At the end of July, the newly formed fleet of Rio Gran do Sul Ocean Lines arrived in Southeast Asia, making its first stop at the Natuna Islands.

The shipping company has more than 150 ocean-going vessels with a displacement of more than 500 tons, and since the maiden voyage only needs to carry more than 10,000 Southeast Asian Chinese, one-third of the ships came to this voyage, and there are about 50 ships.

With the establishment of an ocean shipping company, the task of the fleet is not only to transport migrants, but also to carry goods on the route between mainland South America and Asia.

South America is rich in animal and plant resources, and high-yield crops such as corn, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and potatoes were spread to Asia and other places by European colonizers, increasing local food production and feeding more people.

And cocoa, mahogany, sandalwood, mahogany, balm wood, snake mulberry, cinnamon, cinchona and other plants with medicinal value due to the picky living environment, not as widely spread as sweet potatoes and potatoes, the source is limited to the American continent, the output is limited, the price has been high, there is a lot of profit margin, so in addition to the storage of living materials and weapons and equipment, the remaining space in the fleet is full of preliminary processing of plant medicines, cocoa, and some selected cinchona seeds.

After the fleet arrived in Southeast Asia, cocoa and botanical medicinal materials were quickly sold in batches at high prices to the kings and merchants of the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Annam, etc., while the seeds of cinchona trees were planted in suitable locations in the Natuna Islands by more than a dozen specially recruited South American Indians.

Cinchona trees are suitable for living in humid and rainy areas, and in later generations, the southern part of Yunnan Province, Taiwan Island, Indonesia, and Malaya were the main producing areas of cinchona trees except for South America.

Southeast Asia has a tropical rainforest climate and a natural environment similar to much of South America, and the fleet planted cinchona trees in the Natuna Islands in consideration of natural factors on the one hand, and for greater profits on the other.

In 1850, the British extracted the anti-dysentery drug quinine from the cinchona tree, which solved the greatest threat to the lives of colonists in the tropics.

After the invention of quinine, European colonists began to gradually expand their sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and Africa, and Annam, Burma, Malaya, and the East Indies gradually fell, and European colonists became more and more powerful in Southeast Asia.

The invention of quinine was of great significance to European colonists, but in 1869, about 19 years after the invention of quinine, the manufacturing cost of quinine was not effectively reduced due to the limited source of cinchona trees, which limited the large-scale use of quinine.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a historical stage of rapid changes in science and technology, and the raw materials for industrial and pharmaceutical industries such as rubber and cinchona discovered in South America increased rapidly in the following decades with the improvement of science and technology.

The Europeans have mastered the production process of quinine drugs, and the reason why they have not introduced cinchona trees on a large scale to other regions is mainly because they have not chosen a suitable place to plant transplanted seedlings, and this limitation can be solved in a few years with their gradual exploration and experimentation.

After discussing with Sun Bin and others, the head of the fleet left most of the sales profits as the cost of immigration, and the rest was used to buy and recruit Chinese craftsmen from all over the South Seas.

For example, when Henan encountered a famine, the local people habitually fled to Gansu and Shaanxi, Shandong residents flocked to the northeast, and refugees from Hebei and Shanxi fled to the Hetao Plain and Mongolian steppes inhabited by nomads.

The northern Han people migrated north to the grassland to flee for the nomads to bring much-needed technical talents, and then the nomads relied on the fleeing Han craftsmen to develop a military manufacturing system, and strengthened their own strength to launch an invasion of the Central Plains.

Compared with the north, the miasma is rampant in the south, and the indigenous people in Southeast Asia are not as aggressive as the northern nomads due to the favorable local natural environment, and the Han people who fled to Southeast Asia quickly integrated into the local area, which had little impact on the Central Plains.

Rio Gran do Sul is a long way from Asia, and the Chinese who went to South America voluntarily or involuntarily were at the bottom of society, and except for a few anti-Qing rebels who had rudimentary knowledge, there were very few traditional craftsmen among the common people.

In terms of industry, because the industry in the second half of the twentieth century was just in the early stage of rapid development, under the guidance of Prussian skilled workers, Chinese apprentices could learn from scratch, while traditional Chinese industries, such as tea-making, porcelain refining, and Chinese-style wooden buildings, required skilled craftsmen with more than three or four years of experience.

The development of industry will eliminate most of the technological enterprises in the feudal period, and when Prussian experts and technicians helped build factory facilities in Rio Gran do Sul, Li Mingyuan was not very concerned about the lack of talents in traditional Chinese industries, because in the later era of industrialization, Li Mingyuan was accustomed to accepting industrial products and had little contact with traditional industries in his daily life.

At this time, in addition to the forced change of clothing under the rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Han people maintained traditional habits in their daily life.

When Li Mingyuan inspected the construction of various parts of Rio Grande do Sul, he often found that many Chinese families who had just started a family had withdrawn from the temporary collective wooden houses, and five or six Chinese retired soldiers who knew each other well formed a construction team to help each other transport timber on their land and build simple Chinese-style wooden houses.

Li Mingyuan was a little strange as to why they did not live in the houses assigned to them, and only after asking them did he understand that most of the Chinese were very dissatisfied with the Western-style brick houses left by the Brazilians, and thought that the Western-style houses were not only uncomfortable to live in but also ugly, and were not as airy and beautiful as the Chinese-style wooden houses. So even if they were given a Western-style brick house, they wanted to build a Chinese-style wooden house suitable for living.

The inertia of traditional culture has a great influence on the Chinese, and there are many similar things about the construction of Chinese-style wooden houses in Rio Gran do Sul, and Wang Pu and the officials in charge of government affairs in Rio Gran do Sul have also repeatedly put forward similar suggestions to Li Mingyuan, hoping to relocate more Chinese craftsmen from the mainland to solve the problem of inconvenient life for the Chinese in Rio Gran do Sul. Thus, the ocean-going fleet has added a new task to the completed tasks of migration.

Sun Bin accepted the task of selecting some Chinese craftsmen from Annam as the first batch of Nanyang immigrants, and at the same time sent his subordinates to Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai and other European concession areas to recruit craftsmen as Chinese businessmen in Annam. ……

After spending half a month in Nanyang and receiving 11,000 ordinary immigrants and 1,000 craftsmen, the fleet set off for South America in mid-August, while Sun Bin continued to be responsible for the task of recruiting Chinese craftsmen.