Chongzhen revived the Ming Dynasty

After the meeting, the ministers felt happy but also uncomfortable as they received the wallets and coats bestowed by the emperor.

Happily, the emperor respected the bills passed by Congress and they were rewarded.

The discomfort was naturally that he still had to work at the end of the year, and the emperor did not have a holiday like he had in the previous two years.

After the emperor ascended the throne the year before last, he gave the entire court a holiday after the Emperor's birthday on December 24, leaving only the officials on duty.

The same thing happened last year, and a banquet was even held on New Year's Eve.

This year there is nothing, they still have to deal with affairs on New Year's Eve.

This made the ministers, who thought that the holidays in the previous two years would become a routine, feel very uncomfortable.

On the contrary, students and teachers in the capital had already started their holidays. Even the craftsmen and service personnel in the inner court had made holiday arrangements. All those who were on duty during holidays would be paid separately.

This made the ministers complain a lot, and they felt that they were not even as good as the craftsmen in the inner court. The emperor treated these foreign ministers very harshly.

Yuan Keli was speechless as he listened to their complaints.

These officials had been accustomed to taking holidays in the past two years, but they did not know that the five-day holiday after the New Year was a system established by Emperor Taizu.

It is now customary for the emperor not to give officials holidays.

Knowing some of the reasons, he walked over to Xu Guangqi and asked:

"How is the progress of the calendar revision?"

“When will the new calendar be adopted?”

Xu Guangqi was summoned to the capital by the emperor in the name of revising the calendar, and he certainly attached great importance to this matter.

In particular, the calendar concerns the orthodoxy of heaven and earth, and if it is done well, it will be an achievement that will go down in history.

So after he was appointed, he established the Calendar Bureau together with the Imperial Astronomical Observatory and presided over the revision of the calendar. He planned to use the Western method taught by Matteo Ricci to formulate a new calendar.

But to his surprise, the emperor had already formulated a new solar calendar and asked the Imperial Astronomical Observatory to verify and try out this calendar.

When he explained to the emperor the Western astronomical system taught by Matteo Ricci, the emperor was not interested in his Tycho astronomy theory. Instead, he asked him to ask missionaries about the astronomical theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others.

He further proposed that both the geocentric theory and the heliocentric theory were incorrect, and that he and others were living in a starry universe.

The celestial bodies in the starry universe rotate and revolve under the influence of the original power and gravitational field, and the smaller mass moves around the larger mass.

The mass of the Earth is greater than that of the Moon, so the Moon revolves around the Earth. If the Earth is called a planet, the Moon is a satellite.

As a star, the mass of the sun is much greater than that of the earth, so the earth revolves around the sun. Together with Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and other planets, they revolve around the sun to form the solar system.

The solar system and other star systems belong to the Milky Way and revolve around the center of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way then forms galaxy groups and galaxy clusters with other galaxies... and eventually moves around the center of the universe.

This completely overturned Xu Guangqi's understanding and made him unable to understand.

However, when he asked the emperor how to prove this, the emperor could not answer. He just said that Taizu and Chengzu came to him in their dreams and told him what he saw in heaven.

It was as if he had been in the sky, seeing the land and oceans on Earth and drawing a map of them.

Xu Guangqi was speechless to this explanation, because the map drawn by the emperor was indeed more detailed than theirs, and even included many unexplored areas.

In addition, the emperor's predictions about drought and other things have been proven to be true in the past two years.

This forced him to accept the emperor's explanation, unless he could find a way to prove that the emperor was not possessed by Taizu and Chengzu in a dream, and was not appointed by heaven.

No one in the Ming Dynasty dared to do this. Not to mention that the current emperor's prophecy had already come true, even if there was a mistake, they had to find a way to make up for it.

Xu Guangqi had no choice but to accept the emperor's view of the starry universe and put aside the geocentric theory he had learned from Matteo Ricci.

Because according to the emperor, although the heliocentric theory was not completely correct, it was more correct than the geocentric theory.

To use Western methods to revise the calendar, we must use the theories of Copernicus and others, rather than the Tycho system.

However, the theories of Copernicus and others are not perfect now, and the West does not use them to revise the calendar.

In addition, due to the Vatican's rejection and the missionaries' relatively little understanding of heliocentrism, it became impractical to use Western methods entirely.

Fortunately, the emperor did not completely abandon Western methods. Instead, he followed the example of the Imperial Astronomical Observatory in establishing the Huihui calendar and set up a Western calendar specifically responsible for the Western calendar.

Li Zhizao, Shaoqing of Shaofu Temple, Johann Adam Schall von Bell, Chief Archbishop of the Nestorian Church, Cardinal Deng Yuhan and others were responsible for the Western calendar.

Deng Yuhan and Galileo were good friends. When Sun Yuanhua's delegation was on a mission, he wrote a letter on behalf of the Ming Emperor, inviting Galileo to come to the Ming Dynasty.

Before this, he had a premonition that the Ming Dynasty would revise its calendar, and asked Galileo and others for advice on how to accurately measure solar and lunar eclipses. A letter was passed to Kepler, who answered his question, but because the distance between the West and the Ming Dynasty was too far, the reply had not yet been sent back.

However, this had little impact on the Western calendar established by the Imperial Astronomical Observatory, because the main purpose of establishing the Western calendar was to correspond the Christian era used in the West with the Yellow Emperor era currently used by the Ming Dynasty, so as to compile the European volume of the "Brief History of World Chronicles" in the future.

Deng Yuhan and others were naturally unwilling to accept this positioning. On the one hand, they continued to contact Galileo and others and formulated a calendar based on the heliocentric theory recognized by the Ming Emperor.

On the other hand, he passed on astronomical instruments used in the West in the hope of gaining greater control over the calendar bureau in formulating a new calendar.

In this regard, the officials of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau who studied the traditional calendar were also unwilling to be outdone. They originally formulated the solar calendar according to the emperor's requirements, so they were naturally not afraid of a bunch of Westerners.

In particular, they dug out the "Saint's Longevity Calendar" by Zhu Zaiyu, the prince of Duanqing, and drew on the helpful parts in it. They used the candidates for the Purple Pavilion meritorious officials recommended by the emperor to enhance their persuasiveness.

At present, the two factions are fighting extremely fiercely, and Xu Guangqi is also very troubled by this.

Although he was more inclined towards the Western Method, the emperor did not agree with the Tycho system he used.

But the starry universe system proposed by the emperor was even more imperfect, just like the emperor gave the data of the sidereal year and the tropical year, but did not explain how to calculate them.

This meant that although he and the people in the Calendar Bureau tried hard to perfect the solar calendar, they were unable to achieve perfection at the moment. Until now, they still dare not fully adopt the new calendar and can only use it together with the traditional calendar.

Facing Yuan Keli's question, Xu Guangqi could only say:

"The new calendar is still being revised and is only being tested now."

"We will only use the new calendar once it is fully developed in the future."

Yuan Keli urged him:
"We still have to decide as soon as possible, otherwise the time of the holiday will be uncertain."

"Especially after the change to monthly salary, it is difficult to pay salaries in leap months using the traditional calendar." (End of this chapter)