Rice & Ink: Family Chronicle

China, 1500, the Ming dynasty. Your family lives outside Suzhou on the lower Yangtze, near today's Shanghai: canals, rice paddies, silk, the richest region in China at the time. The family has an estate, land and an ancestral hall. The game runs to 1850, through the Manchu conquest and the Opium War. You can also start later: the world lives through the years before your start without you.
The family
The head of the family and his wife, sons and daughters-in-law, servants, stewards, retainers. People age and die, and the heir becomes the head. Thousands of households live across the county around you: they grow rice, sit the exams, go bankrupt and go to court — sometimes against you.
Rice
Ploughing, transplanting, watering with a treadle pump, reaping, threshing — month by month. Harvests fail. Grain spoils in the granary. Taxes are paid in grain and silver, and the county office counts the surcharge its own way.
The exams
A son is prepared for the exams for years. In the exam hall itself, you answer the questions: interpreting the theme, the policy essay, the eight-legged essay, the poem, the fair copy. A degree brings the family respect and a path to office. Office means evaluations, lawsuits, disasters and letters from the county office.
Money
Shops, mills, weaving workshops, brokers. Stewards skim the takings. Clerks and officials at the county office take bribes, and you will have to pay them.
The lineage
An ancestral hall, a lineage fund, children betrothed young, funerals by Zhu Xi's Family Rituals. Servants are bought. A feud with the neighbouring lineage can end in a brawl at the graves, and a captive will stand in your courtyard until he is ransomed.
History at the gate
In 1601, weavers march to wreck the customs post of the tax eunuch Sun Long and call on you to join them. In 1626, townspeople run to the county office to free the arrested Zhou Shunchang from Wei Zhongxian's men. In 1645, the new Manchu rulers order every man to shave his forehead and wear the queue. You can submit. Or you can refuse and stay loyal to the Ming: then your sons will neither sit the exams nor take office until 1660. In 1768, a mob drags a beggar monk past your gate, shouting that he cut a boy's queue and stole his soul. The head of the family decides what to do, and the county office remembers who stood where. By the 1830s, opium is smoked in the county office, in the barracks and perhaps on your own estate.
Roads and combat
Cross the county on foot, by sedan chair or by boat along the canals. Bandits work the roads. Combat is real-time: your retinue and servants with staves, spears, sabres and bows.
Sources
Dress, hats, laws, sentences and exam quotas change with the edicts of their year. Estates are built after studies of local houses, festivals follow Gu Lu's calendar of Suzhou customs, work in the fields and at home follows Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and the Tiangong Kaiwu, and the streets follow the scroll Prosperous Suzhou.

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