The Royal Railways is a chartered company like the Canal Company, with the power to issue shares and bonds.

And it has been listed, it is hotter than the canal, the success of the Zhangku Railway is a secondary factor, the emperor's unprecedented investment in a commercial company is more sought after by the capital market, even the emperor is optimistic about this company, what else do others have to worry about, the emperor is a shareholder, at least it can be guaranteed that this company does not dare to bully shareholders. Unlike some companies, where slaves are used to bully their masters, corporate officials often make decisions that ignore the interests of shareholders.

Therefore, the Royal Railway Company not only attracted the interest of large investors, ordinary small investors have been enthusiastic, the company was listed with 30% of the shares, raising 5 million taels, which means that the company's market value is as high as more than 1,500 taels, equivalent to more than 300 million taels of silver, equivalent to 100 million pounds, and as high as 100 million pounds, becoming the first company in the world to break through the market value of 100 million pounds.

But the company's problems are not for nothing.

When the Zhangku Railway was built, it only took three months, and the problems that followed were endless, many of them were torn off, the construction quality was not good, and even the vicious incident of road destruction and death occurred.

Zhou Lang set out to be responsible, but punishment was not the goal, the purpose was to learn a lesson. It took a whole year for the architects in charge of the construction to summarize and compile strict construction specifications, and it took a whole year to get the operation of the Zhangku Railway on the right track, and if it were not for the war of the Russians, the railway would not have been able to make a profit so quickly.

After everything was standardized, Zhou Lang approved the listing of the railway company and approved the construction of a second railway.

The first section leads from Xi'an to Yili, and the country needs a fast road to connect the frontier, otherwise the speed of news exchange will be calculated in months, which is too inconvenient for management.

As long as this railway is built, the connection between the interior and the northwest region and even the Kazakh steppe region will become closer, the Yellow River is navigable, this era is still a very busy waterway, from Tongguan to the mouth of the sea, the Yellow River is very gentle, after all, it is only a river with much less water than the Yangtze River, and the biggest hidden danger is only the problem of sediment accumulation.

The Wei River can lead from Xi'an to the Yellow River, which means that as long as the railway between Xi'an and Ili is connected, the price of goods transported to the northwest will be reduced to one-tenth or even less of what camels used to be transported.

Along the way are more mature trade routes, so there is not much difficulty in building, where camels can pass, the railway can also pass, but it is necessary to detour, in the era of not having the ability to conquer the Gundam Mountains, you can only obediently follow the trend of the mountains, such as passing through the Hexi Corridor, absolutely do not dare to go over the mountains at will.

Due to the relatively strict regulations, the construction could not be as unscrupulous as the Zhangku Railway, and the construction speed was greatly reduced in one day, and the average was not even 10 kilometers. Due to many dangerous terrains, such as gully areas, detours have been made, which greatly increased the length of the railway, and the length of about 2,000 kilometers in later generations has been forcibly stretched to 3,000 kilometers; And there are still some ravines that can not be bypassed, the case that the bridge technology is not up to par, a large number of stupid methods of rammed earth landfill, the ravines on the Loess Plateau are up to hundreds of meters deep, and this earthwork is an astronomical amount, so the main construction progress is very fast, but it is stuck in individual road sections, and it can not be opened to traffic within several years.

The railway company is a commercial company and must pursue profits, and the board of directors is smart and adopts the method of breaking the traffic and operation, so as to make the railway profitable as soon as possible.

So a year later, there were trains that began to roar in the section from Xi'an to Lanzhou, as well as the section of Yili and Hami and other sections with few broken roads, but individual sections were still the world of pack teams and carriages, and it was impossible to completely penetrate them without three or five years.

The intermittent opening of traffic affected the operation of the railway, but unlike the fully commercial canal company, the stock price did not plummet, and it can only be said that the emperor's authority was too great for China, and the emperor's name supported the high stock price. As long as the economic environment does not change, this bubble will last for a long, long time.

The economic environment is the best time in history, the rapid expansion of the industrial revolution, from the coast to the Yangtze River, the Pearl River Basin, the Bohai Bay is generally unfolded, and like later generations, the prototype of the three major economic centers began to appear.

With the beginning of the silk weaving industry and cotton textile industrialization in the south of the Yangtze River, the economic development of this area is rapid, agriculture has been completely commercialized, the land that can grow mulberry and silkworms will not be planted with cotton and linen, and the land that can be planted with color cotton will not be planted with white cotton.

In the Jiangnan area, the cotton textile industry in the area of Songjiang Prefecture, the silk weaving industry in the Jiahang area of Huzhou, and the tea industry in Huizhou, all of which are high-end products that sell well at home and abroad, and high profits are gathered here, forming hundreds of tens of thousands of assets, or even hundreds of thousands of asset families.

The industrialization of Fujian and Zhejiang regions started at the earliest, and Fujian's water-powered textiles still have a place, and cheap water-powered power is only not comparable to steam power in terms of scale, but the low cost allows thousands of small hydro-powered factories to survive. In addition, as the earliest cotton textile industry center, Fujian's steam textile revolution has also begun, Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Xiamen and Zhangzhou are the four main cotton textile industry cities, all rely on foreign cotton processing and export, export-oriented economic characteristics are obvious.

Far from being lost, the advantages of tea cultivation in the Wuyi Mountains region have been strengthened, and half of China's tea is still produced here, thousands of large-scale tea plantations have appeared, and the tea mountains that can be opened up have basically been developed. The primitive accumulation of capital, made elegant and not bloody because of this drink, which sells well at home and abroad.

Tea cultivation has also been popularized in Taiwan, the long central mountain range of Taiwan, the introduction of Fujian tea varieties, the production and scale of rapid increase, but Taiwan is also under the jurisdiction of Fujian, so Taiwan's tea growth, is also counted in Fujian Province.

The Pearl River Delta region, because of the convenient waterway transportation, industrialization is also developing rapidly, Foshan as the leading metallurgical industry and machinery industry in the country, in addition to Guangdong's mineral resources have also been developed, lead production has reached half of the country, is an important military production base.

In the south to the Red River Delta, the most favorable conditions here are not the vast area of arable land, but the coal and iron resources are close to the river and the sea, coal and iron ore mining, making it China's largest coal and iron supply base, the rapid growth of the population, a large number of immigrants into here, has completely changed the proportion of the population in the Red River Delta region, Han people account for two-thirds of the local population.

It is still nominally the state of South Vietnam, but in fact it has long been sinicized, and the bureaucratic system is one with China, and China has sent the governor to govern it, and there have been calls to merge here. Zhou Lang has already begun to study how to divide the territory of the Red River Delta, and the basic plan is to take the Red River as the boundary, the north to merge into Guangxi, and the south into Yunnan, so that the two inland provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi have a border access to the sea, after all, the Red River is a navigable river into the sea.

With the development of the Red River Delta by the Chinese, agricultural and industrial technology has quickly outpaced the rest of Vietnam, and the southern kingdom of Nguyen Thi Annam has become an economic colony exporting agricultural products and raw materials. The Nguyen have also been very obedient over the years, they are not too crowded out of the Chinese, they think they are the same as the Chinese, and the Nguyen even adopted preferential policies to attract a large number of Chinese immigrants, accelerating the development of the Mekong Delta, which has now gradually surpassed the Red River Delta and become a huge grain producer, with more than half of the rice exported every year.

The development of industrialization in northern China is generally backward, and the biggest problem is the problem of transportation and resources, there are no bulk commodities for large-scale trade, and it is not suitable for growing cotton and silkworms, and it is difficult to develop purely by relying on agricultural economy.

Bohai Bay gradually began to develop and became the economic center of the north, not because of the industrial and commercial foundation left by Beijing, but because of the discovery of coal mines in Tangshan, and the convenience of being close to the sea made it easy for Luanzhou coal mines to enter the southern market.

Due to the lack of water in the north, and the Yellow River in this era is flowing south, although the population size of the Beijing-Tianjin area in this era is not enough to lack drinking water, but like the south, it is very difficult to use rivers to transport, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal passes through Shandong, the water level becomes shallow, the carrying capacity decreases, far from being compared with the Jiangnan region.

The natural conditions were poor, and the transportation restricted the mining of minerals, so that the north compared with the south, in the early industrial age, seriously lacked advantages, and the transportation problem began to seriously restrict the economy here.

Zhou Lang began to pay attention to this issue.

The two long-distance railways built by the Royal Railways have led to economic development in the provinces through which they pass, which can be seen locally, and the inland provinces have begun to negotiate with the Royal Railways and invite them to set up railways in various places. Among them, Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are the most active, because both provinces lack navigable rivers and have weak connections with the national market. The waterway of the Yellow River, which is shared by the two provinces, is not as convenient for navigation as the Han River in Hubei, so it is greatly restricted by traffic. After the resource survey, Shanxi has abundant coal, with the southern industrial revolution hot, the price of coal is excellent, but it can't be transported, how can the Shanxi government not be in a hurry.

However, Zhou Lang believes that relying on a royal railway company cannot quickly promote the development of railways, and he needs more railway companies, on the one hand, let the railways compete, and on the other hand, use social capital to quickly popularize the railways.

Combined with so many years of experience, Zhou Lang began to decentralize the power of the central government, and delegated the power of the franchised commercial company to the provinces, and the provinces could also approve the establishment of commercial joint-stock companies in the future.

Not only railway companies, but also other companies, such as canal companies and mining companies, can be operated on a joint-stock basis.

In this era, the joint-stock system is still a new thing that is restricted, because this limited liability system is in conflict with the practice of unlimited liability, and the unlimited liability system is also popular in the West, and the bankruptcy of other industries of the partners will even affect the well-run industries.

Watt was bankrupt by his partner, not by his own failure. The West has just evolved to an era when people die and debts are eliminated, and China, under the impetus of Zhou Lang, has just abolished the bad habit of repaying debts from fathers and sons. Now that he has delegated the power to set up joint-stock companies to the localities, it can be said that he has given a great impetus to the modern business system of limited liability such as the joint-stock system and the sharing of responsibilities by the amount of capital.

The era of capital is coming, and it is impossible to predict what kind of bloody storm it will set off.

However, after the decentralization, Shanxi and Shaanxi immediately set up their own railway companies and began to build railways in the territory, but the leading role they expected did not appear, because the railways of the provinces could not leave the province. It can only be built as a regional railway, an inter-provincial trunk railway, and it has to be built by the Royal Railways.

The railway to Yili of the Royal Railway Company is still not fully connected, but the extension line has been completed, all the way out of Tongguan, along the Yellow River through Shaanzhou, Henan, Kaifeng, Guide, from Xuzhou across the Yellow River, through Haizhou (Lianyungang) in northern Jiangsu to the sea, after the railway is repaired, the conditions for the transportation of goods and personnel along the way have been greatly improved, so that the new thing of the railway has been quickly accepted by all parts of the country.

A wave of railway investment frenzy has been set off.

In just two years, more than 10 provinces have set up railway companies and started to build railways, and the obstruction of the canal companies is insignificant in the face of the power of capital.

At the time of China's overhaul of the railway, the war that broke out in Europe over the independence of Greece finally came to an end, and there was no one-sided victory, but Russia still could not hold on.