Inadvertently, the calendar was flipped to 1681, and the port of Yicheng also ushered in a rainy and humid summer.

Today is January 18th, a good day for the official completion of Yicheng Iron Works. To this end, Xiao Jingzong, commissioner of the regional administrative office, Lin Chaoen, magistrate of Yicheng County, and other local officials also attended the ceremony to celebrate.

It is worth mentioning that Lin Chaoen, the magistrate of Yicheng County, was born as an immigrant from the Qing Dynasty, a native of Jiangbei, who was captured by Mo Dashuai in the early years, and after 30 years of hard work, he met the nobles who appreciated him, so he slowly got into the position of Yicheng county magistrate, which was originally seen by many second generations, and it was also an outlier. In addition, his wife Li Mengqin also mixes well, and is currently serving as the president of the Northwest Reclamation Bank.

However, President Li works here in Yicheng, and many people, including Xiao Jingzong, like it very much. For no other reason, the Northwest Reclamation Bank gave the local government great convenience in terms of loans, especially the eye-catching Yicheng Iron Works project, when the United Industrial Credit Bank refused to continue lending because of the shortage of money, it was the Northwest Reclamation Bank that took over in time, so that the project could continue, Xiao Jingzong was extremely satisfied with this, and even had a good eye for his husband Lin Chaoen.

Along with these local officials, there was also a special group of missions, that is, missions from the Kingdom of Korea in the East. This delegation of about 30 people, led by Zhao Chuyan of the Eastern Tour, sent an envoy to the east bank on the order of the Korean Suzong Yi Zhuo, to see the customs and customs of the Eastern Dynasty, and by the way, to purchase some books and return to Korea for research. After being "bullied" by the people on the east coast for so many years, the Korean monarchs and ministers also have self-esteem, and they also want to see what kind of wind and dance the eastern dynasty of the East Dynasty, which can deter them with only one colonial division, and how the DPRK should strengthen itself.

The ship carrying the North Korean mission departed from Ganghwa Island and was a 250-ton standard displacement "Yaksa" class armed transport ship ordered at the Heishui Shipyard, made of oak and pine wood, named "King Hyeonjong", and after being equipped with eight medium-caliber Dongzhou naval guns, it has become a powerful new warship in the Korean naval division (although the Donghaians position it as a transport ship...... ）。

In addition to carrying the Korean mission, the "King Hyeonjong" also carried a large amount of goods on board, some of which were high-grade medicinal materials and furs for gifts (including state gifts, of course, most of them were gifts for relations), and the rest were intended to be sold publicly in the east bank market to raise funds for the mission. There is no way, the Korean kingdom has never been very rich, and it has been squeezed by the east coast, and the successive kings are relatively stingy, so they can only let the ship bring a batch of goods and sell them to the east coast for money to raise funds.

After arriving at the port of Uiseong, the ships of the North Korean mission stayed here due to a sudden illness and the fact that the ships really needed to be repaired and maintained, and received condolences from the Uiseong District Administration. At this time, the main equipment and plant of the Yicheng Iron Works were officially completed, and Xiao Jingzong, the commissioner of the regional administrative office, was happy to invite the Koreans to attend the ceremony, intending to let these buns also see the power of industry, and by the way, plant the seeds of the great eastern coast in their hearts.

Sure enough, several principal officials of the North Korean mission headed by Zhao Chuyan lost their minds for a while after seeing the huge iron-making furnace. Later, they visited the ore crushing yard, the flat rail transport system, the foundry and so on, and the impact was even greater. During this period, some low-level officials of the DPRK carefully inquired about some details, and Xiao Jingzong smiled when he saw it, and did not stop it, because the North Koreans asked in vain, with the primitive and crude metal smelting level in their country, it is absolutely impossible to achieve this modern steel smelting system of the people on the east coast in one step. They love to ask, so let them ask, in the face of modern industry with a relatively fine division of labor, they can't ask too many useful things. In the end, what they could bring back was at best the exaggerated and unrealistic descriptions of the unskilled literati and Confucian scholars, and perhaps they were full of critical words.

And since it is an iron-making plant, it naturally needs raw materials such as coal and iron ore. Naturally, there is no need to worry about coal, because the large coal mine in Chenggao County next door has now entered the stage of actual mining, and more than 500 native soldiers from the Eight Banners of the island, supported by Xinhua, have driven more than 5,000 black slave laborers to mine raw coal while building roads, houses, and coal washing plants.

The reason why so many slaves — ah no, labor laborers — are available cannot fail to mention the stormy offensive of the East coasters on the Swahili coast of East Africa in recent years. It is said that since Qiu Haiyang, the new official of the three fires, decided to send troops to the waters around the island to fight the disobedient Moorish princes, a huge number of Swahili blacks were transported by the east coast army to the Comoros Islands, a transit base. Subsequently, after the selection of these Swahilians in the Comoros concentration camps, more than half of them were sent to the island's major state-owned plantations, quarries, forestry farms, coal mines, iron mines, gold mines, graphite mines, brick kilns, and construction teams as heavy manual laborers. The remaining half of the people were sent to Yicheng County, Chenggao County, and Yiyang Bay to participate in the construction, and even the local area also shared a lot of Swahili labor force - of course, it was not given for free to the locals, in fact, the new Huaxia Island side exchanged a considerable amount of local obsolete machinery and equipment for this, which played a greater role in local production.

Now, although Qiu Haiyang has resigned from the position of the captain of the New China Pioneer Team, and the battle of conquest has come to an end, because there are so many people captured before, the difficulty of labor shortage that has plagued the Yicheng area for a long time has long been not a problem. They divided the massive labor force into several groups, worked separately, and successively completed the second phase of the expansion of the Yicheng Port Wharf, the construction of several third-class national highways in the county, and the Chenggao Coal Mine was successfully built, and entered the stage of formal commercial production, in addition to supplying the local consumption, but also exported a large number of them to the river and even the local area, and obtained a lot of profits.

In addition, as the "supporting infrastructure" of the Yicheng Iron Works, as early as 1677, the Yicheng Railway, which was recognized by the whole region and intended to be built "no matter how difficult it is", has also made great progress thanks to the efforts of these black laborers: by the end of 1680, the Yicheng Railway had been built for more than 50 kilometers, more than one-third of the total design length, and it is believed that if there was still a big gap in funds, the whole line would have been completed by the end of last year.

However, it is true that the railway can no longer be delayed, and the Chenggao Coal Mine and the Yicheng Ironworks at both ends of the railway have already been built, and if it is only transported by a Yicheng second-class domestic transportation, it will not only be less efficient, but also very costly, and the road is not very safe - don't doubt this, there are many Tonga, Zulu and Swazi people who have great hatred for the people of the east coast, and it is not uncommon for convoys to be attacked in recent years.

In order to overcome this difficulty, Xiao Jingzong, commissioner of the Yicheng District Administration Office, went to Xinhua Port by boat last month to hold some consultations with Peng Yuanzhi, who is in charge of the work of Xinhuaxia Island, and planned to borrow a batch of materials and funds so that the railway, which was about to run out of rice, could continue. However, Peng Yuanzhi was only the acting captain who temporarily presided over the work, and he had no right to decide on the disposal of such a large amount of money and property, so in the end, Xiao Jingzong was still disappointed.

In the end, Xiao Jingzong borrowed 100,000 yuan from the Northwest Reclamation Bank, where his wife was the branch president, through the path of Lin Chaoen, the magistrate of Yicheng County, for emergency relief. But this amount of money is undoubtedly a drop in the bucket for the Yicheng Railway Project, which is still short of about one million yuan, and it will not last too long. If we want to solve the financial problem, we still have to obtain a large loan or directly attract investment from the central government, but this seems to be a little difficult at present.

In the end, Xiao Jingzong reluctantly decided to "lend" a group of 6,000 black laborers (including a large number of Tonga, Swazi and so on) to the State Railway Administration, which needed a large number of laborers to build the railway, in exchange for them to "donate" a batch of railway equipment worth about 200,000 yuan to the Yicheng District Administration for free. However, this act of sending out labor suddenly emptied the reserve slave labor reserve in the Yicheng area, so Xiao Jingzong gritted his teeth and ordered Mao Jun, Tang Moyu and other major military officials in the region, so that they could desperately search for and arrest Xhosa, Zulu, Tonga and Swazi in the vicinity, and replenish the labor reserve of the region that had suffered serious blood loss.

"The Yicheng Ironworks was a project that was brought in by the former Commissioner Qiu and was called a 'miracle' at the time, which shows the importance of this national investment project to the future development of our region. I Xiao someone also has the same attitude, Yicheng Iron Works wants to produce, not to produce, I don't want the brand-new factory to be exposed to the sun and rain, and the new equipment is rusty and idle, and it must be used! In order to make the Yicheng Iron Works run normally, the key points lie in two places, one is that our own Yicheng Railway must do everything possible to complete it as soon as possible, which is a hard task, and there is no reason to delay; These two are also very important to us on the side of the new Huaxia development team, when their Kanghua iron ore mine will be able to produce iron ore stably. Alas, I can't rush too much about this matter, after all, the people of Xinhuaxia Island have helped us a lot, and the project of this iron factory was snatched from them by Commissioner Qiu, alas, I can't say anything about urging. After visiting the inauguration ceremony, Xiao Jingzong led a group of people to walk to the factory canteen to eat a working meal, and said to the attachés who followed him on the way.

Xiao Jingzong's words actually mean something. Officials in the Yicheng area all know that the original iron plant project Xinhuaxia Island has been fighting, and the reason is also ready-made, there is a large pyrite mine in the Kanghua Port area, and it is accompanied by gold and silver, which is very valuable for mining. For this reason, they have been campaigning for many years, trying to persuade the Government Council and even the Executive Committee to agree to build a steel smelting enterprise there, and in the end there are even faint signs of success, and the bigwigs of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce have relentlessly agreed to set up a small iron-making plant in Kanghua Port in order to make use of local resources nearby and develop the local economy.

But who would have thought that Qiu Haiyang, who was the commissioner of the Yicheng District Administration at the time, had great powers, and after going to the central ministries and commissions to run around, he cut off the project and made it settle in the Yicheng area, and the scale of investment also doubled, which made the people of Xinhuaxia Island almost crooked their noses. However, after all, people are high-spirited, especially after Qiu Haiyang's lightning transfer to the position of the captain of the New China Pioneer Team, the largest island colony under the rule of the east coast has continuously provided a large amount of money, food, materials and labor for the Yicheng area, and even has continued to the present, which is quite touching - of course, to a certain extent, this is actually a mutually beneficial thing, Southern Africa, does need a steel production center, and this center is built in Yicheng Port, It is already an acceptable result for the new Huaxia Island! You know, Renhezhong has been trying to fight for a steel project for many years, but it is really not competitive in terms of resources, and finally lost to the Yicheng area. Therefore, since he has determined that he will not be able to get this project, it is acceptable to give it to Yicheng Port, in short, he cannot let it settle in the river, which is too far away from Xinhuaxia Island.

"Commissioner Xiao, you don't have to worry too much about this. The matter of Kanghua pyrite, Xinhuaxia is actually quite anxious, but now their new captain (Shao Yaoguang) is not in place, and the acting Peng Yuanzhi is disheartened and has no big moves. I believe that after Captain Shao takes office next month, this project will enter the substantive development stage. Anyway, I heard from a fellow who works in Kanghua Port that the wharf has been repaired a long time ago, and the mine has been opened up, but now there is a shortage of manpower and I have not received instructions from my superiors for development. If you really want to get started, it's actually quite fast. When Lin Chaoen, the magistrate of Yicheng County, heard this, he comforted and said: "And their mine is an pyrite mine associated with gold and silver, and the scale is not small. According to the above ruling, the gold and silver separated from the smelting belonged to the Xinhuaxia Pioneer Team, and the smelting expenses were offset with part of the iron ore. In this way, they don't have to give anything, they just ship the ore and sell it to us, and then they can sit on the ground and collect the money, and the profit is extremely huge. With this factor, they will definitely redouble their efforts. Don't worry, Commissioner Xiao, I guess they're more anxious than us, hehe. ”

"Well, that's right." Xiao Jingzong smiled faintly and said, "I hope that's the case." ”