"Happiness is the Absence of the Striving for Happiness"
At the time of the Famine of the 1690s, the Great Wu regime was still in the process of consolidating its conquests. Even after the victory of Wuchang and the occupation of Fujian and the city of Nanjing, resistance against the nationalist, Ming-revivalist Wu was powerful among the minority groups of the south.
Unrest began to coalesce around a popular revolt in southern Fujian 福建. A person named Ba Gongpu 巴共濮, who was born in Yunnan to parents of the Blang 布朗 people, was orphaned young and took monastic vows before migrating to Fujian during the Tibetan invasion to find work and food, marrying into a Hakka family and taking up salt mining. There he would participate in numerous revolutionary circles spreading his idea that the minority peoples should unite and form a regime which accords them equal status and unseats the domination of the Han. He believed that the Great Shun had begun on a road to good, but had not gone far enough to eliminate ethnic discrimination.
With the support of the House of Mạc, Shun tributaries ruling the state of Đại Việt, he led a successful insurrection which unseated Zheng Chenggong's deputy controlling Fujian, founding there a regime which was called the Great Hong 大宏. Great Hong responded to revolts in Guangdong with a successful invasion in 1692, which coinciding with the death of Zuo, now the Kudao Emperor 嚳道 of Wu, that same year severely destabilized the new state even as a massive wave of refugees from the north descended upon the south. Zuo's two year old heir was deposed with the approval of the aging regent Zheng after six months, replaced by a descendant of the Zhu whose Later Ming regime would collapse in 1694, squeezed between the Hong and the rebels of Anqing, who led by the White Dragon Society occupied large areas of south-central China.
Niang's radical land reform was popular with the peasantry and city dwellers alike, and aimed to prevent massive Malthusian disasters from occurring in China by ordering land ownership and use such that as many as possible could benefit from one another's labor, implementing as well a system of public transportation by which urban workers and farmers could more easily move between the city and countryside to find work. Accompanying these reforms was a radical re-implementation of the Shun university system, emphasizing and institutionalizing the organizations' role as distribution and service centers and encouraging a wave of Buddhists eager to help others to do so through them.
One of the most notable of Niang's changes was the abolition of the nobility, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed. All people who declared allegiance to the new state were given the official title of Peng 朋, or "Companion" and all types of work were removed of official censure. Under the influence of Bu Gongpu's revolution, whom he regarded as a great force of change and hope, Niang declared that all ethnic cultural practices would be considered to be of equal validity.
Niang's revolution was one which emphasized the mixture of old and new ideas, applying concepts of Wang Mang, Confucius, the Buddha and the revived philosophy of Mozi to the creation of an envisioned new society. He created himself as the Emperor of E 鄂皇帝, dropping the customary "Great" from the title of the state, which was named after the ancient State of E, founded during the Shang period by descendants of the Yellow Emperor on the banks of the Chang Jiang, and which maintained its independence for centuries against Zhou and Chu alike; a survival of the ancient culture of Shang. Niang saw in the people of E a great symbolism for his new order, in the image of a fiercely independent free people formed from the will of the primordial culture, who resisted the Kings of Zhou for generations after the Zhou Empire was established, but which was eventually beaten into submission and its legacy reduced to a footnote by its conquerors. Niang saw in his empire an epitaph for these forgotten people, whose memory would be a rallying cry for a new future and a fresh beginning.
Expanding from its base at Anqing, E came to rule much of the lower Chang Jiang after defeating the Later Ming and invading Lu's armies at the Battle of Nanjing. Niang elected not to remove to the newly conquered city, choosing to stay in his home of Anqing among his followers, calling the city Xinjidu 新紀都, the Capital of the New Order. At this time, he adopted the era of Tianjian 天鑑, or heavenly mirror, referring to his aim to establish a perpetual empire formed from the will of the learned to reflect on the earth the perfection and order of the heavenly palaces; to purge oppression and create order through rebellion and reconfiguration. His words, symbols, deeds and ideals resonated powerfully among many of the people of China. The character E itself 鄂 took on a lofty meaning in those generations as a symbol of liberation, and the complexity of the meanings it would come to signify speaks to the divisiveness of the regime.
Defeating the Later Ming and absorbing the warlords which had served the Great Hong after the death of Bu Gongpu and a subsequent civil conflict, and at the head of an ever-growing army, Niang became the hegemon of southern China by 1694, while in the north the third emperor of Lu, an experienced general, who had come under the influence of the family of Confucius in Qufu 曲阜, fought against conquest at the hands of Later Sui. The Dragon of the West was seemingly poised to strike a final decisive blow unto the Lu to become the hegemon of Northern China at last. The Xilong 西龍 Emperor of Sui had not, however, taken the E into account, believing that the E would likely bide their time in the south waiting to defend against an attack, as most southern dynasties had done historically; that the E would not intervene on behalf of the Lu.
The Tianjian Emperor judged his rival's seeming assumption as ironically correct, as the emperor had no intentions of aiding Lu and indeed welcomed that the Sui would destroy Lu for him and leave themselves vulnerable. The Tianjian Emperor rode northwards at the head of an army of half a million people with artillery support, making winter camp at the town of Yutai 鱼台, south of Nanyang Lake 南陽湖, on whose northern shores lay the city of Qufu.
The Sui forces, recovering from their blood loss on the Lu rearguard outside Kaifeng in 1692, triumphed over the Martial Lord of Lu at the Battle on the Zhushui River after the Lu's famous corps of Mongol cavalry was lost due to an unordered attack on artillery in a skirmish at the town of Dingtao. Retreating in disgrace, Emperor Wu of Lu died of pneumonia before he could make it to his home at the Nanyang Lake Palace in Qufu. The Lu Empire came under the rule of Emperor Wu's 9 year old son, the Xiangxiao Emperor 祥霄 and a council of wealthy eunuchs and Mao princes of the Lu court.
The Lu dynasty was spared for the moment, however, as the ambitious intention of the Tianjian Emperor of E had been laid bare to the lord of Sui by the E's northward march. With high spirits brought about by his recent victory, he decided to wait to march on Qufu until he could face the E army before the onset of winter, as the E stood a chance of attacking the Sui rear if ignored. Stretching his supply lines to the limit, he left the safety of his position at Heze 菏泽 and raced his forces southwards as winter fast approached, a more intense cold than usual. The Sui army, having lost many people to disease and cold on the march and at the end of their supplies, finally met the encamped E, who made a short march out from Yutai to meet them at the ford over the Huihe River, making fires, singing songs and joyously drinking wine on the south bank while the Sui shivered on the north.
The Battle of the Huihe resulted in E destroying Sha's army in totality after a whole flank was drowned in the frozen river during the army's attempt at crossing. The Dragon of the West was killed commanding his much reduced army that managed to cross to the south bank, dying by the hand of the Emperor of E himself who dismounted and led his infantry from the front. With Sui effectively vanquished as a threat to northern China, the lords of Lu at first rejoiced that they might regain their power. This was a mistaken idea, as the army of E was joined by revolutionaries within the Lu Empire's structure and populace, and the remaining Lu forces that the central government could recall in time for the desperate battle barely equaled half the people at the Tianjian Emperor's command. Put under the command of a tragically under-promoted general at the last moment, the army fought desperately outside Qufu attempting to break through the E siege, but was destroyed there, paving the way for the annexation of Lu with the capitulation and submission of its young fourth emperor and his court in fear of death. All of them were stripped of ranks and positions and assigned to agricultural work in Shandong, save the Mao clan of the royal line who were massacred. Magistrates of Lu who submitted were made full Friends and placed into the new bureaucracy.
The deaths of both the Dragon of the West and the Martial Lord of Lu resulted in the end of both of their states; the successor of the Xilong Emperor being finally defeated by E in 1697. By 1700, the E Empire ruled all of China from the Hexi to the border of Dai Viet. Only Yunnan remained independent under the rule of a Tibetan Dzungar king.
The E dynasty wrought extensive and consequential changes during its rule. Land reform was immensely successful in ending hunger and satisfying the peasantry, while state-subsidized commerce brought in money that was used to build infrastructure. With extensive famine-protection systems in place, vast armies of labor were freed up for engineering projects and the cultivation of new lands was placed under high priority. Planned population transfers took place to maximize productivity and the new emperor shocked the whole Chinese establishment by arming and paying the peasantry as a professional popular army to crush rebellion and defend the nation from invaders.
The E was rather xenophobic in its own way, and similarly to its predecessors regarded all under heaven as the indissoluble realm of the final imperium which righted the reflection of heaven and earth. Influences seen as reflecting the corruption of late Ming were violently rejected, old temples burned, scholars killed, officials and emperors denounced; enemies seen without and within. Yet also the society of E resulted in the liberation of many formerly untouchable classes of Chinese society and resulted in an expansion of the notion of China to include all who venerated and served the emperor, regardless of ancestry and even nationality. E reflected its emperor's dream of a China returned to a centralist and more holistic past under the pre-feudal Shang and Xia dynasties, as well as the brief rule of the Qin empire. Yet it also reflected his split-minded urge towards a China willing itself into an uncertain future by rejecting the irrelevant detritus of the past.
Despite the bloodletting, E's economic successes were noted and appreciated, and a class of state-employed engineers and artisans formed rapidly in the major cities of South China permeated by the emperor's influence. Though the aggression of the E regime started numerous wars with its neighbors, the state was capable of raising a vast, well-paid professional army to fight them, while craftspeople and other workers and innovators produced numerous works to make the army more effective in the fields.
Under the Tianjian Emperor, E would manage to subdue the frontiers and expand control over the northern steppes, rooting out and destroying nomadic peoples using paid nomadic auxiliaries, settlement bureaus, military colonization posts, and trade vassals. Control by a Chinese empire would also be reestablished over the Tarim Basin after the submission of the ailing Yong state of the Dörbet Mongols, who aided the E in destroying the warlords which controlled the region.
The Great Dai would be the last to fall before the might of E, bravely resisting, but with few troops to levy from desperate farming communities and fewer allies. Only the Koreans offered help, occupying Liaodong and helping to arm Dai soldiers.
The Emperor also never forgot the Korean King Sunjong's refusal of his offer of territory if he were to recant his oath of allegiance to the Emperor of Shun in order to serve the E political order. The grandson of King Hongjo, Sunjong ruled a Korea that had enjoyed decades of good relations with Shun and had achieved a great deal of power and prestige thereby. The king was loath to swear loyalty to an unknown South Chinese rebel with a strange anti-traditionalist political platform just because he now ruled in both the north and south. As it happens, Sunjong was also found to be harboring the last remnant of the House of Li that managed to emigrate. A Li Tong, who assumed the era of Kaikang 開抗 as Emperor of Shun in exile and funded rebels hoping to restore the Shun.
This, of course, meant war.
The conflict was bloody and resistance was fierce and fanatical. Not a century after the Imjin War, the people of Korea would not give up their independence easily. Yet the E military machine was overwhelming, and by 1712 Korea had fallen completely. The Tianjian Emperor changed his own era to Guangdian 光巔, the "mountain peak of light", and ordered Korea absorbed into the administration of E and its people "enlightened" in the New Customs. The printing of Guzi's philosophical work the Book of Doubt 疑書 was accelerated and the work was made part of literacy programs to imbue its concepts into the newly literate.
Yet some things remained the same. Imperial ceremony was largely kept in place, redeveloped in imitation of more ancient customs, or streamlined to be more utilitarian and spartan. A new religion was created in the form of the Book of Heaven, which was an expression of the spiritual ideas of the intellectuals who followed E's rise to power and were disillusioned by religions or philosophies ungrounded in reality as Guzi and the Emperor perceived it. In the volumes of the Book of Heaven, detailed plans and methods for making the lives of individual people better and more comfortable were illustrated with an emphasis on the ways in which social structures and material conditions might be altered to better accommodate human lives and the philosophy of what it means to live a good life and to be happy meditated upon.
The Guangdian Emperor would begin yet a new era, Zhangda 暲大, or "sunrise of the great". His rule as he aged would gradually become more private and his political and philosophical ideas more obscure and esoteric. His preeminence in the imperial apparatus was largely seen in the form of his offspring and loyal general Qingli 情里, who made a name for themself as a political force through the use of ruthless imperial edicts allowing them to personally murder those deemed unfit for service by the emperor. In this, they became the most feared figure in the entire state. As a general, they were especially fond of sieges in which they would destroy entire cities by strategic fire and flood. They ordered the massacre and brutalization of populations according to the will of their master with power of the destruction of cities in their hands.
From this, E had become a formidable power in the world. The institutions that Emperor Tianzu 天祖 created, though met with great resistance, had persevered and proven themselves; the philosophy he espoused had those who listened and were changed by what they had heard. Aside from this, China had been traumatically depopulated by the events of the previous half century and the people were in little remaining mood to rebel against their lords. E was seen as providing order where there was none, and where all had broken down and what was good been forgotten. The Emperor was deified in death as "Tianzu", and his flawlessly molded heir Qingli succeeded him with a fire of hatred in their heart for the barbarians, rebels, bandits, and inept officials that had caused the calamities that had taken their youth from them and cast them into a hard and cruel life of soldiery from an early age. They would follow the fires of revolution with a structure of unbreakable iron, and free the people from the cold winter of their past.
Qingli, being known for social practices deemed strange by contemporary society, including identifying as neither male nor female and dressing in androgynous or gender-nonconforming clothing, was nonetheless enthroned with the final will of the emperor and by the personal power Qingli attracted to themself. Choosing the era name of "Chanhua" 欃花 or "Comet Flower", the new emperor's court attracted all manner of artists from across the country and its peoples creating works which defied all traditional conventions of style and appreciation. The emperor, ruthless and murderous in battle and in politics, was a patron of strange and novel aesthetics- as well as people.