Streamer old shadows, memories freeze.

The roar of steam at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata will be forever engraved in the hearts of the immigrants.

The mouth of the Río de la Plata is the starting point for entry into the interior of the mainland and the largest destination for migrants from abroad.

About 40 percent of the expatriate settlers set foot on South American soil here, and then dispersed to the vast expanse of the mainland through the water tributaries of the Paraná River and the Chang'an-Songjiang railway line.

Sending off large ships flying the British flag,

Welcoming batch after batch of trawlers laden with marine fishery products, on the busy waterway of the La Plata estuary,

The Han Empire, with its firm and broad mind, welcomed a fleet of Far Eastern immigrants composed of more than 60 large and medium-sized ocean-going transport ships.

After nearly two months of long sea voyages, bumpy and boring cabin life, and about to reach their final destination, the migrants on the transport ship were so excited that they ran to the deck and looked up at the familiar and unfamiliar land at the end of the ocean.

The reason why they are familiar is because before they arrived in South America, they had learned a lot about the customs and customs of the Han country in South America from their neighbors and friends, such as the fields where wheat, sorghum and rice are grown everywhere in South America, and there are countless cattle and sheep in the mountains and forests and grasslands, and the people there have piles of small mountains of grain at home, and they can eat rice made of rice every day, so they don't have to worry about starvation.

In southern Fujian, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Liangguang and even the northern coastal areas, there are all kinds of magical legends about the Han Kingdom.

The people who have never been far away, have not stepped out of the surrounding area of a hundred kilometers away, when they first heard this rumor, they did not believe it, they just regarded this kind of talk as a gonzo, because according to their inherent experience, a year of hard work for the landlords to cultivate the land, every day to be able to eat two crude nests, glutinous food, is a rare happy life, as rumored to be, every day can eat exquisite rice, steamed buns, three or five days to eat meat, it is simply a fairy days, It's okay for ordinary people to listen to it as a joke, and it is almost impossible to expect such a good thing to fall on them.

Being on both sides of the world, coupled with the blockade and backwardness of the areas under the Qing government (in the 1890s, there were only more than 100 government-run and private industrial enterprises, and the degree of closure can be imagined. ），

Not only do ordinary people not know the real economy and living standards of the Han Kingdom in South America, but even those officials who claim to be proficient in foreign affairs also know very little about the real situation of the Han Kingdom in South America.

For those who have heard or learned a little about the Han Kingdom in South America, less than one-tenth of the total population of the Far East mainland is still less than one-tenth of the total population, but only this proportion of the population is less than one-tenth, and it has also brought a migrant population far beyond the transportation capacity of the mainland.

Every year, 10,000 immigrants are admitted, and more overseas immigrants are resettled in Songkhla, Lanfang and other places.

The huge and magnificent wave of immigrants to the sea changed the demographic structure of the Han Kingdom in South America, and also changed the fate of nearly 10 million Chinese in the Far East.

Transport ships docked at the shore, and migrants with yellow and thin faces lined up in long lines, and under the guidance of government officials in charge of immigration affairs, they were orderly transferred to the shore to repair and rest.

Not far from the mouth of La Plata, where the coastal port of Songjiang Province is located, in order to settle and transfer a large number of migrants, the local government has built a total of more than 100,000 independent brick houses within a radius of 20 kilometers from the port, and is equipped with enough living and medical supplies to accept 200,000 migrants for temporary residence and repair.

Absorbing Chinese immigrants is a basic national policy alongside encouraging childbirth, establishing education, and developing industry.

The Han government vigorously recruited and resettled Chinese immigrants, not only out of the needs of local development, but also out of morality and responsibility to the nation and the country.

Looking at the four or five-year-old, seven or eight-year-old orphans who walked down the boat one after another, and looking at their frightened and fearful expressions in their arms with their more immature brothers and sisters, no hot-blooded young man with a conscience would let go.

The emperor of the Han Dynasty was well-known for attaching great importance to the relief and raising of orphaned children on the mainland, and those young naval officers who had just graduated from military academies and entered the ocean-going transport fleet as ordinary sailors for a one-year internship period took the emperor's teachings and ideas as beliefs.

According to the group of young officers of the army and navy, this is called a sense of national responsibility and sincere patriotism, in their eyes, every Chinese child who migrated to South America and lost their parents is the future and hope of the country.

When the youth is strong, the country is strong! If the youth is weak, the country is weak! Orphaned children are a suffering generation, and young officers have the responsibility and obligation to forge ahead for the rise of the country, and they do not want to see what orphaned children have experienced repeatedly in their descendants!

The words that the young officers of the Songjiang Port Naval Military Base had on their lips every day appeared in their minds, and Han Guoxing and Niu Shangzhou, deputy director of the shipyard, did not have a deep understanding at first, but after seeing the frightened and helpless eyes of the orphaned children and their poor physical state, Niu Shangzhou's mood also changed drastically.

Niu Shangzhou (born in 1861, the first batch of young children to study in the United States) was born in a wealthy family in the south, and went to the United States to study in accordance with the instructions of the Qing court when he was a teenager.

Later, in 1881, the program for young children in the United States was suspended, and Niu Shangzhou and Xu Zhixuan, Kuang Rongguang, Tan Yaoxun and others accepted the Han Dynasty and returned to South America one after another, and then after five years of study in Germany, he returned to China again in 1887 and was sent to work in Xinghe Shipyard, so that he had a long contact with the young officers of the naval base near Xinghe Shipyard. Niu Shangzhou's understanding of the root causes of the backward rule of the Qing court and the hardships and hardships of the lives of ordinary people in the Far East also deepened.

It was not until today, because Li Mingyuan and several central officials were going to come to Xinghe Shipyard to inspect the completion of the 5,000-ton ship, Niu Shangzhou, director Tong Longfu, and ship technical adviser Thomas Villar personally went to the port to greet them.

Near the offshore dock of the Xinghe Shipyard, unkempt children are dressed in gray cloth clothes that obviously do not fit well, although their faces are flushed with a hint of ruddy (the standards for the distribution of supplies for the migrant fleets are different, and the young children are weaker, and they are given more food and medical care). But the after-effects of long-term hunger still appear on the face.

After all, the standard of living and medical care of the transport fleet is not as good as that on land, and although the young children are better cared for than ordinary young immigrants, these care only meet their basic living and medical needs on board, and it is not sufficient.

In the resettlement bases, orphaned children vary in age, ranging from three to five years old to 11 or 2 years old, some of whom have migrated from the Jiangnan region, and a few of whom belong to the northern region.

In the ranks of young children with a total of two or three thousand people, Niu Shangzhou even saw many children pulling each other, they were either biological sisters, brothers, or close relatives who were related by blood, but no matter how close or close their blood relations were, in the case of their loss of parents and adult relatives, they were young and facing death threats, and they were able to support each other, which was the most touching to Niu Shangzhou.

Xinghe Shipyard is like a small society, and every year a group of orphans who have received primary education are recruited into the factory as apprentices.

In Niu Shangzhou's impression, although many orphans have just turned 14 years old, their physical strength and technical experience are not as good as those of graduates with secondary education.

But perhaps because they have experienced a more difficult life in the past and know how to cherish the hard-won opportunities in front of them, they are very attentive when learning technology, and the technology is progressing very quickly.

In September 1888, when Niu Shangzhou was promoted to deputy director of the Xinghe Shipyard, he heard that the German engineer who was about to return to Europe after the contract expired and sighed: "The whole process of ship construction was carried out by Han workers, and their skill level was no less than that of any European factory worker." And some of them are apprentices who are orphans, who gather around the Han workers and European technical engineers every day, and carefully write down every step and operation of the engineers, their learning spirit is very admirable, and a country with such a group of workers is both respectful and terrifying. ”

The performance of skilled workers and even orphan apprentices in the Han Kingdom may be a little incredible in the eyes of European engineers, but after experiencing the rendering of all aspects of the local propaganda and public opinion of the Han Kingdom and feeling the tenacious character inherited by the Han people since ancient times, it is shown in those ignorant and pure orphaned children.

Niu Shangzhou became accustomed to the evaluation of European technical experts hired by the local government with high salaries.

"Han shipbuilders are very flexible and quick when they work. They clearly possessed the natural skill of controlling and using machine tools, and in every respect, except for their weaker physical strength, the Han workers were comparable to those of any other country in the world. ”

After the first self-built 5,000-ton ocean-going ship in China completed its test voyage, similar admiration from foreign technical experts was often heard.

In the face of more and more praise, Niu Shangzhou only expressed his polite gratitude, and was not complacent, because he knew that compared with the European powers, the civil shipbuilding industry of the Han Kingdom was only at the second-rate level, and the civil shipbuilding industry of Xinghe Shipyard still had a long way to go if it wanted to reach the first-class industry level.