Sky Curtain: The opening scene explains the four major cases of the Ming Dynasty plus the early Ming

The incandescent lights from the studio ceiling cast straight beams of light. Zhu Dijun pressed the control panel, clearing all the previous whiteboard content. Only an ancient map of Songjiang Prefecture in Southern Zhili of the Ming Dynasty remained on the electronic screen. He turned and pulled out a marker, drawing two red circles on the map.

"Alright, family. Now that we've talked about Xu Jie, let's follow the trail of the Jiangnan financial magnates to uncover another, more deeply hidden and insidious melon. Here, we must mention a family power struggle story that can be described as a nested doll. There are two main characters: Xu Jie, and another person who was later elevated to a pedestal as the so-called 'first person to open his eyes to the world'—Xu Guangqi."

On the left and right sides of the large screen, portraits of the two men in their official robes appeared respectively. Zhu Dijun picked up a pointer and pointed it at the blank space between the two men.

"What is the relationship between these two? Official historical records define them as relatives of the same clan but from different branches, which means they are distant relatives. Both of them were from Songjiang Prefecture in Southern Zhili. Songjiang Prefecture is today's Shanghai area. Xu Jie was from Huating County in Songjiang, while Xu Guangqi was from Shanghai County in Songjiang. They were from adjacent areas and shared the same ancestry."

He changed the subject, his tone becoming somewhat sarcastic.

"If you turn to various miscellaneous historical notes from the late Ming Dynasty, you will find a very dramatic account. After Xu Guangqi rose to power, he ruthlessly wiped out Xu Jie's branch of the family, using official power to seize all of Xu Jie's family's fertile land and property in Songjiang Prefecture. Many historians call this an internal power struggle within the family, or a purge of the old aristocratic clans by the new elite."

Zhu Dijun drew a heavy cross on the screen.

"Clearance? Do you guys really believe this nonsense? When we do historical retrospective analysis, we have to look at where the assets ultimately went. Did Xu Jie's 240,000 mu of tax-exempt fertile land, once it came into Xu Guangqi's hands, ever pay a single penny of tax to the Ming Dynasty's treasury? No! The land rent was still collected, and the hidden land remained hidden. Is this what you call clearance? This is just the left hand transferring money to the right hand within the same interest group!"

He typed on the keyboard, bringing up a photocopy of a family genealogy in traditional Chinese characters, and pointed to several special annotations on it.

"To get to the bottom of things, look at the local chronicles of Songjiang and the historical materials on the introduction of Catholicism to China. You will find that Xu Guangqi carries several very strange labels. After baptism, he had another name. How did the historical records refer to him? Xu Baolu. In the Songjiang area, some people called him Paul Xu, some called him Pu Baolu, or even Pu-surname Xu."

There was a brief pause in the live stream chat. A few seconds later, a few characters with question marks floated by.

Zhu Dijun braced his hands on the edge of the podium, close to the camera. "Interestingly, the moment the character 'Pu' is mentioned, its meaning completely changes. It's a surname. The 'Pu' in Pu Shougeng! The 'Yang' in Yang Shiqi is also 'Pu'!"

This is like throwing a high explosive into a stagnant pond. The comment section of the live stream was flooded with messages at a visible speed.

"Holy crap? Pu Shougeng? The Pu family of Quanzhou who slaughtered the entire Song Dynasty imperial family at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty?"

"Xu Jie and Xu Guangqi were descendants of Pu Shougeng? What kind of hellish joke is this?!"

[“Jun-ge, your reasoning is too far off, isn’t it? Do you have any solid evidence?”]

"Don't rush to call it absurd."

Zhu Dijun straightened up and pulled up a nautical chart from the Quanzhou Maritime Trade Office of the Southern Song Dynasty.

"Let's go over the historical records. At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, Pu Shougeng, an Arab merchant from Quanzhou, was receiving a salary from the Song Dynasty and was in charge of the Maritime Trade Office. When the Mongol army attacked, what did this guy do? He turned against them! In order to curry favor with his new master, Pu Shougeng ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of Southern Song imperial family members, officials, and local Han Chinese who had fled to Quanzhou! He even dug up the Southern Song imperial tombs."

The pointer traced a blood-red line on the map, heading straight for Nanjing.

"When the Ming Dynasty was founded, what was the Zhu family's attitude towards these traitors who served two masters and slaughtered their own people?"

A parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty. Fengtian Hall.

Zhu Yuanzhang sat upright on the dragon throne, the veins on the back of his withered hands bulging. He stared coldly at the sky, his words chilling.

"Men will be slaves generation after generation, and women will be prostitutes for generations. They will be forbidden from studying, taking the imperial examinations, and never employed!"

Old Zhu's voice was chillingly ruthless and decisive: "These bastards, worse than beasts in human clothing, are only spared because Heaven has shown them mercy. They want to have a foothold in our Ming Dynasty court? Dream on!"

In the studio, Zhu Dijun corroborated Old Zhu's words. "During the Hongwu era, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an ironclad decree, and the Pu family was relegated to the lowest social class. Under normal circumstances, these people would never have a chance to rise above their circumstances. But where there's a will, there's a way. To clear their names and participate in the imperial examinations, the descendants of the Pu family began a long and clandestine plan of changing their identities. How? By changing their surname! By attaching themselves to a powerful family in Jiangnan!"

Zhu Dijun wrote the two characters "寄籍" on the whiteboard.

"The Xu and Yang families, through marriage alliances and financial transfers, disguised their clan members as natives of Jiangnan. Over generations, they forged family genealogies and reconstructed their ancestral origins. By the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty, these disguised members of the Pu family had transformed themselves into renowned Confucian scholars of Jiangnan!"

He tapped the table with the blackboard eraser at a very fast pace.

"Now, everyone, put this underlying logic into account. Do you understand why Xu Jie harbored such an almost perverse hatred for the Ming imperial family? Do you understand why they acted ruthlessly, readily murdering emperors, flooding Beijing, and coldly watching the life and death of the north? Because fundamentally, they were not Ming people at all! They were foreign compradors parasitizing the body of China!"

The live stream chat erupted in chaos. Amidst the heated discussion, some accounts with prestigious credentials jumped out to voice dissent.

"The anchor is indulging in historical nihilism again. Xu Guangqi introduced Western agricultural calendars and translated Euclid's Elements—these are real scientific contributions. Making baseless accusations about lineage is utterly despicable."

"Exactly, missionaries coming to China to exchange cultures, how can that be linked to conspiracy theories?"

Zhu Dijun looked at the inflammatory comments on the secondary screen without any anger. He then reached into a cardboard box under the control panel, pulled out two thick photocopies of foreign original works, and slammed them heavily onto the podium.

"Calling me despicable? Fine. Today I'll use what they themselves wrote to expose these undercover agents. I'll show you what a century-long intelligence-stealing and subversion plan is behind the so-called 'Western learning spreading eastward'."

The screen then switched to display the cover of a Latin book: *History of the Christian Expeditions to China*.

"How did Xu Guangqi pass the imperial examination? Official records state that he studied diligently in his hometown and finally achieved success. Let's look at the actual data. Xu Guangqi started taking the exam at the age of twenty and continued until he was thirty-five. For a full fifteen years, he couldn't even pass the provincial examination. How could an old scholar who had failed the exam for so many years suddenly turn from an ugly duckling into a swan in the twenty-fifth year of the Wanli reign, which was 1597?"

Zhu Dijun's finger slid across the pages of the book, stopping at a section of translated text.

"The answer is here. During the Wanli era, a large number of Jesuit missionaries flooded into the Ming Dynasty. These people were originally students at the Siyi Guan (Foreigners' Institute), but Zhu Yuanzhang was too lenient. He should have learned from Bai Qi, Huang Chao, and Ran Min, and ended up raising a tiger that would become a threat."

"After the Tumu Crisis led by Emperor Yingzong of Ming, the great war god Zhu Qizhen, the barbarians, having achieved victory, wanted to expand their influence in China. The biggest problem they faced was that they had no one to protect them. Or rather, the internal spies were not enough to meet their needs. They urgently needed to place their own agents within the Ming Dynasty's state apparatus to further destroy the Ming Dynasty and seize its technology."

Xu Guangqi, a man who had been exposed to the church since childhood, lacked a sense of national identity with the Ming Dynasty, and had comprador blood running through his veins, became the perfect candidate for puppet ruler. Furthermore, he was not Han Chinese to begin with.

He extracted the official historical records of Xu Guangqi passing the imperial examination and displayed them in a larger format.

"In the 1597 Nanjing provincial examination, Xu Guangqi failed again. His exam paper was thrown into the waste paper pile by the examiners. At this time, a miraculous operation occurred. Jiao Hong, the chief examiner that year, 'accidentally' found Xu Guangqi's paper among the mountain of failed candidates' discarded papers. After a casual glance, he was greatly impressed and immediately promoted him to the top scorer in the provincial examination!"

Zhu Dijun let out a chilling, penetrating laugh. "Picking out the top spot by sifting through discarded papers. The odds of winning the lottery with that kind of probability in the extremely rigorous imperial examination system of the Ming Dynasty? You're kidding me! What's this about Jiao Hong's 'unintentional' success? That was a targeted salvage operation after the Jesuits spent a fortune bribing the examiners!"

"This was the first deep collaboration between the civil service group and Western powers at the end of the Ming Dynasty. Capital operations and cheating in the imperial examinations forced an insider into the core of the Ming court. From then on, the Jesuits had a master key in the East."