The Top Scholar from a Poor Family

The Top Scholar from a Poor Family is a long historical romance novel by the web author Tianzi, serialized on Qidian from January 19, 2016, completed in May 2020, and running to about 10.46 million characters. Set against the Hongzhi and Zhengde reigns of the Ming dynasty, the story follows Shen Xi, a modern man whose soul transmigrates into the body of a six-year-old child in a poor family in Taohua Village, Ninghua, Fujian. The household is destitute, clan intrigue is constant, and there is not even money for a first teacher. Relying on his knowledge from a previous life and his tenacious character, he starts from small things—trading loaches for paper and brushes, borrowing his child bride Lin Dai to go into the city—and enters a private school, then passes the county, prefectural, and academy examinations, sweeping first place at every level as case head, provincial graduate, metropolitan graduate, and top scholar, a triple first that shakes the court and the realm. After entering officialdom, Shen Xi does not stop at the prestigious Hanlin Academy. He founds silver houses and chambers of commerce, builds water conservancy, and reforms firearms, promoting fiscal, armaments, and maritime change within the existing institutional framework under the name of "investigating things to attain knowledge"; he also goes through frontier campaigns against the enemy, quelling rebellions, administering the southeast, and overseas expeditions, rising from a poor student step by step to a weighty court minister, ultimately enfeoffed as a duke with hereditary replacement. The book uses the era's atmosphere of "all trades are lowly, only reading is high" as its narrative ground, telling how a lowborn son rewrites his fate through study and practical work and turns the gears of a dynasty. The work is a widely circulated long serial in the "Song, Yuan, and Ming" historical category; as of public online information, no officially published single-volume edition has appeared.