Chapter 459 Changhua’s Construction Progress
August 28, 1629, the tenth day of the seventh month in the second year of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, Changhua County, Danzhou.
Almost all the troops stationed in Changhua came to the port to say goodbye to Chief Engineer Liu Shanxia who was about to leave here. In fact, Liu Shanxia's arrival here was not too long, only about three months. According to the construction period of the entire project, this period of time has only just begun. But he had to leave here early to preside over the next large project according to the arrangements of the executive committee.
In order to maintain a smooth construction progress after Liu Shanxia left, the technical staff of the Ministry of Construction, including Liu Shanxia, have worked overtime in the past two months, and have made the construction plan for the next six months in advance, which will make Chang Chang The planned railway line from Huagang to Shilu Mining Area is divided into several construction sections. As long as the construction is carried out according to technical standards, there is no need for Liu Shanxia to stay here and keep an eye on the construction site.
Of course, this journey is not without major technical difficulties. For example, the railway bridge crossing a tributary of the Changhua River near Shilu is definitely one of the biggest engineering problems encountered by the Ministry of Construction after the crossing. Fortunately, the span of this bridge is not large. Even with the current construction level, it is completely possible to build a railway bridge that can accommodate freight trains. It just takes more time and the cost of building the bridge is higher.
After Liu Shanxia leaves Changhua this time, he will first return to the base camp to report on his work, and then he will have to take a boat north to Hong Kong Island to organize and direct the preliminary work of local development. After construction started on Hong Kong Island, Liu Shanxia had to turn back to Annan. At present, the bilateral negotiations on the demarcation of concessions in the Da Nang area have ended, and the development of Da Nang has entered the countdown stage. By then, the base camp will also have to send engineering personnel like Liu Shanxia who can take charge of the job to the local area.
Several ports entered the construction stage almost at the same time. Such small-probability incidents came together and basically drained all the manpower of the Ministry of Construction. The main reason for this is of course that the Executive Committee is eager to expand externally and hopes to spread Haihan's influence to a larger area in the shortest possible time. The development of Annan's port and Hong Kong Island is under the Executive Committee's control. It seems that these are opportunities that cannot be missed. Even if it squeezes the already tight engineering power even more, it is still worth it.
This situation will continue for a long time to come. Although the local technical personnel recruited one after another have been receiving training and serving as foremen in some projects, they want to be independently responsible for the project and provide support to the executive committee. Share the worries, but it still takes a certain amount of time to slowly accumulate experience. The requirements for this type of technical work are far higher than ordinary labor. Even if you are a professional craftsman in this era, it will still take a long time to adapt to Haihan-style engineering design and construction after entering the Ministry of Construction.
For the road construction project currently underway in Changhua, the temporary departure of Liu Shanxia and other technical personnel will have a certain impact on the progress of the project. However, compared with other areas under Haihan's rule, the strict military control implemented in Changhua The system can, to a certain extent, minimize the negative impact.
So far, the total number of prisoners of war and refugees transported from Annan to Changhua since March this year to offset war debts has exceeded 5,000, plus more than 1,000 naturalized civilians and nearly 2,000 people transferred from the base camp. Haihan controlled a population of nearly 10,000 in the Changhua area, which was more than twice the number of people under the jurisdiction of Changhua County.
Starting from Changhua Port to the end of the construction site more than 20 miles away in the southeast, thousands of people are working hard every day to get the rail transit line from Changhua to Shilu open to traffic as soon as possible. Along this section of the road, a total of three immigration camps and two larger hard labor camps have been built, and three companies of the militia and army have been stationed with a total of more than 500 armed forces.
Changhua County, which was considered a hidden danger in the early stages of construction, now seems insignificant. There are only two local hard labor camps where slave laborers are imprisoned. Their area is larger than that of Changhua County, and their population is also larger.
However, Xiao Laosan, the commander-in-chief of the Changhua garrison who took the initiative to establish a relationship with Haihan, has been living a good life recently. After reaching a preliminary cooperation agreement with Haihan, Xiao Laosan quickly received the so-called "office funds" from the Haihan store in the city. According to the agreement, Xiao Laosan began to turn a blind eye to the Haihan armed personnel in his jurisdiction. Although this so-called militia group did not enter Changhua City, these militiamen could be seen pressing down on the city walls almost every day. He led a large group of slave workers to a nearby construction site to build roads.
As soon as it gets dark every day, Haihan militiamen with live ammunition can be seen escorting prisoners in long lines with shackles to work on the construction site. These people often line up near the planned route, and then sit on the ground, The square stone that was transported was slowly pounded into goose egg-sized gravel with a small hammer. When the weather is fine, this stone-pounding queue is often several miles long, with more than a thousand people. The sound of pounding echoes in the wilderness outside Changhua County all day long. In a small and sparsely populated place like Changhua, the formations created by the Haihan people were quite spectacular.
Xiao Laosan once visited the construction site outside the city to see this inexplicable way of building roads. He really didn't understand what the Haihan people thought. Do they want to use this kind of gravel to pave a road? Is it still possible to navigate this bumpy road?
However, after he went there, he became even more confused. The workers piled up the gravel, buried sections of sleepers on top, and then brought up long iron tracks and laid them on top of the sleepers. Xiao Laosan also asked Qiao Zhiya several times, but every time Qiao Zhiya smiled mysteriously and just asked him to wait patiently.
Until one day, Xiao Laosan heard roars from a distance outside the city on the top of the city. Soon he saw a big black monster smoking white smoke along the gravel railway track from the seaside. Coming at speed. Xiao Laosan's eyes almost fell to the ground. He had never thought that there was such a strange thing in the world. The Haihan people spent so much money to build such a strange road just so that this big guy could Travel quickly in the wilderness.
Xiao Laosan didn't even bother asking someone to notify the county magistrate. He got off the city tower and went straight out of the city to the construction site, intending to see what this big guy was up close. After getting closer, Xiao Laosan realized that this thing was far more complicated than he thought. Just seeing the transmission spokes of those big iron wheels made people feel dizzy. And behind this big iron guy was dragging two wagons with only chassis, which were all packed with bundled sleepers, piled as densely as a hill.
Xiao Laosan circled around the big guy several times, but he didn't see what was dragging or pushing it forward. In the end, Qiao Zhiya stood up and answered the question in his mind: "Did you see the coal piled behind the front of the car? This car relies on burning water with coal to push it forward."
"Use coal? Boil water?" Xiao Laosan felt that the more he listened, the more confused he became. It was not unusual to use coal to boil water. The Haihan shop in the city always sold very cheap briquettes. It was better to use it to boil water for cooking than to burn firewood. Much more convenient. But how this matter is connected with the big iron lump in front of him, Xiao Laosan is still puzzled.
"You don't have to think so clearly. You just need to know that after we build this road, it will only take about an hour to get there from here to Shizidong inland by using this new type of transportation!" Qiao Zhiya also understood that it was difficult to explain this kind of scientific knowledge to Xiao Laosan in just a few sentences, so at the moment he only talked about the uses, not the principles.
Xiao Laosan, who is the highest military officer in Changhua County, still knows where Shizidong is. Starting from Changhua County, he traveled westward along the Changhua River. After about sixty or seventy miles, he arrived. The sphere of influence of the Li people's village Shizidong. People with strong legs can walk there in almost a day, but Qiao Zhiya said that this big iron bump can shorten the journey to about an hour, which surprised Xiao Laosan again.
As a low-level officer who has received basic military training and mastered certain military theories, Xiao Laosan is very aware of the important role that mobility can play in combat. The monster created by Haihan obviously has extremely high mobility, and It can also carry a large amount of cargo - or a heavily armed Haihan militia. If this thing is used in wartime, it will really be a terrifying tool.
However, the Haihan people do not seem to have such plans, and the route of this thing is also very limited. Just building this special road for it to pass will have to consume a lot of manpower, financial and material resources, and two or three more will be built. Yue has only built about ten miles of road. It is definitely unrealistic to use this thing for fighting. Of course, there is nothing in Changhua County that deserves the Haihan people to spend so much thought on. Xiao Laosan is very self-aware of this. The only thing he could conclude was that the Haihan people spent so much time building this road to Shilu, obviously not just to help the local Li people move their homes out of the mountainous area.
The doubts in Xiao Laosan's heart are destined to not be answered in the near future. In addition to Huang Sanmu, the time traveler and the cave owner of Shizi Cave, there are only a few naturalized cadres in the Changhua area who know where this road leads. What kind of treasures are buried in this place? And insiders will never leak Shilu's secrets to the outside world because their own interests are involved. When the outside world learns the truth, it will probably have to wait until before or after the Shilu Iron Mine is put into operation.
The people resettled in the Changhua area, including prisoners of war who were assigned to hard labor camps, their mission here was not just to build tracks. Nearly ten thousand people live here, and the daily supplies they need are a number that cannot be ignored. The infrastructure projects here may last for several years with the development of Shilu Iron Mine, and if the people's supplies rely on the transportation from the base camp for a long time, It will undoubtedly occupy a considerable amount of shipping capacity, which is not a good solution for the Executive Committee, which prefers to use the limited shipping capacity at sea for foreign trade.
In order to achieve local supplies of basic life as soon as possible, a considerable part of the labor force assigned to Changhua took on the task of opening up wasteland and farming. Since Changhua County has fewer residents, the unowned wasteland outside the county has become a target for reclamation. The geographical conditions and climate here are very similar to the Red River Delta of Annam across the sea. The Ministry of Agriculture believes that it is very suitable for large-scale planting of rice crops. In just the first two months of construction, the workers, under the command of technical personnel from the Ministry of Agriculture, reclaimed more than 3,000 acres of rice fields and more than 1,000 acres of vegetable land on the banks of the Changhua River. They also planted many crops from the base camp in the fields. Various types of fruit trees transplanted.
Of course, eating vegetarian food alone is definitely far from meeting the energy supplement needs for heavy physical work. Relying solely on the few original small fishing boats in Changhua Fishing Village is obviously unable to meet the current situation. The Ministry of Shipping has transferred ten new fishing boats with a displacement of about 50 tons from the base camp to carry out fishing operations in the offshore waters of Changhua Port every day. In addition to supplying Haihan's nearly 10,000 people with seafood, there is occasionally excess production capacity that can be supplied to the people in Changhua County. In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture also sent a commissioner to direct the construction of a livestock breeding center. Cattle, donkeys, pigs, chickens, ducks and other livestock were brought from the base. However, in-demand commodities such as milk and eggs are generally only supplied to the local area. The traveler cadres eat it.
In addition to basic meal supplies, the executive committee is also trying to gradually improve various infrastructure and permanent civil administration agencies in Changhua. Institutions such as hospitals, schools, and police stations are all under construction or have entered the operational stage. The preparations for the establishment of the Changhua Port Management Committee are said to have also been put on the executive committee's agenda. If no major accidents occur, Qiao Zhiya, who has performed well here in the early stage, is very likely to be appointed as the administrative leader of the Changhua area. Although he also holds a military position, judging from the current personnel situation, there is currently no candidate more suitable for this position than him in the Changhua area.
When Qiao Zhiya applied to be transferred out of the chemical laboratory a few months ago, he probably never thought that he would get a promotion opportunity so quickly. Although Changhua is a sparsely populated place with poor living conditions, after the Shilu Iron Mine is developed in the future, the Changhua area will also need to build supporting coal and iron industries. It is a certainty that it will become the industrial hub of the island in the future. Development The prospects are quite good. Qiao Zhiya himself is engaged in chemical engineering. For him, a purely industrial city has a natural sense of closeness. This is why he responded to the call of the executive committee immediately and was willing to come to Changhua. One of the reasons for staying.
(End of chapter)