Chapter 1626: The Footsteps of Revolution

He was silent for a while, then chose to keep reading. But the title of the next chapter caught him somewhat off guard.

The next chapter was actually titled: An Age of Joint Governance and Prosperity!

As the Imperial Guard grew ever more dangerous, and as the rules of consort feminism were gradually eroded, the glorious Ming dynasty did not collapse at once. Instead, it entered an age of joint governance and prosperity that later generations of the Chinese people would all long for.

"Joint Governance" was the reign title of the weak-willed Zhu Zhongtong, and it was also the political foundation of this glorious age.

This "joint governance" meant, first of all, joint rule by emperor and empress — the supreme model of power operation inaugurated in the era of Zhu Hexing. In the era of Zhu Zhongtong and his empress Zheng Li, it was still maintained.

Although Zhu Zhongtong was indecisive and weak, he was no fatuous ruler. He too had received a fine education, was a top graduate of the Imperial Academy, and was already twenty-eight years old when he ascended the throne. Before that, he had served as county magistrate, prefect, governor, and prefect of Yingtian, and had also held a term as a vice minister in the Ministry of Personnel. He was thoroughly familiar with the politics of the Ming Empire, and was no child raised deep within the palace who had never seen the world.

And the more forceful Empress Zheng Li, though not selected through examinations, was also outstanding, well educated, and likewise a graduate of Jinling Women's University. Before becoming empress, she had studied under Zhu Yiyou and Zhu Yiyou's Empress Lu, learning how to govern the state and how to control the operations of the Royal Consortium. Moreover, she had a remarkable gift for commerce. She keenly spotted the enormous opportunity of the Industrial Revolution and made bold and highly effective investments, lifting the Royal Consortium's strength to yet another level...

Second, the "joint governance" of the Joint Governance era also meant joint rule by the couple Zhu Zhongtong together with the Empress Dowager Elizaveta Petrovna and the King of Siberia, Zhu Zhongzhen, mother and son.

This was a political arrangement that struck Zhu Cilang as very strange — the formidable empress Elizaveta Petrovna and her son, the King of Siberia, who led the Imperial Guard on campaigns east and west and was ever victorious, actually had no intention whatsoever of seizing imperial power. Instead, they wholeheartedly assisted the weak and indecisive Zhu Zhongtong.

It turned out that Elizabeth had not remained Empress of Russia for long. In 1746 by the Western calendar, after her eldest son by Zhu Bolian, Konstantin, married Sophia Augusta of the small German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, she abdicated the throne to her son Konstantin I and returned to the Ming to serve as Empress Dowager.

Her other son, Zhu Zhongzhen, was enfeoffed as King of Siberia after his father's death, but he did not go to Siberia to take up his fief. Instead, he remained in service with the Ming Army, fighting north and south on behalf of his elder brother Zhu Zhongtong and winning illustrious military merits.

And the weak and indecisive Zhu Zhongtong likewise never moved against his stepmother Elizabeth or his half-brother, the King of Siberia, Zhu Zhongzhen... Thus at the core of the Ming dynasty there emerged a situation of united joint governance by four people: the Empress Dowager Elizabeth, the Emperor Zhu Zhongtong, the Empress Zheng Li, and the Prince Zhu Zhongzhen. As a result, the Ming dynasty was quite stable during the Joint Governance era.

Seeing this, Zhu Yaofei gave a bitter laugh and muttered to himself, "It seems I still underestimated them! And when you think about it... Elizabeth is a white woman, and that boy Zhu Zhongzhen is mixed-blood. Besides, the Imperial Guard fought rotten wars for over a decade, and they've already gotten all the benefits they could get. They ought to be satisfied for the time being.

And Zhu Zhongzhen, with the wrong bloodline, could never become emperor. Naturally, Zhu Zhongtong would not groundlessly suspect him either... The boy may be weak, but he's no fool!"

After all, the Ming dynasty was a feudal dynasty that placed great emphasis on bloodline!

Moreover, outside the central government there were a great many imperial princes, and at court there were many imperial clansmen serving as high ministers, while in the military there were also many Princes and Commandery Princes of the Zhu clan.

So Zhu Zhongzhen, with his impure bloodline, could never plot to usurp the throne... Compared with risking universal condemnation to seize power, being a loyal great general was far more in his interest.

And although Zhu Zhongtong was weak and indecisive, he was not a harsh man. He was extremely generous to his stepmother and brother. He did not interfere in Elizabeth's private life, and he used Royal Consortium funds to subsidize Konstantin, who was serving as Tsar in Russia, enabling him to buy over the nobility and the church. This greatly pleased Elizabeth and her son.

In addition, he was also extremely generous to the Imperial Guard, which had won the Russian throne for Elizabeth and her son... Although quite a few Imperial Guard officers and men preferred Zhu Zhongzhen, they were very satisfied with their treatment and were also rather fond of Zhu Zhongtong.

So the seemingly dangerous situation did not cause the Ming dynasty to disintegrate from within... Of course, the risks that would bring the state to ruin were accumulating, but the empire left behind by Zhu Cilang had a very solid foundation, and it was still on an upward trajectory.

However, the cooperation of Elizabeth, Zhu Zhongtong, Zheng Li, and Zhu Zhongzhen alone could not have created a golden age.

What truly brought the golden age to the Ming Empire was the Industrial Revolution!

The Industrial Revolution did not erupt overnight. It was a gradual process, slowly moving from quantitative change to qualitative change. As early as the era of the "Reign of Prosperity and Fortune," the workshop handicraft industry of the Ming southeast was already quite developed, and steam engines imported from England had begun to see widespread use in mining.

Thanks to the use of steam engines in iron and coal mining, and the gradual maturation of coke-based iron-smelting technology, Xuzhou — which possessed both large coal mines and medium-sized iron mines — began to grow into a heavy industrial center!

What? Xuzhou could become a heavy industrial center?

Seeing this record in the *Comprehensive History of the Ming*, Zhu Yaofei was somewhat surprised.

Although he knew Xuzhou was a coal city, in his memory, if one did not consider imported iron ore, China's heavy industrial centers should have been in the northeast and north China, where coal and iron resources were concentrated. How could it possibly be Xuzhou?

He continued reading, and only then did it dawn on him... It turned out that during the era of the First Industrial Revolution, the steel output of various countries was merely in the range of a hundred thousand to several hundred thousand tons. A country's steel output first breaking one million tons was already a nineteenth-century matter, decades after the start of the Industrial Revolution. Xuzhou's coal mines were on the scale of ten million tons, while its iron mines were on the scale of several hundred thousand to over a million tons. That was more than ample for eighteenth-century industrialization. Even as development reached the nineteenth century, although Xuzhou's iron ore output was insufficient, the development of the Ma'anshan iron mines could still provide sufficient raw materials for Xuzhou's metallurgical industry — the distance from Ma'anshan to Xuzhou was not great, and there were transport lines formed by the Yangtze waterway, the Grand Canal, and the Xu-Huai Railway to support it.

In addition, within Fengyang Prefecture, near Yingtian Prefecture, coal mines with enormous reserves had also been discovered. Within Wuhan Prefecture, there was also the Daye iron mine, which had been worked for a thousand years.

These coal and iron mines were linked together by the Yangtze and the newly built railways, and could continuously supply the industrial and commercial centers of the Ming southeast with high-quality, low-cost iron and steel products.

With high-quality, low-cost steel and coal and iron, the machine industry and railways were able to develop continuously, and the industrialization of the Ming southeast was able to get onto the fast track.

Therefore, throughout the thirty-year Joint Governance era and the later Xingdao era, the Ming Empire remained in a state of long-term prosperity and flourishing. For this reason, the two eras of Joint Governance and Xingdao are collectively called the "Prosperous Age of Joint Governance and the Dao." This golden age lasted more than sixty years, from the mid-eighteenth century all the way to the early nineteenth century.

During these sixty-plus years of prosperity, all the hidden dangers and all the contradictions of the Ming Empire were masked by rapid economic growth. The self-confidence of everyone, high and low, soared to its peak.

And the ideal of "blending the barbarian and the Chinese" pioneered by Zhu Bolian and Elizaveta Petrovna also became ever more deeply rooted in people's hearts, thanks to the progress brought by this Industrial Revolution.

Moreover, technologically, it had also become possible to realize it!