Late Ming

Late Ming is a long-form alternate-history novel by Ke Shanmeng, serialized on Qidian from March 2012 to its conclusion in March 2014; it runs about 2.27 million characters in 601 chapters and is regarded as one of the representative works of the time-travel-to-the-late-Ming genre. The story begins in the autumn of 2011: Chen Xin, a corporate office director, and Liu Minyou, a project manager, are carried off by an unidentified flying object while hiking in the Jiulong Mountains of Ji County, and wake up in the wilderness of the seventh year of Tianqi (1627). With nothing to their name, the two first use their wits to swindle travel money, take in several refugee children from Liaodong, then enter the Tianjin canal docks, maneuver between the grain-transport gangs and salt merchants, learn the rules of Ming commerce and maritime trade as bookkeepers, and rise step by step from refugees to organizers. The book advances through arcs including "The Seas Run Wild," "Cutting Through Thorns," "The Jisi Incident," "Landscape Like a Painting," "Campaigning North and South," and "Swallowing Mountains and Rivers": in the early phase they trade along the Shandong coast, buy military offices, establish a base at Weihai, build the Wendeng Battalion, and set up three systems for training, logistics, and intelligence; in the middle phase, during the Jisi Incident of the second year of Chongzhen, they lead troops to the emperor's aid and confront the Later Jin head-on with firearms tactics; in the late phase, in Dengzhou and Laizhou they promote military farming, workshops, commercial societies, and schools, put down Kong Youde's rebellion, and ultimately counterattack into Liaodong, ending the Later Jin in a timeline whose history diverges completely. The work is known for its "double transmigration" structure: the pragmatic Chen Xin and the humane Liu Minyou mirror each other, one handling military strategy and the other civil administration and economics. The book is meticulously researched on details such as taxes, military pay, firearms manufacture, boat-trackers' livelihoods, and market prices, and its battle scenes are grim and realistic, relying little on "cheats," which has earned it readers' praise as a "wondrous Ming time-travel book."