The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 262 Another Idea
Zhu Jianxuan listened to Peng Yuanrui's request and did not make a rash decision.

Instead, he brought the map of North America they had explored and spread it on the table in the conference room.

Check out conditions around the Great Lakes, New York, and the St. Lawrence River.

The five Great Lakes are connected in sequence through the St. Lawrence River, which flows through Montreal and Quebec and into the Atlantic Ocean.

On the west side of Manhattan Island in the center of New York City, there is a north-south valley that extends northward to the St. Lawrence River Valley and intersects near Montreal.

The highest point at the bottom of this valley is about 40 meters above sea level, roughly located slightly south of the center of the valley.

There is a river that winds north from the highest point, passes through a fault lake, and then joins the St. Lawrence River in Montreal.

The tributaries of the Hudson River extend from the mountains on the west side and also begin to flow south along the valley from here, flowing into New York Bay on the west side of Manhattan Island.

The two rivers are about forty kilometers apart at their closest point.

At the same time, there is a forked valley extending westward to Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes.

The Erie Canal in American history passed through this valley.

The highest point at the bottom of this valley is about 125 meters above sea level.

There are also two rivers on both sides of the highest point.

One flows eastward and joins the Hudson River at the fork of the valley, and the other flows westward into Lake Ontario.

The two rivers are about fifty kilometers apart at their closest point.

The surface of Lake Ontario is 75 meters above sea level, and the surface of the adjacent Lake Erie is 174 meters above sea level.

The two lakes have a difference of ninety-nine meters in altitude, forming the famous Niagara Falls.

The surfaces of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are completely connected, and the altitude of both lakes is 176 meters.

Lake Superior is 183 meters above sea level.
Therefore, except for Lake Ontario at the easternmost end, the water surface altitudes of the other four lakes are not much different, and navigation between them is not difficult.

In particular, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Erie in the middle can be navigated completely by themselves.

So the end point of the Erie Canal in American history is Lake Erie, skipping Lake Ontario, which has the most complicated situation.

After looking at it for a while, Zhu Jianxuan asked Peng Yuanrui:

“Is there any way to build a lock between the two large lakes in the east to directly connect the waterways between them?

“Then, a dam was built near Montreal to redirect the St. Lawrence River south.

“Following this valley it flows into the Hudson River, which empties into the sea directly west of New York City.

“Or we could build a dam at the outlet of Qinglong Lake to raise the water level of Qinglong Lake to 130 meters, and then flow eastward along the valley and merge into the Hudson River.

"This will reduce the drop between Qinglong Lake and Zhuque Lake by 55 meters, and the difficulty of the canal should be greatly reduced."

Zhu Jianxuan is interested in the canal.

The canal continues to play a huge role into the 21st century.

But the prerequisite is that the canal must be large enough.

In order to make the unit transportation cost much lower than that of railways, the weight of goods transported in a single trip must be much greater than that of railways.

In the past, only half of the Grand Canal was navigable, but the annual cargo volume still exceeded 800 million tons, ranking third among all rivers, second only to the Yangtze River and the Pearl River.

At the same time, the total freight volume of all railways in the country is about 5 billion tons, which is basically the same as the total freight volume of inland rivers.

Water transport has always been the best carrier for bulk goods.

Now that the Ming Dynasty already has trains and railway technology, the Erie Canal plan in American history is meaningless.

The small canal, which was complained by Americans as the "Erie Ditch", did not have much advantage in transportation capacity compared to heavy-load railways, and the construction cost of the canal, which used a large number of locks, was very high.

If we are going to build it, we should build a canal that is wide enough.

Canadians in previous lives built the Welland Canal connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, it has been expanded five times. Eventually, the canal was eight meters deep and could accommodate cargo ships with a displacement of more than 5,000 tons.

At the same time, Zhu Jianxuan had seen Wang Lai's imaginative idea of ​​the Sanjiangze Lake, and now he directly thought of the plan of building a dam to divert the river.

Dam the St. Lawrence River and turn the valley next to New York into a large canal.

The officials headed by Peng Yuanrui were all stunned after hearing this.

Then Peng Yuanrui tried hard to recall all aspects of the situation, analyzed and judged on the spot:

“Some craftsmen have proposed a lock canal connecting the two lakes, but the engineering difficulty and cost are relatively high.

“Redirecting the St. Lawrence River… No one has proposed this idea, but it should be possible in theory.

“We need to collect detailed elevation data around the river valley and recalculate the feasibility.

"We need to consider the scope of flooding after the water level rises..."

Upon hearing this, Zhu Jianxuan directly ordered:

“Okay, then let’s arrange for the craftsmen to calculate and do a feasibility assessment.

“I will stay in North America for a while to handle the more important matters in North America.

"If there is anything else I need to confirm, please bring it up as soon as possible."

The officials headed by Peng Yuanrui immediately bowed and agreed:

"I obey your orders."

The governors of New York and New Jersey, as well as the nobles of the various dominions, had no say at all at this time.

All the measurement, planning and other matters were completed by craftsmen from the Ming Dynasty.

In Clinton's view, immigrants from Europe are all garbage, and this may even include their own ancestors.

Landless peasants, various criminals, adventurers and sailors are all destitute people who cannot survive.

Why would serious engineers come to the North American continent to suffer?
Even after the independence of the United States, Britain could no longer exile criminals directly to North America, but most of the immigrants who went to Europe on their own were still poor people.

There are also many criminals who do not want to be tried in their own country and go into exile in the United States early.

In fact, it was not until the late 19th century, after the development of America's own industry and commerce, that more and more ordinary people from Europe began to try to immigrate to North America.

It was not until World War I that the United States began to become a priority immigration destination for European elites.

Historically, when the construction of the Erie Canal in New York State officially started in 1817, the main persons in charge, from design to supervision, were all amateurs.

The chief designer of the canal was a judge. He was originally responsible for adjudicating land boundaries and was often involved in land surveying.

Engineers were mainly mathematics teachers, ordinary workers who learned on the job, and stonemasons.

After the project started, the governor found it too chaotic, so he allocated funds to send people to Britain to study canal engineering.

In the early days of the United States, from the federal government to the local level, there were makeshift teams everywhere.

The immigration of the Ming Dynasty was organized by the Ming court.

Most of the immigrants themselves are from good families and are normal urban and rural residents.

At the same time, among each batch of immigrants, in addition to ordinary people, there were craftsmen and scholars organized by the court.

Of course there are people who can be engineers, and they are all trained in formal disciplines.

After working and living normally with these people for a long time, Clinton and other European immigration leaders increasingly feel that European immigrants are garbage.

So they let their children work hard to learn from the Ming Dynasty craftsmen. Hancock, Adams, Clinton and others and their families basically lived in the way of Ming Dynasty immigrants.

Peng Yuanrui took note of Zhu Jianxuan's instructions and continued to ask:

“Your Highness, if the plan of building a dam to intercept and change the river course is feasible, where should the main industrial center be located?

“Should it be located directly on the edge of present-day New York City, or should it be relocated inland on the shore of a great lake?”

Zhu Jianxuan thought about it for a moment:
“It’s better to place the industrial zone directly around New York to facilitate sea transportation.

“The key is to avoid direct contamination of the lake water.

“The population of industrial cities will increase rapidly. There are already three million people around Yingtian Prefecture, and two million people in Wuwangdu, Australia.

"The amount of domestic waste generated by these people is dozens or even hundreds of times higher than that of small cities with tens of thousands of people.

"More importantly, the production efficiency of large-scale machine factories has increased by one to two orders of magnitude compared to the handicraft era.

"But correspondingly, the amount and speed of pollutant generation will directly increase by one to two orders of magnitude.

"This scale exceeds the upper limit of the self-decomposition and purification capacity of most lake water bodies.

“In the vicinity of the Ming mainland and the Wu King’s capital in Australia, many small rivers and lakes near industrial areas have turned into stinking ditches and stinking puddles.

"That's when the pollution rate exceeds the purification rate of the natural environment.

“Among all water pollution, freshwater lakes are the most critical.

“Because most water bodies are long-term stable, the water that continuously flows out is only a small part of the surface.

"The waste generated by various factories and people's daily lives enters the lake, and the pollutants that cannot be decomposed and purified will continue to settle and accumulate in the lake.

“So to some extent, the water pollution of the lake is irreversible.

“Although the Great Lakes of North America are large, as long as industrial construction continues, they will sooner or later become huge stinking puddles.

“All kinds of bacteria, viruses and poisonous insects will breed in such stinking puddles.

"At the same time, the waste from chemical plants, steel plants, dye plants, and ceramic plants contains a lot of toxic substances, such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.

"There is too much of this stuff accumulated in the lake, and people who eat it while fishing may get poisoned.

"Once there is a sudden large-scale death, it may lead to public outcry and affect the stability of the country, so we must prevent and avoid it in advance."

Due to the influence of Emperor Chongzhen, the concept of environmental pollution had already been in the minds of scholars in the Ming Dynasty.

Especially in recent years, exchanges between the East and the West have become closer.

After the people of the Ming Dynasty compared the urban environment of the Ming Dynasty with that of large cities in Europe, their understanding of pollution became clearer.

Know what human lifestyle is like in extremely harsh environments.

The high mortality rate among European royal aristocrats made the scholars, nobles and officials of the Ming Dynasty shudder.

In recent years, the germ theory proposed by Zhu Jianxuan has made scholars clearly aware that a dirty environment is directly related to disease.

Europeans have not yet realized that the Ming people have used them as negative examples.

Diseases caused by modern environmental pollution had not yet appeared, but the Ming Dynasty had already begun to respond and prepare for control.

To the extent that some people went even further than Zhu Jianxuan thought.

After Liu Quanzhi and Zhu Jianxuan talked about the impact of pollution, they couldn’t help but raise a new question:
“Your Highness… We built the factory on the coast of New York. Although this avoided the pollution of inland lakes, it could not avoid the pollution of the ocean.

"In the future...will the entire ocean...become a filthy, stinking puddle..."

Liu Quanzhi was obviously a little too worried.

With the destructive power of mankind in the 21st century, it is difficult to turn the entire ocean into a cesspool, let alone the era of the First Industrial Revolution.

But we must never let it go, especially we must not encourage pollution.

This kind of groundless worry can serve as a driving force for pollution control, and organize people in advance to start work on pollution prevention and control.

Based on past experience, the excessive demonization of environmental protection in Europe and the United States is certainly not desirable.

But completely allowing pollution is definitely not an option.

Zhu Jianxuan clearly remembers that in his hometown in a remote rural area, the river water could turn pitch black.

You can even see various horribly polluted rivers and lakes on the Internet.

There is also a layer of heavy metal sediment at the bottom of the five Great Lakes in North America, which causes all the freshwater fish in the Great Lakes to exceed the heavy metal standard and are completely inedible.

Even more terrifying are the eight major public pollution incidents in the world in the 20th century, all of which were environmental disasters caused by extremely severe environmental pollution.

The damage caused by environmental pollution has reached the level of natural disasters, leading to widespread illness, disability and death.

Therefore, even if we do not attach particular importance to environmental protection, we must never allow factories to completely allow pollution.

Zhu Jianxuan sorted out his thoughts a little, and said to the officials and nobles present in an analytical and exploratory tone:
“Although it’s a bit exaggerated, I don’t think we can rule out this possibility.

“Although the amount of water in the ocean may be more than a hundred times that of fresh water in rivers and lakes, its decomposition and purification capacity is naturally also very huge.

"At the same time, the sea water is inherently 'dirty'.

“Seawater contains almost all the substances on Earth and is originally a dilute mixed solution.

"But the pollution we directly discharge will obviously first accumulate in coastal areas before slowly spreading throughout the ocean.

“If there are too many pollutants in the coastal areas of cities, it will definitely affect the living environment of coastal cities.

“The fundamental solution is to proactively deal with pollutants.

“The court could set up an environmental protection department and organize scientific researchers to study technologies and solutions for proactively treating pollutants.

“But we cannot stop development and construction just because we are worried about pollution, because that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

"Just like the Yellow River in its natural state, it should flow freely in the Central Plains and should have irregular flood discharges and diversions. This is how the North China Plain was filled.

“However, we cannot simply abandon the entire Central Plains for this reason.

"Instead, we need to find a way to confine the Yellow River to a specific range and turn most of the Central Plains into a place for us to live and reproduce.

“Only technological progress and hard work can solve the problem.

“We must first avoid polluting freshwater on land that is directly used by humans, and lake water without flow is the primary target of protection.

“At the same time, we are researching ways to treat pollutants and reduce pollution in our rivers and oceans.”

After listening to this, the officials, craftsmen, and nobles on the scene bowed again and agreed.

European aristocrats such as Hancock, Adams, and Clinton had no objection to the environmental pollution issue that Zhu Jianxuan was considering.

Compared with the immigrants and officials from the Ming Dynasty, these Europeans had a clearer and more intuitive understanding of the differences between the Ming Dynasty and the European environment.

They planned and built towns in accordance with the requirements of the Ming Dynasty, and paid attention to the cleanliness of the environment and their bodies in accordance with the requirements of Ming officials and soldiers.

Then the frequency of their own and their families' illnesses decreased, and most importantly, the child mortality rate was significantly reduced.

As long as you truly learn and accept the Ming Dynasty's lifestyle, it will be more effective than praying directly to your own god.

Today's European Americans believe that the Ming Dynasty is the true civilization, and most of them are now very happy to follow and love this kind of life.

They began to see Europe as a place ruled by barbarians.

It’s just that those who are more devout in their faith are more confused and feel that their faith may have been shaken.

(End of this chapter)