The Great Chancellor

The Great Chancellor is a long historical novel by the web novelist Yu Ren, originally titled The Scourge of a Poor Family. It began serialization on Qidian Reading on December 12, 2017, ran for about four and a half years, and concluded around May 2022, totaling roughly 2,437 chapters and 6.3 million characters. The story begins in the thirty-sixth year of the Jiajing reign of the Ming dynasty (1557). A modern person dies accidentally in the original book and is reborn as Lin Haoran, a poor scholar in Changlin Village, Shicheng County, Gaozhou Prefecture, Guangdong. He wakes to find himself hanging from a beam and is saved by villagers. The original body's home is utterly destitute, yet it has left him a solid foundation in Confucian learning; the new soul, with twenty-first-century perspective and worldly experience, quickly sets his life's goal on the imperial examination path—first becoming a xiucai, then a juren, and finally entering the court. The early part of the novel focuses on the examinations: county, prefectural, and academy tests, one hurdle after another, with open and covert struggles against local gentry, petty officials, and fellow students, detailing the scarcity of resources and the difficulty of examinations for poor scholars. The middle section shifts to local officialdom and then to a career as a capital official, where the protagonist applies modern thinking to practical matters such as taxes and grain, river works, maritime trade, and armaments, maneuvering among historical figures of the Jiajing court such as Yan Song and Xu Jie. The later section expands the scope further, from court reform to overseas expansion, culminating in the line the author set down at the outset: "A chancellor, when excellent, makes a great power"—meaning the creation of the world's foremost power of the sixteenth century. The work is positioned as a historical wish-fulfillment novel on the imperial examination and officialdom theme, balancing historical research with plot momentum; the author states that he consulted a large number of historical texts to recreate the social appearance of the mid-to-late Ming. The character "Hu Niu" is controversial for her vivid personality, and the author addressed this specifically in an afterword. It should be noted that this is a web serial and no formally published print edition is currently available; versions circulating in the market are mostly proofread electronic complete texts compiled by platforms such as Zhixuan Cangshu.