The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 193 Northern Core Area Construction Plan

Zhu Jianxuan drew on the map the industrial and mining areas he was considering developing, as well as the railways connecting them to the port.

As a result, it was found that the most suitable intersection of these lines in the Central Plains region was near the current Shuntian Prefecture City.

But the problem was that, based on the experience of later generations, he was already preparing to move the central city in the north away from Shuntian Prefecture.

Zhu Jianxuan looked at the map for a while and found that it was really not easy to find another suitable central city.

Tianjin is too low-lying and Yongping Prefecture is too remote.

Shuntian Prefecture City is already close to the Taihang Mountains and cannot move any further west.

In addition to these places, a more suitable place is Zhengding Prefecture, which is Shijiazhuang.

Not to mention how far these places are from the coastline, the key is that the population carrying capacity of these places will not significantly exceed that of Shuntian Prefecture.

Continuing to look southwards, the central part of the North China Plain and both sides of the Huai River are facing the overwhelming pressure of the Yellow River, making it difficult to settle down.

Chang'an's carrying capacity had long been insufficient, so the emperors of the Tang Dynasty often went to Luoyang for food.

Going further south is south of the Huai River, which is no longer considered the north.

And since it has reached the south of the Huai River, we can just use the Jiangbei area of ​​Yingtian Prefecture as the core, but this kind of place has nothing to do with the north.

The key is that it is not under your control now.

After thinking for a long time, Zhu Jianxuan slowly realized that he had fallen into a misconception.

Shuntian Prefecture is not able to become the central city of the northern region just because it is Shuntian Prefecture or Beijing City.

It was because it was the most suitable central node in the north, so it naturally became Shuntian Prefecture and Beijing City.

Shuntian Prefecture is located at the northernmost tip of the North China Plain, with Yanshan Mountain behind it and Taihang Mountain in its sight, facing south and facing the great plain.

If you extend your hand to the northeast along the Liaodong Corridor, you can capture the Liaodong and Northeast regions. If you extend your hand to the northwest along the Great Wall, you can capture the Mongolian grasslands and the Hetao region.

Going south, the road is smooth across the North China Plain.

Just like on the right-angled combination sofa in the living room, you can lie sideways in the most comfortable corner position and have a very intuitive overview of the entire living room.

Considering its location on land alone, Shuntian Prefecture is naturally the central node for controlling the three major regions of Northeast China, North China, and grassland.

If we consider the ocean, the estuary is not far to the southeast of Shuntian Prefecture.

But it is not directly facing the sea, which makes it convenient for it to go out to sea while also providing a defensive buffer zone.

Once you reach the sea, there are four inland seas serving as buffer zones: the Bohai Sea, the northern Yellow Sea, the southern Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea.

There are four island chains and peninsulas forming a sea route barrier, including the Ryukyu Islands, the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island to the mouth of the Yangtze River, the tip of the Shandong Peninsula and the small peninsula in the middle of the Korean Peninsula, the Liaodong Peninsula and the northern part of the Shandong Peninsula.

Unless the navy here is extremely disabled, or the enemy has an overwhelming advantage beyond its time, it would be impossible to break through so many defenses.

Otherwise, conventional opponents won’t be able to get in at all.

Shuntian Prefecture is a natural northern core, a dual core of ocean and land.

Even if this place is not the capital, it must be a strong military town and a core city in the local area.

In other words, there is no northern city that can replace Shuntian Prefecture.

If you can't change it, then you can only split it.

Arrange different functions in different places, and don't let them gather together and grow bigger.

According to the experience of previous lives, various industrial zones were built in core cities in the early stages, and then relocated when the cities could no longer bear the pressure. This typical detour should now be avoided.

The industrial areas with the fastest population accumulation in the industrial age should be separated, and no factories should be built within 100 kilometers around Yingtian City.

The industrial centers in the early days of industrialization were located near the steel industrial centers of Lulong, Luanzhou, Kaiping, Qian'an, etc. in Yongping Prefecture, and a sea transportation terminal was built at the mouth of the Luan River in Leting.

As industrialization continues to deepen, more and more industrial land will be needed.

Then place industries suitable for water transportation around the Bohai Sea and choose places suitable for port construction for development.

Industries that did not require or were not suitable for water transportation were built southward along the central part of Northern Zhili and arranged along the railway from Shuntianfu to Yingtianfu.

Neither the Ming Dynasty nor the Wu Kingdom has a shortage of arable land now, so it is most convenient to carry out construction on the vast plains.

Large water users can be located in the foothills of the Liaodong Peninsula, where precipitation is similar to that in the Huaihe River Basin, but evaporation is less and water resources are more abundant.

At the same time, the course of the Yellow River can be artificially changed back.

Let the Yellow River follow the normal course it should have taken during the Northern Song Dynasty and flow into the Bohai Sea from the Tianjin area.

Tianjin has a low terrain, and most of the rivers in the northern part of the North China Plain basically flow into the sea in this swamp, so it is called the Lower Ends of the Nine Rivers.

On the other hand, this lowest place should be where many rivers flow into the sea.

Frequent flooding here is normal, and this place is not suitable for large-scale industry and urban construction.

This is also a historical experience that should be considered and learned from.

By the time Tianjin relied on the advantage of being a designated seaport in Shuntian Prefecture and formed large-scale industrial and residential areas, it was too late to make adjustments.

At the same time, it is time to carry out large-scale management of the Yellow River.

The imperial court that rules the Central Plains must control the Yellow River, otherwise the Central Plains region cannot be stable. This has been the fate since Dayu controlled the floods.

The last time the Yellow River changed its course naturally was in 1048, when it shifted northward from its old course during the Eastern Han Dynasty in the higher-lying Shandong region to the lower-lying Hebei region, and flowed into the sea in the Tianjin region.

But at that time, the Tianjin area was the dividing line between the Northern Song Dynasty and the Liao Kingdom. If the Yellow River continued to roll northward, it would enter the territory of the Liao Kingdom.

In that way, the Liao Kingdom would be able to cross the Yellow River within its own territory and move south along the North China Plain to attack the Song Dynasty.

The Song Dynasty would lose the natural defense line of the Yellow River.

Therefore, the Northern Song Dynasty court wanted to forcibly divert the Yellow River back to Shandong, where the terrain is higher.

The result was that after decades of hard work and considerable expenditure of money and manpower, the project failed to achieve any success and the wealthy Hebei province became a state of decay.

In the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty, in order to resist the Jin Army, the Southern Song defenders took the initiative to dig up the Yellow River embankment in 1128, artificially causing the Yellow River to change its course again.

This was the first time in the history of the Yellow River that it flowed into the south, and it began an era of flowing into the sea through the Huai River that lasted for seven hundred years.

In the first three hundred years of the stage when the Yellow River flowed into the sea from the mouth of the Huai River, it was only certain that the Yellow River would flow into the sea from the mouth of the Huai River, but the place where the Yellow River flowed into the Huai River often changed.

It was not until the Wanli period that Pan Jixun forcibly fixed it. The Huai River, which was originally very quiet and gentle, was flooded by the Yellow River, causing large areas of erosion in the lower reaches. Places that had never experienced large-scale floods began to flood every now and then.

The prosperous Jianghuai region in the Tang and Song dynasties became a precarious Yellow River flood area.

The imperial courts of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties had no choice but to choose between protecting the Huai River and protecting the grain transport, and had to continue to allow intermittent flooding in the lower reaches of the Huai River.

The Yellow River is not suitable to continue staying in the Huai River's channel.

Even if Zhu Jianxuan left the Yellow River alone, the silt carried by the Yellow River continued to accumulate for decades, and the Yellow River would force its way to burst its banks and flow northward.

Originally, the diversion took place in 1855.

Moreover, for a long time before this, the Yellow River had already begun to burst on a small scale every now and then.

Wei Yuan, who wrote the Illustrated Records of the Maritime Kingdoms, once issued a warning thirteen years in advance, believing that the Yellow River in the south was about to collapse and would surely erupt on a large scale if left unchecked.

The Qing government at that time ignored Wei Yuan's advice, and the Yellow River burst on a large scale in 1855.

The uncontrolled diversion of the Yellow River is actually allowing the river water to flow freely on the great plains until the river water finds a suitable channel on its own and slowly flows into this new channel.

Without human intervention, this process will continue for many years, forming a large-scale persistent flooding area.

We are now starting to plan new river channels decades in advance, preparing a more suitable channel for the Yellow River to enter the sea, and then artificially inducing the Yellow River to switch there in advance.

There should be an opportunity to avoid flooding caused by natural diversions.

In fact, if it weren't for the reckless operations of the two Song dynasties, the Yellow River should have continued to flow in Hebei for hundreds of years.

The Yellow River silt has been accumulating in Tianjin for hundreds of years, and the Tianjin area should not have been so low-lying a long time ago.

When the main channel of the lower reaches of the Yellow River is relatively stable, small-scale diversions will often occur in the delta area at the estuary.

The river channel will swing back and forth in a fan-shaped range, continuously raising and expanding the terrain of the delta.

The reasonable arrangement for Tianjin and the Yellow River now should be to prohibit large-scale city construction in Tianjin and to use this lowland as a dedicated sea entry area for North China rivers.

In normal years, it can be used as a hunting ground or pasture, and in flood years, it can be used as a flood discharge area.

Anyway, both the Ming Dynasty and the Wu Kingdom have no shortage of arable land.

To complete the massive project of artificially diverting the Yellow River's course, it should be possible to slowly solve the problem using today's traditional tools, but this is clearly not in line with the efficiency of the industrial age.

I should prepare some more suitable engineering tools.

A mechanical tool that is far more powerful and efficient than ordinary humans, yet flexible enough.

Historically, this requires an internal combustion engine.

With Wu's current level of machining, it should be able to manufacture usable internal combustion engines.

Using internal combustion engines as power to manufacture excavators, bulldozers, tractors, and transport trucks can simultaneously complete agricultural mechanization.

At the same time, civilian and military vehicles were developed, and further research on flying machines was carried out.

Then, there are many mudflats along the coast around Bohai Sea. Building a seaport requires dredging the inland rivers and sea channels. It is best to start developing specialized dredger suction dredgers at the same time.

The mud and sand at the bottom of the water can be stirred into muddy water and pumped out to the shore or both sides of the waterway.

Zhu Jianxuan also wrote down these ideas one by one.

Then we will continue to consider the functional area division plan of the core cities in the north.

After the industrial zone was separated from Shuntian Prefecture, the areas where the population may continue to expand in the future are the commercial trade and financial areas.

They can be placed between industrial areas and old urban areas, such as places like Jizhou and Zunhua.

The site was chosen at the foot of Yanshan Mountain to facilitate the construction of a reservoir in the valley to supply the city's water needs.

Then there is the main base of the core central army, which can be dispersed in several surrounding counties such as Jizhou, Langfang, Changping, Miyun, etc.

Finally, there are the administrative center, cultural center, scientific research center, and military command center.

The total number of people in these institutions is likely to be several million, and they can be placed within a few kilometers to tens of kilometers around the old city, divided into several discrete centers.

The scientific research center is located in the northwest of Fangshan County, more than 20 kilometers southwest of the old city, around the Qinglong Lake Park in the previous life.

This is the highest place in the Shuntian Prefecture plain area. As long as drainage is done properly during construction, this place will not be flooded even if the entire Shuntian Prefecture old city is flooded.

You can also build dams to store water to form lakes and create landscapes just like in the previous life.

The center of advanced education, that is, the university town where various universities will gather in the future, should be adjacent to the scientific research center.

So it is placed to the east of the scientific research center and to the north of Fangshan County.

As for the military command center and administrative center, they should be placed around the king's residence.

In the north and northwest of the old city of Shuntian Prefecture, there are royal gardens such as Yuquan Mountain, the Summer Palace, and the Old Summer Palace, as well as many private gardens of various sizes.

During the more than 200 years from the Yongle to Chongzhen dynasties, a large number of royal relatives, high-ranking officials and wealthy businessmen built many mansions in this area.

Tsinghua Garden was originally built by Li Wei, the grandfather of Emperor Wanli.

When the Qing Dynasty invaded Central China, it occupied all the existing gardens here, and later continued to build some new royal and private gardens.

Now that the Northern Expedition Army has cleared out all the Qing Dynasty high-ranking officials here, these gardens will of course all belong to the king himself.

You can use new-age engineering technology and design ideas to repair, reinforce and expand these gardens according to your personal preferences.

In the future, part of it will be used as his future palace and office space, and part of it will be awarded to current or future meritorious ministers for residence.

His official royal palace is in the capital of King Wu in Australia, so there is no need for a formal and solemn palace here. These gardens can be considered as villas and villas.

Government office buildings and residential areas for officials were built in the east, south and north directions of these areas as administrative centers.

In the west of this area, a separate office area was built as a military command center.

The future cultural center will be the completely preserved old city.

However, there should be no private buildings inside the old city in the future, so new urban areas can be specially built on the east and south sides of the old city walls.

All future cultural and artistic industrial areas will be built and expanded to the east and south based on these two city walls.

(End of this chapter)