtain the elixir of immortality.

Since there were immortal isles, immortals, and immortal elixirs... the filial sons of the Great Ming had to go search for them on behalf of their dear father!

So the Tycoon King Zhu Hehao and the Stock King Zhu Cihuan had very early on sent ships to search the Pacific, and around the twentieth year of Hongxing they had found the Hawaiian Islands. There were quite a few natives on the islands, and the explorers from the United States and the Qing Kingdom asked them about the immortals... They asked and asked, but never got any reliable information. So some adventurers simply went ashore themselves to search. Who knows how they searched? They kept at it until the death of the Chongzhen Retired Emperor, and never found any immortals.

In truth, Zhu Cilang never believed in any of this — he had been to Hawaii in the future, and had never seen any immortals there! Although their absence in the twenty-first century did not guarantee that there had been none there in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the odds of finding them were, after all, not very great.

Therefore, during the Hongxing era when Zhu Cilang was in power, the Great Ming did not put much effort into the Immortal Isles of Hawaii — although this archipelago lay in the middle of the Pacific, it was situated in the doldrums. Whether sailing east or returning west, one did not need to pass through Hawaii. So the value of this archipelago was not great.

But by the sixth year of the Xingfu Emperor's reign, the successive deaths of the Grand Empress Dowager Zhou, the King of Luo Zhu Cizhao, the King of Qing Zhu Cihuan, and the Retired Empress Wu Sanmei, along with Zhu Cilang's steadily deteriorating health, all made Zhu Hexing feel that he had to seriously search for the immortals and the elixir of immortality.

And so an "Immortal Isle War" broke out!

This "Immortal Isle War" began in the sixth year of Xingfu and dragged on for more than four years, only ending completely in the tenth year of Xingfu... The objective of the war was not achieved. Although the allied forces occupied all the islands, suppressed the resistance of the natives, and even established a somewhat fantastically named "Immortal Kingdom" on the "Immortal Isles," sending one of Zhu Hexing's sons to be its "Immortal King," no true immortals were found, and of course there was no elixir of immortality to give to the ever-aging, soon-to-fail Zhu Cilang...

The third war of the Xingfu era broke out between the Celestial Alliance and the Russian Empire. The cause was the Republic of Siberia's war of aggression against the Chahar Khanate and the Tumed Khanate.

This war was originally a conflict among "Tartars," and neither the Great Ming Empire nor the Russian Empire took it seriously. But because the Republic of Siberia produced a famous general, Borjigit Tsering, who routed the Chahar Khanate and the Tumed Khanate, the Great Ming had no choice but to intervene.

And the Great Ming's intervention in turn drew in Russia!

As a result, the war kept escalating, and the Western Chu Republic, the Dzungar Kingdom, and the Khoshut Kingdom all entered the fray one after another. In the end, the war became a grinding stalemate between the Celestial Alliance and the Russian Empire — because the theater was too vast and logistics were extremely difficult for both sides, the scale of the war remained small throughout, and the losses stayed within a range both sides could bear.

Moreover, the bitter cold of Siberia restricted the movements of the Ming and Western Chu armies. The war thus settled into a pattern: the Celestial Alliance attacked in summer and pulled back in winter, while the Russian–Siberian allied forces advanced in winter and pulled back in summer.

This war began in the seventh year of Xingfu and continued all the way to the tenth year of Xingfu, with no sign of ending... Meanwhile, the health of the Great Ming Retired Emperor Zhu Cilang grew steadily worse, and by the end of the tenth year of Xingfu, he had reached the end of his life.

It seemed he would not live to see the elixir of immortality, nor to hear news of victory in the Siberian war.

A great hero and sage sovereign of his generation was about to return his soul to the heavenly kingdom!