Our 1654

Our 1654 is a long-form historical military time-travel novel by the web author Xiaoyang Youxing, also known as Our 1649. Serialization began in 2009 on Zongheng Chinese Network; the full text runs to roughly three million characters across more than eight hundred chapters. The protagonist, Li Ziqiang, is a middle-aged factory owner whose machining business has failed and whose marriage has fallen apart. He and a group of friends working in agriculture, chemicals, commerce, and historical geography stumble upon a wormhole near Sanya, Hainan, and from there begin preparing what looks to outsiders like an absurd "mass time-travel" expedition. Carrying seeds, instruments, boats, documents, and a complete set of modern technical plans, they set off for the southeastern coast of late Ming China in the mid-seventeenth century, hoping that their collective technical knowledge can change the course of history—at one point they are confident they can "roll over the world." The novel does not center on a single protagonist's cheat-like advantage; instead it adopts a ensemble perspective, letting team members collide with the ancients in military affairs, production, institutions, justice, trade, and education. In the Tainan area they rebuild a shipyard, promote new construction methods, establish courts and a legal-advocate system, and organize formal combat operations—and again and again they are thwarted by the old order, old attitudes, and the inertia of history itself. The core question of the work is not merely whether the time travel can succeed, but whether a nation's history has been cursed, why a thousand years of glory always seems to be destroyed at the critical moment, and why cyclical rises repeatedly return to zero; and after round after round of struggle, the travelers discover that the ones most changed are themselves. The book's pacing leans toward deduction and institutional design, combining technical detail with speculative reflection; it is one of the more representative "technical-stream" mass time-travel works in web fiction.