The Ten-Thousand Year Mandate of the Jade Emperor

The Ten-Thousand Year Mandate of the Jade Emperor, or more commonly the Mandate, is a world power of sorts. The Mandate has the largest military of any nation as well as technology that surpass anything seen in the New World. Fortunately for everyone else, the Mandate is ruled according to the 2,803 principles of the Jade Compact, one of which unambiguously forbids the Mandate from expanding beyond its shores.

The Jade Compact
Legend has it that the Jade Compact was handed down to Zhou the Consoler by the Jade Emperor himself. The Compact is an incredibly long list of rules for proper governance. The rules detail everything from how a trial is to be conducted, to what forms of taxation are acceptable, to which meals are acceptable for a king to consume. The rules have guided the behavior of the Mandate ever since its inception 300 years before the current era. Although the rules are all easy to interpret, many of the rules are downright bizarre. One rule, for example, completely prohibits statesmen from eating meals whose total preparation time exceeds 3 hours, except for on holidays. Every third time the emperor dies of natural causes one fifth of all money in the treasury is to be redistributed to a single citizen at random. None who have seen the jade tablets of the Compact with their own eyes may every eat duck.

Despite the apparent pointlessness of many of these rules, nearly everyone within the Mandate accepts the premise that if these rules are violated the Jade Emperor will withdraw his support and the Mandate will fall. Part of the reason that this arrangement has proven to be so stable is that few of the Compact's rules have anything to do with the common people. Those that do read more like patronizing suggestions than hard and fast rules. For example, it is considered important for parents to rule the household as equals and for children to cultivate positive feelings towards those who raise them, but few consider this a proper rule.

Other rules specify proper comportment in bizarrely specific situations. Rule 804 runs for tens of thousands of words and describes in detail the things that must be done by a single young man so that the human species might continue beyond the Mandate's collapse.