Wen Desi's Ambition

Wen Desi then briefly told the other two of his first trip through the wormhole by himself.

The other end of the portal lay at the foot of a non-descript hill, right on by the banks of a river. Wen Desi judged from the development of the surrounding land that it appeared to be a rather prosperous agricultural region. The geography and vegetation placed him in the southern reaches of China. Just as he was contemplating whether or not he wanted to take a risk and venture further to try to scout out a village, something unexpected happened.

A group of soldiers in old-fashioned armour escorted a dozen or so villagers to the riverside, under the command of a mounted officer. Swiftly several heads went flying, and with a clatter, only a few broken weapons were left next to the corpses. The soldiers gathered around their officer and soon left.

Although Wen Desi had seen some fairly gory stuff online before, being a spectator in reality still brought an incomparable shock to him. The quick and sudden execution, leaving the bodies behind without even blinking an eye.

“...Luckily I was wearing camo, otherwise I’d have been done for.” Wen Desi said. He still felt a lingering fear. “The closest soldier was less than ten metres away.”

The first impressions that Wen Desi had of this new world was that one, the air was fresh, and two, that life there was bleak.

Wen Desi opened his notebook, and showed the others the pictures he’d taken of the scene. The headless, bloody corpses were captured in nauseating and gruesome detail with the resolution of a 9 megapixel camera.

“I also found some copper coins scattered nearby.” Wen Desi brought out a plastic bag. Inside were a dozen copper coins. “Several of them in fact. I asked someone to look into them, and the latest date from Tianqi’s reign.”

“It could also be Chongzhen.”

“Well, at least two years into Tianqi.” Xiao Zishan said confidently. “Taichang was only emperor for a few months before he passed, and so in the first year of Tianqi the coins minted were still those of Taichang, his father’s. Only from the second year onwards were the coins relabeled to those of Tianqi. If we take into account the time it would take to mint as well as circulate around, a good guess would probably put us sometime after the third year of Tianqi.”

“But the time frame is still pretty wide. The two brothers Tianqi and Chongzhen ruled for over twenty years combined.”

“I think it should be during Tianqi, or maybe around the start of Chongzhen. Chongzhen’s coin was minted in great quantities and circulated widely, it'd be impossible to find Tianqi’s money during his reign.”

“Well with the time period established, what are our actual plans?”

A wormhole into an alternate space-time would be a milestone for modern science. But the three people inside the toilet were not physicists, and would indubitably have no share of the Nobel prize. If they wanted to make it big in the news…Well, none of them were in the media circles either. They would only be relegated to the sidelines. Of course, as the discoverer, Desi would probably be mentioned a little.

Regardless, they all knew of the massive conspiracy that would inevitably cover up the existence of this wormhole, like the Americans and Area 51. If this were to occur then their future prospects didn’t look too good. At least, if Wen Desi wanted to win a physics prize or some such there was no way he would have made that bulletin post.

All three of them knew that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just how big? Just as Desi had said, large enough to contain a whole other world from the 17th century. Thinking of this, their breathing became excited.

After a brief discussion that echoed in the bathroom of Wen Desi’s home, the Executive Committee was formed. Soon followed the founding Document Number 1. In the histories of the new world, this meeting would be later known as the “Bathroom Conference.”

The resolution adopted by the conference? To build a new world!

But how would they go about this? The people of the 17th century were not NPCs. They would not lose to modern people on intelligence, courage or force of will. They even had a home-ground advantage. Although the three of them enjoyed reading time travel novels, doing it for real would be very different.

The only aspect that the time-travellers were superior in compared to the locals was the 300 years of civilisation and development between them.

“Scale and standardisation.” Wang Luobin said. “This will be our strategy for victory. An industrialised society will always defeat a non-industrial one.”

They would need to gather up a large group of people knowledgeable in modern-day science and management, as well as contemporary machinery and technology. By bringing all this across the wormhole, they could establish a rudimentary industrial base and from thence conquer the whole world.

A journey of a thousand steps always starts with the first. Regardless of how far-flung this goal seemed, they could only take it one step at a time. The three arrived at two short-term goals after a brief discussion: one, to gather a group of fellow time travellers, and two, to raise funds to buy supplies and equipment.

Wen Desi first decided to create a Skype group chat to use for communication. The original bulletin post had already become extremely popular, but there wasn’t much detail in the post itself. He now appended to the post a link to the Skype group and a spare email address for contact. Then he simply locked the post. All three of them agreed that starting from now it wouldn’t be a good idea to draw too much attention to themselves.

On the topic of money, although the three of them had some money, pooling everything together only got them to just shy of a million yuan. To rebuild an industrial society from scratch with just a million yuan would be way too sci-fi.

In theory, the people who joined later would also bring some funds in, but probably not enough to dramatically transform their financial situation. Perhaps the only realistic way of making money would be by trading goods through the wormhole, taking advantage of the price differential on the two sides.

Making huge profits using modern day goods in an ancient era must be the most tried and tested method in all time travel fiction. Everyone thought of the standard culprits: glass lenses, glass cups, matches, watches, and so on. Countless time travellers had used these methods to become rich. After making their first pot of gold they would then be able to embark for real on their path to the top.

Xiao Zishan decided to contribute the promotional goods accumulated from his company to the cause: the makeup boxers with an in-built mirror, the melamine bowls and cutlery, the little fruit knives, the synthetic kitchen aprons, the acrylic hats, gloves and scarves, the glass mugs, the plastic plates, towels…all in all, about 3 or 4 cardboard boxes filled with these assorted knick-knacks. These trinkets, made in Yiwu county, printed all over with ugly company branding, now appeared to be shining piles of gold money in the eyes of the three.

Although Venetian glass lenses were a luxury good in 17th century Europe, they didn’t even exist in Asia. From this they could build a monopoly in glass alone. This is not even to mention those unshatterable plastic plates and bowls, transparent lunch boxes, even the plastic water bottles that they had just emptied. Any of these things would be novel to that time period. Logically speaking, they could set the price to be anything they wanted: a hundred taels for a powder box, two thousand taels for a cup, a hundred taels for a bowl… How many time travellers had done the same thing?

The three of them all felt their blood pressure rise in anticipation of their golden-bright future. Wen Desi even started having some regrets. Perhaps keeping the wormhole to himself could still let him control all of the other world.

“But if we go over like this, we’d be arrested immediately at the city gates and sent to the sub-prefectural coast guard yamen.” Wang Luobin brought up a practical question.

“Is there such an office in Guangzhou?”

“Not sure, but there is a Maritime Customs there.”

“Good point though, we are wearing strange clothes and speak in a strange accent. Guangzhou is not a sparsely populated place, we’ll inevitably be seen. And we also don’t have maps of the local roads…”

“We wouldn’t end up deported to Liaodong right…”

“Probably not, but if we were to be brought to court because of our strange appearances, if we were not to be straight-up executed we would at least lose a layer of skin.” Xiao Zishan remembered the memoirs of several Portuguese travellers to Ming China. One of the Portuguese pirates recorded his entire experience after being taken as a prisoner of war. Although he expressed great admiration for the justice system of the Ming dynasty, praising its fairness, impartiality and openness, he also didn’t hesitate to describe the cruel punishment of the criminals.

Thinking of the cruel experiences seen by that Portuguese man, Xiao Zishan couldn’t help but shiver a little in fear.

“Why don’t we find some websites that sell hanfu? I've seen some that are very meticulous with their Ming-era clothing.”

“We can dress the way they look, but we can’t learn the way people speak and act.” Wang Luobin rebutted. “That'll draw much more attention.”

“Why don’t we pretend to be foreign merchants? From Borneo or something.” Wen Desi suggested. “Actually, couldn’t we pretend to be envoys from a foreign country? All the emperors love having foreigners present tributes.”

Xiao Zishan thought for a while. “But I remember that the Ming dynasty was very strict about people from overseas. All foreign merchants could only trade in Macau, apart from the Portuguese. Non-Portuguese ships were barred from even entering the mouth of the Pearl river.”

“Wait, but the Portuguese could enter Guangzhou proper?”

“Yeah, every year in Guangzhou city there would be a trade fair and merchants from all over China would head there to trade with the Portuguese.”

“I didn’t know the Guangzhou trade fair had such a long history!” Wang Desi exclaimed.

“Hmm, but there’s still a problem. None of us look Portugese. Back then, were there any overseas Chinese people?”

“Maybe? Who knows.”

“Damn this is giving me a headache. We need to do some research.”

Suddenly, Xiao Zishan slapped the table and smiled. “We’re so dumb! Why are we thinking of entering Guangzhou city when we’re currently in it already?”

Everyone brightened up. Indeed, since the two ends of the wormhole were in the same spot, as long as the other end were positioned inside the city walls of that era then wouldn’t they end up in the city directly? If anything got too dangerous then they could simply open the wormhole again and run away.

The final location they settled on was Haopan street, which was originally in the southern part of Guangzhou city along the Pearl river. The area had been a busy commercial district ever since the latter part of the Song dynasty, and had only become more prosperous in the Ming. In the years of Jiajing Guangzhou city was expanded to include this riverside commercial district. Since then, the south walls of the city had been standing on the banks of the Pearl.

Haopan street in the Ming dynasty was a residential area for merchants from other provinces, and was also a hotspot for smugglers. This group of people would collude with the fishermen of Youyuzhou near the mouth of the Pearl River, specialising in smuggling foreign, non-Portuguese goods. “Every time a sailship arrived, all the merchants of Haopan street would load up porcelain, silk, money, gunpowder onboard. The boats would always leave full and return full.” Xiao Zishan however was sceptical about these inter-provincial merchants. They must’ve had some backing in officialdom, otherwise how could the smuggling be so rampant? That could potentially risk an early exposure…

At least, as long as they were in the smuggling business, they would definitely not care about where these new strangers came from. Profit was the basic instinct of all merchants. From this point of view, the merchants of Haopan street were the most suitable for first contact.

[TN]

A term that pops up a lot is 佛郎机 (Falangji or Folangji), which, if taken at face value, would be rendered as Franks in English (referring to the German people), but this would be ignoring the historical context entirely. In Ming China this was a name for Portugal, but the Ming often referred to both Portugal and Spain interchangeably as Falangji. Later on it became more of an umbrella term for Western Europeans in general. This makes the translation in English a little difficult, as we don’t have such an equivalent historical term. I will be using Portugal/Portuguese, but keep in mind the original context is a bit more broad. For more historical details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang.