In 1610, on the 24th day of the 12th month of the 38th year of the Wanli reign, a baby’s cry was heard from the East Palace of the Forbidden City. Zhu Youjian, the fifth son of Crown Prince Zhu Changluo, was born in the gloomy morning with thunder and lightning. For the father and son, this series of rare thunder explosions in winter was more like a warning to their dangerous situation in the Forbidden City. In their future lives, all kinds of sudden and strange bad weather in life had just begun.

Since the outbreak of the Japanese invasion during the Jiajing reign, officials such as Tan Lun wrote to the court, suggesting that private overseas trade could be appropriately liberalized. As soon as Emperor Longqing ascended the throne, he ordered the lifting of the maritime ban and established Yuegang in Zhangzhou Prefecture, Fujian as a port for private overseas trade. He also set up a supervisory office to manage and tax private overseas trade, which was known as the "Longqing Opening".

The "Longqing Opening" gave the Ming Dynasty, which was already on a downward trajectory, an immediate "shot in the arm" and laid the economic foundation for the subsequent comprehensive reforms of Zhang Juzheng, the "savior prime minister" of the Ming Dynasty. The Longqing Emperor was in power for only six years, but he left his son, the Wanli Emperor, a strong cabinet team - Gao Gong, Gao Yi, Zhang Juzheng, and a rich political and economic legacy. The Wanli Emperor Zhu Yijun, who originally held a good hand, was the longest-reigning Wanli Emperor in the history of the Ming Dynasty, but he missed the opportunity for China to keep up with the new trend of world development and usher in the dawn of a new era in his passive confrontation with the civil service group and lazy governance. The Ming Dynasty was accelerated in his hands and pushed to the desperate situation of destruction.

The brief prosperity of the Longqing New Deal and the Wanli Restoration and the short-lived reform of Zhang Juzheng extended the life of the Ming Dynasty for nearly half a century. However, no matter what, they were only the last brilliant light of the Ming Dynasty. The seventeen-year-old young emperor Zhu Youjian was full of vigor and vitality and worked hard to govern the country, but ultimately he could not save the crumbling Ming Dynasty.

The struggle for the foundation of the country, the factions fighting against the dissidents, the heavy taxes, the refugees, the strange weather, when the world had entered an era of ocean expansion and bloody capital plunder, the Ming Empire was like a sailing ship with a broken mast, missing the last chance to turn around, and sliding step by step into the abyss of collapse in the storm. The fate of the stagnant and introspective Ming Empire was doomed to fail, which was the inevitable result of history.