Master of the Realm

Master of the Realm is a historical time-travel novel by Hanfeng Xiong Lie, serialized on Qidian from July 2018. It runs about 4.37 million Chinese characters across 949 chapters and was completed in October 2021. The protagonist, Chen Ming, wakes up to find himself transported to the thirtieth year of the Qianlong reign (1765), as the young master of the Chen family in the south of Lushan County, Ruzhou Prefecture, Henan — the legitimate son of a minor local official's household. This is the height of the so-called "Kangxi-Qianlong Prosperity": the Qing court appears mighty, yet locally the bureaucracy is corrupt and the gentry prey on one another. Drawing on memories of later ages, Chen Ming starts with the family business, improving its craft to produce bone china finer than anything on the market, then moves into iron smelting and the improvement of tools and weapons, building the Chen family's wealth. But "an innocent man is guilty of possessing a treasure": the bone-china formula and the family's prosperity attract the covetous eyes of the Manchu magistrate and local strongmen. In open and covert strife with rival families the Chens are pressed step by step, until they are drawn into conflict with the authorities, forced to take to the hills as outlaws, and finally to rise in rebellion. The story then expands from clan feuds in a single county to military contention sweeping north and south: the protagonist forms an armed force called the "Short-Hair Army," and with knowledge of later warfare and the advantage of cannon and firearms repeatedly defeats government troops, extending his power outward from Henan. The main thread is the protagonist's course from gentry scion to rebel against the Qing to a contender carving out new living space; the book vividly portrays the cunning, short-sightedness and ruthlessness of gentry, clan elders and petty officials in an age when imperial power did not reach the villages.