People who have never been to the Guangzhou Business Zone, even if they have seen a lot of written descriptions about the business zone, and heard more people say that this place is prosperous, they already have a certain understanding and imagination of the prosperity of the business zone, but when they see it with their own eyes, they will still be shocked.

Qin Zhifu is the same, he has already seen a lot of descriptions of the business zone, but when he saw it with his own eyes, he was still shocked!

Before approaching the wharf, you can see many ships crowded together in the harbor from a distance, small boats shuttling among them, and among the many small boats, there are also a few large sea ships, most of which are traditional sea ships in Southeast Asian waters, fortune ships, Guangzhou ships, sand boats and even other forms of ships are everything, and a small number of them are soft sail Western Galen ships, Clark ships.

Even the small ones are two or three hundred tons, and the big ones are five or six hundred tons or even seven or eight hundred tons.

Qin Zhifu, as the commander-in-chief of Nanao Island in the former Ming Dynasty, has been in contact with many ships, but it is the first time he has seen so many ships, of course, what shocked him even more was that there was a huge building complex on a small hill near the port.

Even if the distance was a little far, he could still see at a glance that this was a large-scale battery group, and the vaguely exposed cannon muzzles on it made people a little inexplicably frightened.

Although he couldn't see the scene on the shore at this time, the crowd of ships on the pier alone showed how prosperous this place was!

After the boat docked, Qin Zhifu boarded the dock, and there were all kinds of people coming and going as far as he could see, and many of these people were strangely dressed, with strange appearances, hooked noses and red hair, and there were many foreigners who were as ugly as evil ghosts.

Immersing yourself in it makes you feel like you're in a strange world.

Rao is well-informed Qin Zhifu was shocked when he saw this scene.

Perhaps seeing Qin Zhifu's surprise, the naval captain who accompanied him said in a proud tone: "My Datang Guangzhou Trade Zone has only been established for two years, but in just two years, it has become the largest port in East Asia, and there are more than ten ships and dozens of ships traveling to and from the trade zone every month. Due to the large number of ships coming and going, the wharf built in the early days was overwhelmed, and three large wharves were built in succession. ”

As he spoke, he pointed to the endless wharf and said: "After long-term construction, the port of the business zone now has a total of four large wharves, which can berth more than 50 ships of more than 100 tons at the same time, and 15 of them are deep-water berths, which can berth huge ships of more than 1,000 tons and a draft of 10 meters!" ”

"In order to solve the problem of cargo loading and unloading, the terminal is equipped with all kinds of machinery and equipment, and it is rumored that steam engine lifting equipment will be introduced in the near future.

"Two months ago, in order to solve the problem of serious accumulation of goods at the wharf and difficult transportation, we laid a number of special railways from the berth to the port warehouse area, and through the special rail carriage, the goods can be quickly and labor-saving!"

As he spoke, he also pointed to a large carriage pulled by two horses in front of him: "This is the rail carriage specially developed by our Datang Royal Institute of Technology for the port area!" ”

When Qin Zhifu first looked at this carriage, he didn't see anything strange, the only special thing was that he felt that this carriage was not a common two-wheeled carriage, but a four-wheeled carriage, in addition, this carriage was a bit big, and it was loaded with a lot of goods, and it was extremely heavy at a glance, but there were only two horses pulling the carriage, which made Qin Zhifu a little puzzled, how could these two horses pull such a big carriage!

But if you look closely, you can see that the trajectory of the carriage is always limited to those two rails, and the wheels are different from ordinary wheels, not wooden, but iron.

You can hear the sound of iron wheels and rails crashing in the distance!

Just looking at the rails, carriages and rails, as well as all kinds of machinery and equipment on the dock that are not famous, all of them made Qin Zhifu feel eye-opening!

In fact, not only Qin Zhifu, but also many outsiders will be full of curiosity and even puzzlement about many special things in the Guangzhou Business Zone when they first come to the Guangzhou Business Zone.

Not to mention outsiders, even the insiders of the Tang Dynasty were curious and even surprised at first about this port, which was different from other ports.

The reason why the Guangzhou Business Zone is so unique is naturally inseparable from the efforts of Li Xuan and the Royal Institute of Technology and Zhaoqing Machinery Branch, which were independent from the young military camp.

As a modern person, Li Xuan put forward many construction suggestions when planning the business zone, including the installation of various types of loading and unloading machinery and equipment, and the railway system.

Especially for the railway system, Li Xuan was very concerned, personally formulated the relevant design plan of the railway, and then asked the Institute of Science and Technology to improve it.

He knew that the current steam engine technology was not enough to make horse-drawn carriages, and the funds and manpower required to build the railway were very large, and the Tang Dynasty would not be able to build a real steam engine-driven railway system in a short period of time, but this did not prevent him from experimenting with one or two first.

The business area and some mining areas, where the amount of logistics and transportation is very large, have become the best test sites.

If the steam engine used as the power is not up to standard, then it will be pulled by horses first, and if large-scale railways cannot be built, small railways of several kilometers and kilometers will be built first.

Li Xuan put forward a general design plan, and the students and teachers of the Institute of Technology, who came from the young military camp, were responsible for the detailed design plan, and then the machinery branch under the Zhaoqing Arsenal was responsible for the specific manufacturing and even construction.

First of all, a test operation was carried out in an iron ore mining area, and a test was found that although the construction cost of the railway is relatively high, the efficiency of transportation has been greatly improved, and only in terms of cost, it has saved at least five times the cost compared with the previous simple manpower and storage transportation.

The officials at the Ministry of Industry were overjoyed by this discovery, so they were preparing to build such railways in several other mining areas.

Later, this railway system was simply introduced in the trade area.

However, the cost of building a railway is too high, and it requires special maintenance and special carriages, and the use of horses to pull vehicles, the capacity is actually relatively small, so the operating costs are not low. Therefore, it is necessary to effectively reduce the transportation cost in a place where the transportation volume is very large.

If it is in other ordinary places, it is difficult to recover the construction cost.

And Li Xuan is also quite satisfied with this, the current railway is only an experimental railway, and it will continue to improve while using it on a small scale, so that when the steam engine technology is improved, especially after the high-pressure steam engine is made, the railway system with the steam train as the core can be built on a large scale.

When many railways began to be built and put into use, it also announced that Datang had entered the era of the industrial revolution.

And now, what Li Xuan has to do is to make all kinds of preparations before the arrival of the industrial revolution, so as to be ready to take off at any time!

Qin Zhifu naturally didn't know the story behind this section of the railway and the profound meaning it represented, in fact, not only Qin Zhifu, but most people couldn't see the huge role of the railway.

Many people think that this railway is just a novelty!

Coming out of the wharf, Qin Zhifu continued to walk around the business area accompanied by others, the area of the business area is actually not large, but the place is small, but the people are very dense, and there are many shops, these shops are different from the shops outside, although they also sell at random, but the main thing is to do bulk trade, and the guests received are mainly those maritime merchants.

This is evident from the fact that the currency they used in their transactions was not directly gold and silver, but the silver notes of the Royal Bank.

Because of the frequent large-scale trade in the trade area, the transaction volume is not even hundreds of thousands of taels, but hundreds of thousands or even millions, and it is very common for those maritime merchants to purchase tens of thousands of taels of silver at one time.

In order to implement the silver ticket system, but also because the weight and composition of gold and silver currencies around the world are different, and it is more troublesome to collect cash directly, so the tax collection system adopted by the Datang Tax Department in the trade zone does not collect cash silver, but only collects silver bills from the Royal Bank!

And this forced those merchants to ignore whether they wanted to or not, but in order to pay taxes, they needed to take out a part of the cash to go to the Royal Bank to exchange for silver bills, and when the silver bills could pay taxes, merchants in various places naturally circulated, and merchants also preferred to collect silver bills when they traded large amounts of money in order to avoid all kinds of troubles.

As a result, Royal Bank has set up a super-large branch in a small business district, which is also the largest of the many branches of Royal Bank.

Its exchange department is the largest, and many service windows provide merchants from all over the world with gold and silver tickets for silver tickets!

Of course, this service of the Royal Bank is naturally not free, if it is a variety of other messy gold and silver coins to exchange for silver tickets, because it is necessary to identify the gold and silver content, and then after recovering the gold and silver, the Royal Bank will also smelt and recast the gold and silver into standard silver coins and gold coins, so it is gold and silver to exchange for silver tickets, and it is necessary to charge fire consumption.

However, if you are holding the standard silver coins and gold coins issued by the Royal Bank to save money, there is no service fee, and there is no charge for withdrawing cash and cash with the same silver ticket, but you can only get the standard silver coins and gold coins issued by the Royal Bank, and other currencies are not provided.

The Royal Bank did this in order to promote the silver ticket and its own standard gold and silver coins!