Dream of the Celestial Empire

Dream of the Celestial Empire is a long historical-military web novel by Da Luoluo, serialized and completed on Qidian around 2014, with a total of about 3.86 million Chinese characters (statistics on different sites range from 3.45 million to 4.09 million). The story begins during the Daoguang reign of the Qing dynasty: after the Opium War, the great powers loom and the country's doors are thrown open, and China faces a transformation unprecedented in three thousand years. The protagonist, Zhu Jishi, is a returnee master's graduate in medicine who only wanted to heal the sick and make a living. Before his ambitions could be fulfilled, he transmigrates to Victorian Britain, landing on a fog-shrouded 19th-century London street. He establishes himself abroad through medical skill, builds his fortune on medical inventions and patents, and rises from a gun-carrying itinerant doctor to a figure in London high society, bringing a surgeon's precision to the gambling tables of capital and politics. The story's focus then shifts from Britain to Southeast Asia and East Asia: he maneuvers among various factions, uses Lanfang as his base, founds schools and builds an army in Hong Kong, and gradually converts overseas accumulation into leverage for change at home, introducing institutional designs such as constitutional monarchy and "the king is under the law," promoting comprehensive industrial, military, and fiscal reform, and ultimately being drawn into the waves of modern warfare, European revolutions, and the global rivalry of the great powers. The book takes the 19th-century world order as its scope, offering detailed speculation on historical threads such as the British Chartist movement, the European revolutions, the North-South conflict in the United States, and the Anglo-French-Russian rivalry, attempting to answer through a path of "pushing Chinese transformation from overseas" why modern China declined and whether another possibility remained.