Welcome to Daming!

From Nantianmen to Guangzhou, after passing through the customs, John Tillotson looked up at this strange city, and a thought came to his heart - the Ming Empire, I am here!

Ming Empire!

Compared with the Nantianmen, this is the real Daming, Nantianmen, but it is just the border of the Daming.

John Tillotson has never seen so many people!

My first impression of Guangzhou is that there are many people here. However, despite being an important port, it is different from Nantianmen, where you can meet people from all over the world, not only Europeans, Indians and even blacks. But here there are only Ming people.

"Now Daming has fallen an iron curtain, and you don't know what's behind the iron curtain at all."

A few years ago, the Portuguese, who were forced to leave Macau, used to describe the Ming Dynasty in this way. Why did the Iron Curtain fall in Daming? No one knows why, but they didn't close their country, at least not completely, their merchant fleets still sailed around the world, their immigrants still flowed into the colonies, and their goods were still sold all over the world.

But foreigners who want to enter the mainland of Daming must have a visa.

Especially after the Portuguese left Macao, Europe's understanding of the Ming Dynasty became more and more closed, although a large number of European scholars came to the Ming Dynasty with invitations every year, but Europe did not know more and more about the Ming Dynasty.

And the reason why John Tillotson came here is to get to know the Ming Dynasty.

Passing through the port, I slowly walked into the city. On both sides of the street are Ming-style buildings. There were many restaurants, bars, and grocery stores on both sides of the street, and sailors were mixed in, although he had seen in his travelogue that in the mainland of the Ming Empire, Europeans would always attract crowds, but John had not encountered such troubles. Sometimes, he can also meet some European women who are dressed like the women of the Ming Kingdom, and there are even quite a few of them.

"It seems that there are indeed many European women who marry into the Ming Dynasty."

John Tillotson didn't know that in fact, those women came to Daming as a handmaiden, and she could only be concubines at best.

After a walk around Guangzhou, it was time to eat. John didn't care about what he ate, and as a missionary, he never cared about that. And he didn't see a European restaurant in Guangzhou, and in the end he just ate a simple Ming-style lunch in an ordinary restaurant, the chef's skills were very good, the taste of the dishes was also good, and John was very happy to eat, just like in Nantianmen.

He's used to the food.

When the sun was setting, John did not go to the hotel, but sat in the garden in the middle of the street, looking at the street lamps, and almost all the travelogues related to the Ming Dynasty had a description of the "city that never sleeps". This is of course what he is most curious about.

As night fell, John, who was sitting on a bench, saw someone come and put oil lamps into the light box at the top of the lamppost on the side of the road, and the light of the oil lamps reflected on the nearby street more than ten feet away. Although it was getting late, the people on the street had no intention of resting, and the streets were still full of people, and the street lamps illuminated the streets as if it were daytime.

"My God, if every day they light the oil lamps all night, how much will that night be wasted? If this were the case in all cities across the country...... My God, if it were England, England would be bankrupt! ”

However, despite his curiosity, John, who was already very tired after a day of shopping, quickly fell asleep in the hotel and spent his first night in Daming in his dream last night.

"Excuse me, where is the nearest post office?"

The next morning, while John was having breakfast, he asked the guys in the restaurant. When he was in Europe, he heard that there was an agency called the post office in Daming, which could help him deliver letters and parcels to the place he wanted to take as long as he paid a certain amount of money.

Before leaving for Nanjing, John needed to tell Newton the exact time of his arrival in Nanjing, so he needed to send a letter to the other party.

"Sir, if you want to send a letter, you can write a letter first, and then pick up the envelope and stamps at the front desk of the hotel, and when the time comes, the hotel will help you send the letter, of course, you need to buy the stamps yourself."

The guy speaks an official language that is not fluent, and in comparison, his official language is not even as fluent as John's.

"If you want to shoot a telegram, you'll need to go to the telegraph office yourself, but ......"

The guy looked at the foreigner and asked tentatively.

"Are you naturalized?"

"Telegram? Are you talking about the kind of telecommunications that can be received in a day, no matter how far away? ”

John wondered that there has always been a legend in Europe that almost everyone had mentioned that there was a "telegraph" in the Ming Kingdom, a kind of letter transmitted by electricity. No one knows how it works, but it's so fast that it only takes a few hours to deliver a letter, even when thousands of miles apart.

Is this possible?

Throughout Europe, everyone thinks it's an astronomical night talk.

But John knew that this was true, for more than one missionary or scholar had mentioned the telegraph, and even in Newton's letters, the convenience of the telegraph had been mentioned more than once.

However, no one could understand how electricity carried letters compared to the postal network of trains, mail ships, and horses, so until now there have been zero books on telegraph in Europe.

"Yes, but, sir, if you are not a naturalized citizen, you cannot make a telegram through the telecommunications office."

A simple restriction made John give up the idea of going to the telecommunications office, and he went to the front desk of the hotel and asked for a piece of stationery. On a letter he wrote the day he arrived in Nanjing.

When sending the letter, John found that all he needed to do was to put a special little piece of paper on the envelope.

"This is a postage stamp!"

Holding the little stamp, John exclaimed.

Postage stamps are regarded as the greatest invention in Europe, it is printed by the country, and stamps of different denominations can be sent as long as they are attached to the envelope. The convenient and fast postal system of the Ming Dynasty is the envy of scholars from all over Europe, but no European country has established the same postal system so far.

Looking at this beautifully printed stamp, a thought suddenly popped up in John's heart - perhaps, the strength of the Ming Dynasty lies in these unnoticed details.

Why do all you see only steam engines, ships, trains, spinning machines, looms?

John thought to himself that just a small stamp, the postal system it represented, made the Ming Dynasty far ahead of the European countries. In the end, in addition to the few stamps he had bought by mail, John bought an entire stamp, which he intended to keep as a souvenir. He even put a stamp on his diary and made notes on the side.

"The foundation of the empire".

At this time, John himself did not know what his evaluation meant, which meant that Europeans saw for the first time that the Ming Empire ruled this huge empire, and the postal system was the most important link in it. It's just that in many cases, it is ignored by scholars from all over the world.

He also didn't know that a few years later, after he returned to England, he loudly called for the establishment of the British postal system, and it took more than ten years to finally build the postal system in England, which also made Europe the first country in Europe with a postal system, and the second was the Byzantine Empire.

On the afternoon of the third day of his arrival in Guangzhou, John got on the train with excitement. In fact, the reason why it has been delayed until now is that the sleeper tickets for the train from Guangzhou to Wuchang have been sold out, and there is no way, so he has to postpone the trip. Of course, there is another reason, because John wants not to waste time, he wants to inspect the cities he passes through along the way, and Guangzhou is naturally the first stop.

However, even so, for the past three days, John has been like a curious teenager, full of curiosity about the train, and when he came to the platform in a happy mood, he was in shock when he looked at the long train and the crowded people on the platform.

Even when he entered the carriage, he looked at the bedroom-like carriage, and he still hadn't come back to his senses.

How can there be such a carriage?

How did the train take away so many cars and so many people?

Undoubtedly, a question lingered in John's mind, and he was full of curiosity about everything on the train.

The cramped, but comfortable, bed, became his resting place for the next few days, and for the first time he experienced the convenience of train travel.

When the train crossed the mountains in the mountains of Lingnan, looking at the charming scenery outside the carriage, John, who was sitting in the dining car enjoying the meal, was fascinated by all this for the first time, not for the scenery, but because of a completely different feeling.

"How? Is there an illusion that you are in heaven? ”

The words that suddenly came into his ears made John look up at the opposite side, and at some point in the seat opposite, there was a person, a European.

"My name is Wilhelm, Swiss."

William looked at the confusion on his face and continued to explain.

"I used to be Swiss, and I came to Ming five years ago. I was like you at the time, and after I came here, I found myself in a very different world, a very different world from the one we are familiar with, just like ...... now."

William pointed to the mountains speeding by outside the car window and continued.

"When we were enjoying our meal on the train and before we knew it, we were already hundreds of miles away, and in Europe, people were still stuck in primitive carriages, my friend, can you imagine that you could enjoy it all so comfortably?"

William's rhetorical question made John nod thoughtfully, and he said with a smile after a long time.

"Heaven is God's creation, isn't it?"