I am Emperor Shizu of Song

Chapter 177 Finale
In the twenty-seventh year of the Jianyan era, when Zhao Zicheng was fifty-three years old, after the new capital of Xuzhou was completely completed.

The Crown Prince Zhao Bocong, who was in charge of the country, had already turned thirty and had been in charge of domestic affairs for three years. He was gradually getting the hang of everything.

Zhao Zicheng trusted the Crown Prince, so he moved the Crown Prince to Xuzhou as well, intending to give him greater authority.

This allows him to oversee both domestic affairs and defense when the emperor is not in the capital—of course, currently it only applies to defense, not to deploying troops to launch offensives against other countries, but only to deal with invading enemies.

Given the current authority of the Song Dynasty, no one in Asia is actually going to invade it anymore.

The Song army had been fully equipped with smoothbore flintlock muskets, and the cavalry had been replaced with cuirassiers equipped with carbines.

Although the steam engine had not yet been invented, the industrial level of the Song Dynasty had basically reached the peak of the handicraft economy.

For example, spinning machines in the textile industry have actually reached the level of the spinning jenny, and can even have more spindles, but they lack the power source of a steam engine. However, in places like Dujiangyan where the water flow is stable, waterwheels can be used to drive large spinning wheels with dozens of spindles connected in parallel.

The machines for reeling silk are similar to those for spinning cotton yarn, and have made great progress in both areas.

In the textile industry, the flying shuttle loom also matured and gradually began to spread throughout the Song Dynasty.

With the widespread cultivation of cotton, and the subsequent conquest of the Western Liao and Western Xia, cotton cultivation was also widely popularized in the Hexi Corridor. The people of the Song Dynasty finally bid farewell to the scarcity of textiles, and everyone was at least able to avoid freezing to death.

Regarding grain production, thanks to Zhao Zicheng's continuous encouragement of maritime and geographical discoveries, Song Dynasty explorers finally reached the Americas—however, they did not choose to cross the Pacific Ocean directly, as that was too far. Instead, they went to Africa first, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and finally crossed the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the Americas.

Although the total voyage is longer, at least the maximum voyage of a single segment is much shorter, and there is no situation where you can sail at sea for nearly half a year without seeing land.

With the arrival of Song Dynasty merchants and explorers in the Americas, within a few years, American crops, quinine, and rubber were finally brought back.

People in the Song Dynasty also began to widely cultivate corn, and in some areas they could also grow potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, peppers, pineapples and other crops.

Before the Jingkang Incident, the population of the Song Dynasty was barely over 100 million. Later, due to the war and massacres by the Jurchens, the population of the country was reduced by at least several times, if not half.

However, by the twentieth year of the Jianyan era, with the population growth brought about by peace throughout the land, the losses from previous wars, expansion, and plagues had been largely recovered.

At that time, Zhao Zicheng also conducted a special investigation of the population of the country, and finally found that there were nearly 120 million people. These 120 million people were not all Han people from the original homeland of the Song Dynasty, but also included people from countries that had been annexed, such as Dali, Jiaozhi, Jin, Western Xia, and Western Liao.

However, only Jiaozhi (northern Vietnam) had a relatively dense population, and Dali was also fairly populated. The other three northern kingdoms didn't have much population; the smaller ones had only around a million people when they were absorbed into the north.

With the advent of corn and potatoes, feeding 120 million people across China and its surrounding areas would be no problem at all.

So by the twenty-seventh year of the Jianyan era, the population had expanded further, increasing by more than ten million in just seven years, exceeding 130 million.

However, the people of the land were still able to have enough to eat and wear, and almost everyone had land to cultivate and enough food to eat. This period was later known as the "Jianyan Restoration".

This was a true revival, characterized by comprehensive prosperity in both civil administration and military affairs, and in all aspects of people's livelihood.

With the world at such a peaceful state, where inaction was sufficient for governance, Zhao Zicheng proposed to go on an inspection tour, leaving all state affairs to the Crown Prince who was in charge of the state. As a result, the voices of opposition were much smaller.

Zhao Zicheng's inspection tour did not waste too much of the national treasury. Historically, the later Ming Dynasty's voyages to the Western Ocean did not involve trade, but only focused on tribute and rewards, resulting in huge financial losses.

Although Zhao Zicheng would need at least a hundred giant ships and ten thousand followers, at least he could carry exquisite Song Dynasty goods with the fleet and go out to show the power of our country.

Zhao Zicheng's trip was not merely for sightseeing, but also to broaden the horizons of the Song Dynasty and allow it to see the world more clearly.

As emperor, wherever he went, he would station troops and establish colonies/trading ports at key seaports around the world.

Originally, the civil service might have thought this was too much trouble, but with the emperor's tour as a pretext, many things became more logical.

For example, if the emperor were to travel west through the Strait of Malacca and request that troops be stationed in the strait to prevent bandits from cutting off the shipping route, would the civil service dare to object for the sake of temporarily wasting money? Obviously not.

They had no choice but to allow the emperor's expansion, simply because controlling these strategic locations would protect the emperor's return journey.

Zhao Zicheng believed that by heading west, he could seize Malacca, the Red Sea, and many other strategically important islands. Even if Han Chinese soldiers were unwilling to garrison them, other ethnic groups under the Song Dynasty could take their place. Once the area was developed and less barren, the Han Chinese could then be brought in.

On the other hand, with the further development of medical technology and public health in the Song Dynasty, and the introduction of quinine, tropical diseases were no longer a problem. Places like Champa and Zhenla, which were previously uncontrollable due to climate, were naturally no longer an issue.

As for the unclaimed lands later known in history as "Luzon," they were directly incorporated into the Song Dynasty without any difficulty, requiring no further "travel." After the Luzon Islands were taken over, they also became the Song Dynasty's testing ground for species exchange. Any introduced species were first sent to Luzon to test their effectiveness; if they were harmful, they were restricted and culled as much as possible to prevent their introduction into the Central Plains.

By the 30th year of the Jianyan era, Luzon, Japan, and other regions along the first island chain had been completely Sinicized. Southeast Asia had also become the Song Dynasty's backyard.

After traveling the world for several years, Zhao Zicheng had nothing to do while sailing. Having obtained everything in his life, he became bored and decided to devote some time to writing books and pursuing other interests.

So he decided to organize the scientific theories, such as Newton's laws and Kepler's laws, which are now widely used but lack formal summarization.

The conclusions of these things are actually quite simple, but anyone who has actually read Newton's "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" knows that the process of proof is not easy.

The reason why physics textbooks in later generations seem simple is that they omit many processes and directly give the answer.

Zhao Zicheng could not have memorized "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" in his previous life, so he could only do some minor work, proposing some hypotheses and ideas. The specific verification would probably require the collective wisdom and efforts of the academic officials around him to come up with a solution.

Fortunately, he was, after all, the emperor. When ancient emperors wanted to compile classics, there were countless people willing to help them. Back then, Xiao Tong was just a crown prince, but when he was compiling the "Wenxuan" (Anthology of Literature), he was able to get the assistance of scholars and virtuous men from all over the country. Moreover, when it came to signing the authorship, only Xiao Tong could be listed as the author; who else actually in charge would dare to sign their name?

Moreover, Zhao Zicheng had already been a powerful monarch who had held the reins of power for thirty years.

The Ministry of Rites officials will try their best to verify the ideas proposed by Your Majesty, and the credit will ultimately be recorded only for Your Majesty's ingenuity.

Unless Zhao Zi claimed that he was respectful to scholars and humble in accepting advice, and actively requested the historians to record the contributions of others.

Thus, during his travels across Eurasia, Zhao Zicheng amassed countless territories and wrote numerous books, seemingly having no further ambitions.

The basic concepts of calculus, the three laws of motion, the foundations of astronomy and its applications in navigation were all developed by Zhao Zicheng in his spare time when he was in his fifties.

Incidentally, due to the enlightenment of astronomy, navigation and geographical discoveries flourished in the Song Dynasty. Finally, a naval officer completed the feat of circumnavigating the earth, which also proved from an empirical perspective that the earth is round.

On the other hand, the traditional interpretations of the Mandate of Heaven and other aspects of the interaction between Heaven and humanity, as well as the orthodoxy of virtue and destiny, by the Ministry of Rites also faced a crisis and collapsed, and had to be rebuilt from the ashes.

Fortunately, the Song Dynasty of this era was not prone to mental confusion. Zhao Zicheng was a wise ruler who conquered the country on horseback, and his martial arts skills were unparalleled throughout history. He had the foresight to put forward the slogan "The rise and fall of the nation is the responsibility of every citizen" as early as when the Song Dynasty was saving itself and destroying the Jin Dynasty.

Today, with the collapse of traditional mystical interpretations, the imperial edict "The rise and fall of the nation is the responsibility of every citizen" has been elevated to a new theoretical level, thus constructing an ideology in the Song Dynasty that is similar to modern nationalism in history.

An emperor must represent the interests of his nation and its cultural identity, because the emperor protects the nation and its cultural identity, and therefore the people of the land support him as emperor, not because of the prophecies and divinations of the traditional era.

To benefit the world is to be virtuous; to betray the world is to be immoral. This was the kind of education that the royal family received from then on.

In this way, the hidden danger of emphasizing civil affairs and suppressing military affairs in the Song Dynasty was reversed from the theoretical root. At the same time, it clearly tells the world why the Zhao family is worthy to be emperor. This is because Zhao Zicheng fought for the dignity of the world.

Military men no longer had any reason to say things like "whoever has the strongest army and the most powerful horses will rule the land."

After the complete collapse of traditional mysticism, the Ministry of Rites officials lost all control over scholarship. In the following decades, various schools of thought, including Neo-Confucianism and the School of Mind, competed for dominance. Although everyone stumbled forward under the guise of Confucianism, the sacredness of Confucianism inevitably diminished, and more practical elements were incorporated in a reformist manner.

It's like putting an electric motor on a broken bicycle today, a battery pack on it tomorrow, a brake coil on it the day after, and then even welding off the rotten frame and replacing it with a new stainless steel tube the day after that.

In the end, no one could recognize that this was Confucianism. It was like the Ship of Theseus, which underwent intensive repairs. No one could say from what moment that not a single part on the ship was original.

……

Because of Zhao Zicheng's geographical discoveries in his later years and his dispatch of astronauts to circumnavigate the globe, people's understanding of the world underwent a tremendous change.

The entire civil service and academic system of the country also had to adapt to this dramatic change, so the Song Dynasty experienced a slight slowdown in its territorial expansion.

Digesting existing gains and vested interests, and adapting to new circumstances, all require time.

In the end, it was his son Zhao Bocong, who was in charge of the state, who also wanted to prove himself. So, after a few years of respite, he overruled the objections of others and launched many new territorial expansion campaigns.

After all, the original Emperor Xiaozong of Song also wanted to prove himself in the recovery of his homeland. Although his father recovered all the homeland in this life and left nothing for him, he went south to occupy Borneo, Java and Australia, which were inhabited only by natives, and west to annex Myanmar.

With these martial arts skills as a foundation, the Crown Prince felt a little better and thought his position was secure.

Because the Crown Prince was always worried about whether his lineage would be able to successfully succeed to the throne in the future—he was not worried that his father would change his mind, but he knew that his father was incredibly powerful and physically strong, and would most likely live longer than him.

Throughout history, there has never been a dynasty whose legally rightful first-in-line successor, Emperor Taizong, was able to complete his term and successfully pass the throne.

Which of Hu Hai, Yang Er, Li Er, and Zhao Er didn't usurp the throne? Only Emperor Hui of Han, Liu Ying, successfully ascended to the throne, but he only lasted his generation. When he wanted to pass the throne to his son, Liu Ying's entire lineage was wiped out by Zhou Bo, and Liu Heng was replaced.

Of course, this issue had already been noticed by others, so Zhao Bocong's confidants comforted him: "You can't make that comparison, because His Majesty is a restorer of the dynasty, not a founder who starts from scratch."

But Zhao Bocong also understood that even if someone was a restorer of the dynasty, so what? Did Emperor Guangwu's eldest son, the first crown prince, eventually become emperor? Emperor Ming of Han, Liu Zhuang, was Emperor Guangwu's fourth son, born to Yin Lihua. Emperor Guangwu's first crown prince, born to Empress Guo, did not inherit the throne.

His father's willingness to let him oversee the country ahead of schedule put him at ease, and he understood his father's good intentions. Therefore, he planned to establish some martial arts skills after taking over the country, so as to ensure the stability of this lineage.

Moreover, he deeply believed in the system of doctrines established by his father. The Crown Prince himself was the one in the entire Song Dynasty who believed most in the imperial edict that "every man has a responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation." He also felt that he should contribute to his nation and civilization in order to be virtuous and respected by the world.

In the thirty-fifth year of the Jianyan era, when Zhao Zicheng officially turned sixty, in order not to put pressure on his son, and because he himself had no ambitions, Zhao Zicheng officially announced his abdication and became the Retired Emperor.

By this time, the crown prince had been regent for ten years and finally officially ascended the throne.

In this way, the curse that prevented emperors of previous dynasties from ascending the throne smoothly can be considered broken.
It also prevented future emperors from suffering significant losses to the country if they developed dementia in old age, thus lest they ruin their reputation in their later years.

If even a powerful and pioneering ruler like Zhao Zicheng has retired, what reason do later emperors have not to retire when they reach a certain age?

The Crown Prince officially ascended the throne at the age of thirty-seven, and was naturally overwhelmed with gratitude and filial piety towards his father.

He then followed in his father's footsteps, expanding into new territories and securing key trade points and ports globally. In the north, he further developed Xianbei-Lisu, extending all the way to the edge of the Northern Ocean. Although the northernmost reaches were too cold to inhabit, at least geographical and mineral surveys were conducted.

Continuing global operations inevitably led to the gradual spread of flintlock muskets and cannons. Some of the released populations, far from the reach of central authority, also became independent; these things could not be completely avoided.

However, since it was the Chinese who first discovered the Western Continent (which can no longer be called America) in this era, although the Chinese also occupied and settled in a large number of uninhabited areas outside the Americas, the Chinese were ultimately much more peaceful than the Europeans.

Therefore, the indigenous people of Western Continent were not systematically purged. In the eyes of the Chinese, although the indigenous people of Western Continent were backward, they were at most similar to Indians, and there was no need to massacre them.

The spread of the plague was inevitable, but no one was deliberately causing trouble. It all happened naturally during trade exchanges. The local people had no concept of hygiene and did not know to wash their hands frequently or drink hot water, so there was nothing they could do.

However, regardless of the circumstances, the rate of decline of the native inhabitants of the western continent in this world was much slower than in the original historical period. Later, the countries of Europe and the western continent also acquired firearms and cannons. Without the gap in civilization, Europeans could not colonize the northwestern continent, and of course, the United States and Canada no longer existed in this world.

When the British arrived in the Northwest, they discovered that not only were many key and prosperous coastal ports occupied by the Chinese, but the local natives also possessed firearms.

Since the natives also had firearms, how could the British and Spanish possibly overpower a hundred times their number of natives?

The world thus went off track and grew wildly, but without the wave of European colonization, each race relied on its own abilities, surging forward, and even Zhao Zicheng could not see the road ahead.

It was inevitable that many Song citizens who went to distant lands would establish their own states. Zhao Zicheng exercised restraint and did not waste resources on a long expedition to suppress the "rebels."

His son, Zhao Bozong, was unwilling to swallow this insult, but in the end, under the earnest persuasion of his retired father, Zhao Bozong also chose to back down.
“Those who establish states overseas, if they do not respect the legitimate calendar of the Great Song Dynasty and the orthodoxy of China, will surely be killed even if they are thousands of miles away. But if they respect the orthodoxy and pay tribute to the emperor every year, they can be spared from conquest.”

In other words, it is required that someone thousands of miles away can effectively be a king, but absolutely no one can use the title of emperor.

Only one person on Earth can be called Emperor, and that is the Emperor of the Great Song Dynasty. People from other parts of China, thousands of miles away, can at most be called Kings, and they must acknowledge the Emperor's reign. That way, they can govern their own territories, and that's acceptable.

This opening was unavoidable, because the Song Dynasty simply couldn't directly rule over so many territories around the world.

Other countries not composed of Han Chinese naturally followed the same precedent. Even during the Zhou Dynasty, barbarian tribes that were too remote and beyond the "wilderness" were not required to pay tribute or recognize the emperor's calendar; they were left to fend for themselves.

How this world will ultimately develop is up to the wisdom of future generations.

-

(The book is complete; the new book has been approved.)

(End of this chapter)