The Great Bandit

The Great Bandit is a time-travel historical web novel set in the late Ming dynasty, written by Aogu Tiexin and serialized on Qidian Chinese Network. The full text is about 2.008 million characters, and it is complete. The story opens in the 16th year of Chongzhen, on the eve of the Ming dynasty's collapse: Li Zicheng has established the Dashun regime, Zhang Xianzhong has founded a state in Wuchang, the famous general Sun Chuanting is dead, and the situation in the north is rotting, while the Jianghuai region still barely maintains a surface calm. The protagonist, Lu Si, travels back in time to an ordinary farm family in Shanggang Town, Yancheng County, Huai'an Prefecture. In both his past and present lives he has been an honest man, and seeing that chaos is coming, he has neither capital nor connections. Because of the dredging of the Grand Canal, local men are conscripted for labor, and Lu Si is forced to become a canal worker on the grain-transport waterway. The hard labor, the extortion of superior officials, and an incident in which government soldiers kill civilians push him step by step to the brink, until he can only rise up "with a kitchen cleaver." From a canal workers' uprising he goes on to capture Huai'an and Yangzhou and builds a strictly disciplined Huai Army. Thereafter he maneuvers repeatedly among the Southern Ming, the remnants of the rebel army, the Qing, local warlords, and powerful clans; he inherits the legacy of the rebel king, supports the Southern Ming, and marches north to resist the Qing, growing through bloody battles into a force that sweeps across a region. The book follows a rare "roving bandit route." It does not rely on farming and technological advancement but takes military conquest and survival in a chaotic era as its main line, with relatively detailed depiction of late-Ming official corruption, grain transport, the military system, and the hardships of the common people.