Grand Secretary

Grand Secretary is a long-form historical time-travel novel by Yi Shanjin, serialized on Qidian.com starting July 21, 2010 and completed around 2011. It comprises seven volumes and 485 chapters, totaling approximately 1.48 million Chinese characters. Set against the backdrop of the late Zhengde and early Jiajing reigns of the Ming dynasty, the story follows Sun Dan, a modern-day county gazetteer office clerk who, struck by lightning during a thunderstorm, is transported back to the fifteenth year of Zhengde. There he becomes a impoverished youth from a fallen household, quietly sustained by his betrothed, Wan Zhiniang, even as the family's farmland has long been controlled by her relatives. To avoid corvée labor and secure a means of survival, Sun Dan draws on the historical and literary materials he accumulated in his previous life—a vast store of texts he can summon from memory at will—and sets out on the path of scholarly examination. He progresses through the county, prefectural, and academy examinations, then the provincial, metropolitan, and palace examinations, rising step by step from a poor commoner to an official career. The novel takes examination advancement as its main thread, depicting in fine detail the Ming imperial examination system and the daily lives of scholars, while also unfolding plots involving court factional strife, local governance, experiments with paper currency circulation, and events such as the compilation of Chuanqing Xiaoji and the Qingtian Song. The narrative ultimately converges on the Great Ritual Controversy of the Jiajing reign. With plain, solid craftsmanship, the author portrays officialdom and the ways of the world, and the work is regarded as one of the representative historical novels of the "imperial examination genre." During its serialization it received a front-page cover recommendation on Qidian and garnered over 200,000 bookmarks.