Minutes of the Aussong Senate General Assembly

The Senate of the Aussong in Exile, in the Year of Our Lord 1642, on the twenty-third day of the seventh month, convened its general assembly at the Longbai Hotel in Songjiang. Present: thirty-seven elders and delegates. The Presiding Elder opened proceedings at 13:00. By 13:05, three Songjiang district officers of the public security bureau had been informed by hotel staff of the assembly’s existence. No arrests were made.

This is a lightly fictionalized account of the Linggao Qiming (Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World — I’m joking; the real English subtitle is sometimes rendered as “1632 in China”) fan gathering I attended in Shanghai in late July. Linggao Qiming is a Chinese collaborative web novel, roughly two thousand chapters and still ongoing, in which a group of modern Chinese people time-travel to the late Ming Dynasty on Hainan Island and proceed to build an industrial-era state from scratch.

The gathering was at the Longbai Hotel in Songjiang. The hotel management, somewhat alarmed by a group of people arriving carrying banners with Ming-era heraldry and referring to each other by Senate titles, did apparently contact local authorities. Nothing came of it.

Linggao Qiming is often described as a time-travel encyclopedia: its authors are predominantly engineers, economists, and historians, and the novel reads less like fiction and more like a technical feasibility study occasionally interrupted by plot. Want to know how to smelt iron in 1630s Hainan with available local resources? The novel has a chapter. Want to know how early-modern trade finance worked? There’s a chapter for that too. The average reader doesn’t finish it; the average reader joins the wiki.

The guiding ideology, as one elder explained to the gathering, is “Industrial Party” thought: the belief that social problems are fundamentally engineering problems, that heavy industry is the foundation of all other progress, and that materialism—thorough, uncompromising materialism—is the correct framework for social construction. Chinese society roughly between 2002 and 2012 fit this model, which is part of why the novel’s fandom skews older than you might expect.

Ma Qianhu—whose real name is Ren Chonghao, known to the political commentary world as Ma Dugong—is among the novel’s most prolific contributors, and something of a legend in the community. The Senate elder who explained the guiding ideology was clearly a disciple of his approach.

The average age of the attendees was surprisingly young—late twenties and early thirties mostly, with a few teens. The stereotype of the Linggao fan as a grizzled veteran engineer is not entirely accurate. What they shared was not nostalgia but appetite: a desire for the kind of dense, consequential world-building that most fiction doesn’t attempt.