The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 385 The Boundary between Urban and Suburban Areas
Fateh, Bagration and their entourage went ashore at Bao'an Port after identity verification and were then arranged to take a train to Guangzhou.

Fateh and Bagration had known about trains for a long time. Bagration had learned about them before, and Fateh had heard Ma Weiguo's introduction to them a long time ago.

The passenger trains of the Ming Dynasty usually had about twenty carriages, with a speed of 60 to 90 kilometers per hour, and could carry 3,000 to 5,000 people at a time.

If it is a freight train, it usually has fifty or even sixty carriages, a speed of about sixty kilometers per hour, and can transport two to three thousand tons of cargo at a time.

However, neither of them had ever seen a train before. This was their first time riding on a train and their first time intuitively feeling the power of a train.

Behind Baoan Wharf are the train station and bus station. Fateh and others can take the car in the yard to the train station.

Then, under the arrangement of the Honglu Temple, we walked through the official channel and entered the special platform.

When Fatah and others arrived in front of the prepared train, their first feeling was that they could not see the end at a glance.

Even if you turn around and look forward and backward, the end of the car feels a bit blurry, mainly because you have no actual sense of the length of this thing.

The trains are long and slender, and when placed on the ground, especially when placed in front of you, they appear even more ridiculously long than the ships floating on the sea.

Fatah looked confused as if he was accepting something new quickly, and subconsciously said to Ma Weiguo beside him:
"With such long carriages... and so many carriages, how can this train run? How much power does the locomotive have to have?"

Ma Weiguo smiled and said:
“It’s really powerful. The engine of a locomotive can be used as the engine of a small ship.

"But the key to making such a large thing run on the ground is that the rails support the carriages and reduce the friction between the wheels and the ground."

Fatah immediately reacted:
"Oh, by the way, sir, you mentioned the railroad. Is it true that the railway is all made of steel?"

As Fatah spoke, he subconsciously lowered his head like the people around him and looked at the tracks under the train.

Then they saw not only the shiny rails, but also the supporting structure under the train cars.”

"This carriage is also made entirely of steel..."

Bagration next to him muttered:

"The roads in the Ming Dynasty are made of steel, the train carriages are made of steel, and all the large ships are made of steel. How much steel does it take..."

Ma Weiguo smiled and continued:
"The annual steel production in Daming is about 50 million tons.

"If the current growth trend continues, it should be able to grow to 100 million tons per year within 20 years at most.

“This data seemed huge before, but now it has less and less impact.

“After all, a steel battleship, a large cargo ship, or a relatively long railway all require tens of thousands of tons of steel to build.

“And all the new buildings need steel as the frame, there are so many places where steel is needed.

"Just like the wood in the past, now it has turned into steel..."

The steel production data of the Ming Dynasty was not made public until the end of the large-scale war, but most of the officials of the Ming Dynasty knew about it.

There will be no foreign countries in the future world, and the various main sentences of the Ming Dynasty will be made public as regular data.

When Fateh and Bagration heard this data, they were instinctively surprised and shocked to the extreme, but they also felt that it was reasonable.

Just like the topic just now, so many things in Daming are made of steel, so the demand for steel production capacity is naturally very high, but the key core issue is...

"How can we produce tens of millions of tons... or even hundreds of millions of tons of steel?"

Ma Weiguo knew they would ask:
“So today I will take you two to visit Daming’s steel plant in Guangzhou.

“That was the old steel plant in Foshan. Although the new plant is near Bao’an Port, it has not yet officially started production.

"Once you get to the factory floor, you'll know how the Ming Dynasty smelted steel."

The direct purpose of Fateh and Bagration's coming to the Ming Dynasty was to pay a visit to the Ming Emperor.

But now the Emperor of the Ming Dynasty arranged for them to visit.

Although it was a little strange, both of them now fully understood it and felt that this visit was necessary.

Zhu Jianxuan wanted the monarchs of the vassal states to have self-awareness.

The vassal monarchs themselves also wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Ming Dynasty and find out why the Ming Dynasty was so powerful, and then consider whether their own countries could follow suit.

The two men and their entourage quickly agreed and waited for Ma Weiguo to arrange for them to get in the car.

Fatah and others had special identities, so they were naturally not arranged to sit in ordinary carriages. Ma Weiguo applied for official carriages for them according to the procedures of the Honglu Temple.

There were less than fifty people in a carriage, so the space was still quite spacious.

After getting on the bus, Fatah and others looked around. They felt that the space in this type of carriage could indeed transport at least two hundred soldiers.

Even if you only run 60 kilometers per hour, that's more than 1,400 kilometers a day, and it only takes four days to get from Shuntian Prefecture to Central Asia.

There are not just a few of these trains, but they have filled the entire station and can depart one after another.

The Ming people could send tens of thousands of soldiers from the capital to the front lines thousands of kilometers away in just a few days.

Trains that transport cargo supplies have a larger carrying capacity, and one train can carry thousands of tons of supplies.

Therefore, even in Central Asia and Siberia, far inland, Russia was unable to confront the Ming army.

Any country that borders the Ming Dynasty on land has the ability to resist this supply capability.

As for coastal countries and island countries, what they have to face is a fleet that is even more terrifying than the "porting country".

After Fateh, Bagration and others got on the train and waited for a while, and after all other government and private passengers had boarded, the train broadcast announcing departure.

Accompanied by a loud whistle, the train slowly left the platform, then passed through the port area of ​​Shekou Peninsula and continued to travel northward in the western part of Bao'an city.

The passengers on the bus instinctively looked at the scenery outside the window, and naturally saw the prototype of a new city in a new era.

There are chimneys everywhere, trains everywhere, construction sites everywhere, people everywhere, cars everywhere, concrete buildings everywhere, and hardened roads everywhere.

And the scale of this city is very large.

It takes time for the train to accelerate, so it took nearly half an hour for the surrounding buildings to gradually become sparse.

In Ma Weiguo's opinion, the train finally left the city, and outside was the countryside, nothing special.

But the Arabs and Europeans, led by Fatah and Bagration, were still staring out the window with great curiosity and concern.

In their subconscious, the outermost area of ​​a city's influence should be an uninhabited wasteland.

Now the endless farmlands outside, the villages scattered among the farmlands, and the people working in the farmlands are still symbols of prosperity in their eyes.

They all knew that Guangzhou was the southernmost tip of the Ming mainland, and the straight-line distance from here to the Ming capital Shuntianfu was more than 2,000 kilometers.

This is the distance from St. Petersburg to Georgia, and also the distance from Moscow to Persia.

Guangzhou should naturally be a frontier region.

So they instinctively waited for the sparse buildings outside the city to completely disappear and for the real uncultivated wilderness landscape to appear.

In their subconscious, that is the boundary between the development area and the influence area around Bao'an Port.

With such expectations, the result is naturally disappointment and surprise.

The Ming mainland is the only place in the world with a truly saturated population, and it is also the only place where arable land has been basically developed to its fullest.

Therefore, as long as there is rain in the plain area, there will be no real wasteland.

Wherever there is farmland, there are people working.

And there are even more outrageous scenes waiting for them here.

In places far away from the city, there are some large farms that are centrally operated by the government and the private sector.

After Zhu Jianxuan destroyed the Qing Dynasty in the north, he established the Northern Agricultural Company. After reducing the feudal system, he established the Southern Agricultural Company in the south. These two companies were actually government-run land management companies.

All private land transactions must first be reviewed by the two land companies, which have the right of first refusal at the same price.

The two companies were not only state-owned companies, but also backed by the common people, landlords, and businessmen, and had government and yamen and even royal backgrounds.

The key is that they also have relatively modern management methods, and more importantly, new-era agricultural production technologies.

Not to mention priority purchase at the same price, even if they simply compete on price, the two super real estate companies have massive amounts of funds, and ordinary landowners in the private sector will naturally find it difficult to compete with them.

The two land companies soon took control of more and more private land.

The two companies used the official power of the court to carry out land annexation, reclaim private land for the royal family and the court, and enhance the royal family and the court's control over the country.

Then, in accordance with the instructions of the Ming Emperor and the court, we promoted the centralized management of existing agricultural land among the people.

While collecting a large amount of land, they continued to trade or exchange with large landowners in the private sector, concentrating the scattered land and turning small farms into large farms.

Then make use of the latest agricultural machinery and cooperate with the Academy of Engineering to develop new industrial machinery.

So when these large farms appeared, Fateh and Bagration saw large tractors, large combine harvesters, large trucks, pumps...

There are even agricultural aircraft.

As well as the large-scale agricultural company production base, a large number of newly built warehouses and residential facilities, a place has been formed that looks like a small manor town.

Fateh and Bagration looked at each other for a few seconds, then asked Ma Weiguo in surprise:
"What...is this place? It looks like a huge manor, but there are these large motor vehicles and even airplanes. What are they used for?"

"If it's some special military or royal facility..."

Ma Weiguo laughed when he heard the question:

“This is not some special facility, it’s just a government-run farm, and the machinery and aircraft are agricultural.

“Those motor vehicles were tractors, which were specially designed agricultural machines.

"You should have seen tractors working, used to till the land and spread seeds and fertilizers.

"Aircraft are used to spray pesticides. They spray water mist containing medicine from the air to kill insects on the crops..."

This type of farm is considered relatively professional in modern times, and ordinary people will find it complicated.

For Fateh and Bagration, it was even more completely unreal; they didn't even know what pesticides were.

At that time, ordinary people might not be able to take medicine when they were sick, but the Ming Dynasty used medicine for food...

Fertilizer is also a kind of medicine in their eyes.

They suffered the impact of industrialization in the cities and faced an equally disorienting cultural shock in rural areas.

Fateh and Bagration continued to move forward with the train in a state of surprise.

Not long after, the buildings between the farmlands gradually became denser again, obviously approaching another city.

Ma Weiguo said casually:
"We are almost at Dongguan. Bao'an Port was originally Dongguan County... The current Dongguan Prefecture was newly established during the Wanli period."

Therefore, Fateh and Bagration did not even see the boundary of the Baoan development zone, and entered the scope of the more mature old development zone around Guangzhou Prefecture.

After passing Dongguan, the train turns northwest, and after entering the Guangzhou city area, it turns southwest again.

Finally after a three-hour journey, we arrived in Foshan Prefecture.

Foshan was originally just a "town", but because it had advanced steel casting technology in ancient times, it was the handicraft center of the south.

During the construction of Guangzhou Industrial Base, the steel industry was naturally allocated.

Later, it was established as a separate county, and later it was upgraded to a state.

Bao'an Port is indeed a new district, while Dongguan, Guangzhou and Foshan of this generation are the first industrial centers in the south of the Ming Dynasty.

Now the built-up areas outside the provincial capital and the two county towns are vaguely about to be connected into one.

Especially between Guangzhou and Foshan, there is almost no vacant land on both sides of the main road. Various new concrete buildings are lined up one after another, and there is no complete interruption along the way.

In Zhu Jianxuan's previous life, this was a state between an ordinary fourth or fifth tier prefecture-level city and a county town relatively close to the urban area.

But this scene is extremely rare in this era.

If you are from London or Paris, you will find it easier to accept this phenomenon.

The cities they live in have become very large, with a population of hundreds of thousands or even millions.

But Fatah is a Persian, and Bagration is a Russian of Georgian descent, both of whom are relatively unsophisticated.

Fateh felt like he was on a very fast train, traveling through a large city area for nearly an hour.

Although there are still many farmlands in the middle of this vast area, there are also farmlands behind the buildings.

However, the scope of the town buildings seems to be no smaller than the farmland in the middle.

"This... this area of ​​buildings stretches for at least twenty kilometers... maybe even forty or fifty kilometers. The whole area is completely filled. The scale of this city is too big..."

Such a large built-up area was completely unimaginable in the minds of Fateh and Bagration.

In fact, Ma Weiguo, a Ming Dynasty man, would find this a bit exaggerated when he discovered it. This was also a very rare thing in the Ming Dynasty twenty years ago.

But now more and more of them are appearing.

Around Guangzhou Prefecture, around Hangzhou Prefecture, between Yingtian Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture and Songjiang Prefecture, around Tianjin Prefecture, Shuntian Prefecture and Yongping Prefecture, and along the New Grand Canal and the main stream of the Yellow River between Shandong and Henan.

The boundaries between built-up areas and suburbs in these places are beginning to blur.

This is a direct impact of industrialization and was also caused by the height restrictions on buildings in the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty was a traditional feudal dynasty and is not undergoing profound social changes.

Therefore, there are many remnants of feudal traditions in all aspects of administrative management and social life.

According to the traditional system, the colors and styles of Ming people's clothes, the height and size of their houses, their decorations, and various living tools were all strictly regulated and restricted.

With the development of industry and commerce, restrictions on various clothing and daily necessities have become increasingly relaxed.

However, the imperial court’s control over the people became increasingly stronger.

If something is wrong with your clothing, it can be changed or hidden, and as long as you don't deliberately display it in official occasions, it's usually not a big problem.

But if the building is built taller than the Qianqing Palace, there is really no way to conceal it.

Zhu Jianxuan also took the initiative to relax restrictions on clothing. As long as the people did not use royal patterns or uniforms worn by official personnel, any other clothing was not illegal.

However, there has been no proactive relaxation of restrictions on building height and number of floors.

So even though the Ming Dynasty had begun to industrialize and construction technology had made great progress, all private buildings were no more than six stories high and no more than twenty meters high.

This is not actually a clear public standard, but just a tacit unspoken rule.

Because the employee housing of state-owned enterprises was no more than six stories high and twenty meters high, ordinary people thought this was an instruction from the imperial court, so they built their houses according to the same standards.

The bigger the city, the more prosperous the area, the fewer people dare to exceed the standard, and the more famous the person, the less likely they are to do it.

The local officials also kept a close eye on the situation, because many of the royal family members were gaining experience among the common people, and one day a prince might come to the place under their jurisdiction...

These princes and clan members can write reports and send them to Shuntianfu to the emperor at any time...

Since the number of floors and height of buildings cannot be increased, the floor area can only be increased, and the scope of the city will naturally expand faster.

(End of this chapter)