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.…