Port Merlin, September 5, 1644.

As an important inland river port and railway transshipment hub in China, it is the time when the wharf of Meilin Port is full of people at this time. Sweating profusely, uniformed General Railways administrators directed a large number of freight rail wagons to stop at designated locations, and then more than 200 Shandong immigrants in brand-new uniforms, wearing cotton gauze gloves, unloaded boxes of heavy supplies from the cars and stacked them aside. Several staff officers of the military headquarters opened these boxes and checked them one by one with the lists to see if there were any mistakes or omissions.

These were supplies to be sent to Fort Lower Yi to the west, with brand-new Type 32-C flintlock rifles, 41-year steel bayonets, barbed wire, hand-thrown bombs, and even a few artillery pieces, almost all of which were war materiel. Just last week, the War Department officially ordered the reformation of the Army's 3rd Company's reserve in Coal River Township, the 103rd Army Company, which had already been disbanded. After the formation of the company, it will be stationed and trained in the area of Canyon Fort in the west, so as to ensure the smooth development of the area and the safety of the construction of the railway along the way.

With the launch of the strategy of developing the western region of China, the location advantages of Meilin Port have become more and more apparent. In addition to machinery and fuel transported from the northern industrial zone, all weapons, grain, farm implements, livestock and people sent from the southern region were transshipped at the port of Merlin, which brought the Neihu port city, which was built more than three years ago, to a new level of prosperity. With the continuous migration in recent years, the population of this new city has officially exceeded 2,500 as of yesterday, and if you include the nearby Fort Chouy and the newly built Qishan Fort in the northwest, a new urban belt at the mouth of the lower reaches of the Yi River is beginning to take shape.

In this urban belt with Port Merlin as the regional core. The simultaneous development of industry and agriculture will be its most important economic form. Thereinto. Meilin Port will build the production, design and manufacture of freight rail carriages with the Southern Vehicle Factory as the core; Meantime. Also settled in the Meilin Harbor Engineering Technology Research Institute of the Institute of Vehicles will focus on the research and development of steam locomotives, after more than two years of research, has overcome the transmission system, coupler buffer device, braking device, pressure spring shock absorption system and a series of technical problems, the next will continue to tackle the wheelset system (including axle box, bogie, traction device, etc.), tube boiler, bearing system, high-horsepower Barbarian -4 steam engine, turnout system and so on more technical difficulties. Only by overcoming these technical problems can the people of the East Coast pick this delicate flower of industry.

These things don't just pat your head. To put it mildly, as long as you haven't been exposed to early steam locomotive design, even if you bring more things from the modern era, it will be useless. This thing is much more complex than the steam power system on a ship, and a simple braking system involves multiple technical links such as materials, casting, machining, and transmission. The name of the flower of industry is not called for nothing.

At present, some people who have a certain amount of primitive accumulation have set up small workshops in Meilin Port, such as carriage body processing, anti-corrosion, such as the production of shock absorbing springs and so on. They had a lot of money, and directly ordered some relatively backward hydraulic machine tools from a machine factory, and then recruited workers to start work. Such a capital advantage is difficult for immigrants in this time and space to compare, to know that the cheapest price of a set of hydraulic machine tools in Ludao is 300 yuan, and it is subject to the strict supervision of the State Intelligence Administration, and pays a high deposit. This is not something they can afford if they have not yet completed their original capital accumulation. Of course, these small factories can only afford to manufacture some small parts. In order to supplement the lack of processing capacity of the southern vehicle factory itself, however, the vehicle manufacturing and some parts processing with high technical content and more lucrative profits in the future are still strictly prohibited from private capital entry.

And Chuy Harbor, which is located only seven or eight kilometers east of Merlin Harbor. It is more dominated by animal husbandry. The inhabitants are mainly backward Samogitians and more than 700 new Koreans, who herd cattle, raise government-fed horses, and serve as natural sentinels for the coastal areas. In addition, a small amount of crops are planted, and some agricultural and sideline products are sent to Merlin Harbor to be sold at the market time to earn some cash income, which is typical of the natural economy of rural areas in the south.

Unlike Fort Chowy, Fort Qishan, located more than twenty kilometers northwest of Port Merlin, is much stronger. At least the large area of land near the estuary here is relatively fertile, and the harvest is quite good if it is used to grow crops. At present, more than 1,000 residents of the fort have lived in the past, engaged in agricultural planting, poultry breeding, fishing, ship repair and other work, and the agricultural economy also occupies the main body.

The staff officers reattached the seals on the inspected containers and motioned for the dockers to load the goods onto the ship via a steam boom. The ships that were already loaded with goods, under the command of the port authority staff, honked their whistles, and sailed out of the Meilin Port wharf, which was full of ships, and headed for Lake Milin. The cargo ship crossed the Merlin River into Lake Mirin, then turned left into the Yi River, and continued its way up to the lower Yihe Fort Wharf. Once at the Lower River Fort, most of the goods and personnel will disembark and wait for the arrival of some freight wagons to transport them to the Canyon Fort to the north.

The Canyon Fort is located four or five kilometers east of the later Kuevos Gorge, where there is a lot of small surface runoff, mostly tributaries of the Yi River to the south. The soil is moderately fertile and there are not many forests, but the strategic location is quite important. Less than 100 kilometers north of here is Merlot, the northern town of what would become Uruguay. The Merlot area is bordered by the Negro River in the west, the Agualong River in the north, and the Lake Mirin in the east. More importantly, the Merlot region was opened up, and then along the Negro River to the north, it entered the edge of the hilly area west of Duck Lake, thus connecting the inland areas of the north and south of the country through ground transportation.

Of course, it is still far from the development of the Merlot area, and the first step is to build the first stronghold of Canyon Fort, which extends to the north. The first group of about 300 immigrants from Ming Shandong had arrived a few days earlier, and before they arrived, five platoons (55 people) of cavalry had arrived at the Canyon Fort site with their own equipment to protect hundreds of South African laborers to build infrastructure such as railway stations.

Most of the 300 Ming immigrants came from Ninghai Prefecture, and almost all of them were elite men, so they worked more efficiently. They unloaded a large amount of supplies and tools from the wagons, and then began to build temporary living cabins, toilets, bathhouses and other facilities under the command of several East Bank cadres. Nowadays, the people of the East Coast are not too familiar with the pioneer and reclamation, so they have summed up an effective pioneer manual. Every time you go to a location, you only need to follow the manual to operate, which one to build first, which one to build, what to pay attention to, and what to add are clearly written in the manual, and a process has been formed.

The place of Canyon Fort, except for a few small streams and a few sparse woods, is full of grassy plains. There are no large dangerous animals in the vicinity, but in the mountains to the west, it is said that there are some vicious villages of Charua. They were sheltered by Spanish missionaries and also received a certain degree of military training and material support. The Spaniards were not stupid, and they could not have been unwary of the westward movement of the East Coasters, although at the moment relations between the two countries were normal or even slightly friendly - because of the Dutch, but this did not mean that they would let the East Coasters move on their nominal territory and remain indifferent.

Just as they supported the Guarani in the northern Paraná mission against the Brazilian slave catchers, the Jesuit friars who were missionary in the East Bank were very interested in arming the Charua. They set up several mission areas in a large area east of the Uruguay River and west of the West Ridge, and sent a dozen monks to spread the faith and teach the Charuas to grow crops and raise livestock. On the other hand, they armed the barbarians with weapons such as arquebuses and spears brought from the region of La Plata, and instigated them to confront the people of the East Bank.

These missionaries hated the East Bank government, which had appointed its own Archbishop and was trying to suppress the development of Catholicism, so in the face of the aggressive westward expansion of the East Bankers, they began to slander the Charuas that the East Coasters had usurped their land—perhaps this was really not a slander—and then called on the fierce Charuya to resist, not to be intimidated by the East Coast army, and not to bow the knee to the East Coasters—because the East Coasters would send them all to South Africa.

The will to resist is extremely tenacious, but the problem is that they are too few in number. Historically, there may have been fewer than 10,000 or perhaps only six or seven thousand indigenous people in Uruguay, and they were scattered over a vast area the size of the entire province of Guangdong in China. Although the density of indigenous people in the Negro River basin is relatively high, it is not much higher, after all, the base is so large. Therefore, in order to cause greater trouble for the people on the east coast and to curb their ambitions to move westward, the Jesuit monks tried to persuade the officials of the West Indies to intervene to stop the cross-border reclamation of the people on the east coast through their connections with the upper echelons of the Spanish kingdom. On the one hand, some merchant organizations also preached the "wealth" of the east bank in La Plata, which attracted some bitter gaucho horse bandits to "make a fortune".

With the establishment of the Northern Canyon Fort at the Lower Yi River Fort, the conflict between the two sides reached its peak in late August. For this reason, the cavalry battalion had to send dozens of cavalry northward again to stabilize the situation there. On the last day of August, 240 officers and men of the heavily armed 103rd Company of the Army also arrived at the Canyon Fort, and Lieutenant Long Xu, who was the company commander, after listening to some reports, decided to carry out reconnaissance of the Charuya in the mountains to the west in preparation for the next military attack on them. (To be continued......)