Inside the Ganlu Hall of Chang'an and the Guangzheng Hall of Bianliang, silence fell just the same.
By now, the ruler and ministers of the Zhenguan era all understood the crime of the Wa invasion, and had witnessed the vision of the Heavenly Palace of Earth.
So what filled their minds instead were sighs. They wondered what such a thing must cost to build, and what wars between nations must look like in that later age.
Qin Qiong and Yuchi Jingde even exchanged glances and lamented:
"If battles in later generations are fought like this… what use would warriors like us even be?"
The people of the Zhao Song court, after their moment of astonishment, were quickly steered by Zhao Pu toward a different line of thought: maritime trade.
"The descendants speak of this object with such gravity. It must not be an ordinary thing even in their age. Most likely it was forged from materials beyond the heavens, gathered by many nations working together over a long time before they could produce this 'Little Boy.'"
"Rather than standing by the abyss and envying the fish, better to step back and weave our nets."
"When the Mongol Yuan entered China, the essence of our Song scholarship was probably damaged again and again. Neo-Confucianism, mathematics…"
In the end, Zhao Kuangyin sighed and forced himself to look away from the giant mushroom cloud, turning his thoughts instead toward a more practical question:
Before unifying the Central Plains, how could Song first ensure that the sea routes obeyed its command?
After all, whether one looked at Han Shizhong's naval victory at Huangtiandang, or at how later generations always emphasized the maritime development of the Two Song, or even at the Ming dynasty's regretted sea bans, it was obvious that the ocean lying right before China's gates had always been an important yet neglected frontier.
If Song was to inherit the flourishing legacy of the Great Tang, then filling in this weakness was its duty.
---
[Lightscreen]
[The explosions of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" directly destroyed the divine-nation myth of Wa.
But the militarism that had taken root in that ideology did not disappear with its collapse.
The blood of forty million victims still flows beneath the earth. The shrines in Wa that enshrine war criminals remain brightly lit to this day.
Even now, the scars Wa left upon China have not healed.
Wa itself is already eager to push aside the past and pretend the invasion never happened.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Wa provoked the First Sino-Japanese Naval War without cause and ultimately seized Yizhou Island.
Among the common people of Wa, everyone celebrated, hearts filled with joy.
From that point on, Yizhou Island remained under Wa colonial rule for fifty years.]
---
Even Zhu Yuanzhang could vaguely sense that the young narrator's voice in the light screen had grown distant for a moment, heavy with meanings difficult to put into words.
But even so, the number alone froze his breath.
Forty million.
He did not need the earlier calculations about gold and silver to confirm it.
Because he remembered another matter clearly.
In the third year of Hongwu, he had issued an edict ordering officials to verify population numbers and register households across the realm, issuing household certificates to each.
Ten years of investigation had not yet fully concluded, but the Ministry of Revenue already had a rough estimate:
The Great Ming now had roughly ten million households and more than sixty million people.
And this Wa country had killed more than forty million Chinese subjects?
Almost the same scale as the entire population of Ming at this moment?
His first reaction was disbelief. But when he thought of the earlier scene of foreign warships firing a hundred cannons in unison, and the calm yet crushing weight in the later generations' words, it did not feel fabricated, nor did it need to be.
And the culprits behind such monstrous calamity were still worshipped and offered sacrifices in Wa?
"Good. Good. Good…"
"This Wa country… I will remember it."
"My descendants must never forget either."
"Even if it takes three generations of effort, we will surely—"
Before he could finish, the furious Ming emperor suddenly saw the images on the screen change again.
The black-and-white footage and text faded into darkness. Then the screen brightened slowly, and a voice speaking in question and answer reached his ears.
---
[Voiceover: So what Chinese history have you studied so far?]
The voice asking the question sounded warm and steady.
As the image fully lit up, a smiling young girl appeared, still shy in her expression.
Even though her clothing and makeup were utterly different from anything in Ming times, Zhu Yuanzhang recognized her instantly.
"This girl… she's most likely one of our Huai-Western Chinese descendants!"
He had wandered the Huai region for years and knew the southern Han appearance well.
His curiosity immediately rose.
"Chinese history… how do later generations praise me in their history books?"
Behind him, Empress Ma turned her head away, unwilling to watch. With her perceptive heart, she already had a vague guess.
Zhu Yuanzhang waited expectantly.
What he got was silence.
His brows furrowed again.
"Hm… looks like this thousand years of history isn't easy to study…"
---
[The Girl: I study Japanese history.]
The Ming emperor nearly stumbled.
Still, he steadied himself.
"Maybe the reason, To know the enemy and know yourself is—"
But the scene crushed that thought immediately. The frame zoomed out slightly, and an older woman's voice joined in.
[Teacher: Her history is a bit weak because she currently likes things from Japan
Oh…
Voiceover: So if you don't want to study Chinese history, you can choose Japanese history instead?]
The girl blinked, thinking seriously, and answered:
[The Girl: If your credits are enough.]
The answer spoke for itself.
Zhu Yuanzhang exploded.
With one kick he sent the nearby vase crashing over.
"You speak the Han tongue yet despise the history of China. How can this be allowed?!"
"How dare you?!"
"You do not know your ancestors, yet study the invading Wa pirates instead. Can such words be called those of a Han child?!"
"These Wa bandits harbor wolfish ambition. Do they truly dare replace China with Wa?!"
For the Ming emperor, the pride he had felt earlier when later generations respectfully called him the Hongwu Emperor, founder who drove out the invaders and restored China, shattered once more from this simple scene.
By rights, he should have been used to such things already.
Since raising his army, how many had he seen bowing to the Mongol Yuan? Countless.
But this was only a child of later generations. She should have grown up reading of how the Hongwu Emperor expelled the Hu and Mongols. She should have remembered the forty million blood debt the narrator spoke of.
But…
The screen went dark again.
---
[Lightscreen]
[The issue of Yizhou is complicated. It does not involve only Wa. When we later reach Zheng Chenggong, we can probably review it in detail.
But returning to Wa itself, if we trace backward from the First Sino-Japanese War, we find that the arrival of Little Boy and Fat Man was the result of choices Wa made on its own over several centuries.
Forty years before that war, the Wa scholar Sato Nobuhiro wrote Secret Strategy for Unifying the World. He explicitly proposed that Wa was "the first nation formed upon the earth, the root of all nations," and believed that "the world should become counties and commanderies, with all rulers serving as subjects." He also laid out a strategy: "Occupy Liaodong, then descend on Jiangnan, and only then can China be destroyed."
A hundred years further back, during the Tokugawa shogunate, the stage play The Battles of Coxinga swept across Wa. It depicted Wa warriors rampaging across China and marching into the Ming capital to establish a Wa state there.
Another hundred years earlier, Toyotomi Hideyoshi shouted the slogan of conquering the four hundred provinces of Ming, moving the capital to Beiping, and swallowing India.
Another hundred years before that, Wa committed massacres numbering in the hundreds of thousands in Fujian alone. When Xinghua Prefecture fell, seventeen jinshi, fifty-three juren, three hundred fifty-six xiucai, and more than twenty thousand civilians died.
One wonders whether Old Zhu, down in the underworld, would regret declaring Wa a nation not to be invaded.
Though he probably would not care much. From the third to the fourteenth year of Hongwu, Ming envoys sent to Wa were killed more than once or twice.
Old Zhu shouted grand slogans, but in the end no imperial wrath ever arrived. No wonder those little devils' ambitions kept swelling beyond restraint.]
---
As the young narrator listed each point, the Ming emperor's anger visibly rose step by step.
But when the final sentence landed, that anger suddenly had nowhere to go.
His face flushed red, yet his imposing aura weakened noticeably. He stamped his foot and protested:
"That was because the remnant Yuan had not yet been wiped out!"
"And we still had to guard against the danger of Yuan forces regrouping!"