Although the railway line is still a single-track railway, transfer stations have been set up where necessary, so that trains can turn around and turn around, so the single-track railway is still a two-lane railway. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Before the end of the year, Hu Dajian extended the railway to Zhengzhou, after a whole year of drought, Henan's summer harvest was almost wiped out, although the famine has not yet broken out generally, but there are scattered famines in various places, like a ball of fire, as long as the grain in these places is not replenished before eating, the whole famine will instantly spread throughout the province, and then the hungry people do not even know where to run, because they can hardly find any direction to find food before starving to death.

The government bulletin pointed out two routes for them, one to run to the railway line and the other to run to the Yellow River.

The railway is not the only external channel, the river is also, even if it is the Yellow River such a bad-tempered mother river, it also has a certain degree of shipping function, from Jinan to Zhengzhou large and small sailing ships can sail, but unfortunately because of the drought, the water level has dropped to the lowest position, so hundreds of tons of ships can not pass, otherwise the disaster may not be so difficult to save.

When the railway is extended to the riverside and near the ferry, a wharf will be set up here as a transit terminal, so that the local recruited water gangs can deliver supplies to the relief stations along the river.

In addition to more shacks, doctors were recruited to take care of the sick in order to prevent epidemics.

Among these doctors, in addition to the vast majority of local recruits, there are also some from Daming, and there are even a considerable number of foreigners, especially among women, a considerable proportion of them are foreign volunteers, and most of them are show girls from the church.

Zhu Jinglun is not anti-religious, he has no prejudice against religion, the reason why he implemented a strict policy of restricting religion in Daming and only allowed Western religions to spread in port cities is not to suppress foreign religions, but to worry that foreign religions will suddenly and violently invade the traditional culture and beliefs of the Chinese, will violently collide with traditional ideology and culture, and produce unpredictable social problems.

There is no prejudice against foreign religions, and they will not be rejected if they are willing to take the initiative to relieve disasters, and the strict defense of the Qing court makes it difficult for missionaries and Xiunu and other disaster relief personnel to go deep into the disaster area, but they find that they can well avoid the siege of the local government by passing with the construction team of the Daming Railway.

As a result, more and more churches began to contact Daming, hoping to let them go deep into the disaster area to help through Daming's channels, and the Daming government did not refuse this, but proposed that it was too dangerous for them to travel alone, so it was better to stay in the disaster relief settlement set up by the Daming disaster relief department to help.

Except for a few churches that really did not aim to save people, at least not the main purpose, most churches were willing to accept such an arrangement, so under the cover of the disaster relief department of the Ming Dynasty, which was mainly based on the railway company, they were able to go all the way along the railway line into the disaster area.

Timothy Lee was also such a disaster relief minister.

Timothy Lee knows some medical skills, which is a necessary quality for missionaries in this era, because the church believes that only two things can quickly approach the Chinese, the first is almsgiving, the second is medical treatment, obviously the church has found out the practical character of the Chinese people, saying that a thousand times the ethereal heaven is not comparable to the fierce medicine for colds.

So Timothy Lee and the two nuns joined the relief station, and they worked diligently, without any return, with only one request, and that was that they asked to follow the railroad to the depths of the disaster area, and wherever the railroad was built, their workstations would be moved.

Simple grass sheds, arranged horizontally and vertically on both sides of the railway into a dense small city, countless Chinese live in such grass sheds, in the middle of these gray grass sheds, is a white tent area, this is the earliest temporary base established by the railway company, tents are military tents brought from Daming, but soon this kind of tents are not enough, so they began to use local raw materials to build these grass sheds.

Timothy Lee's medical station was assigned a white tent with a number of 18, meaning he was the eighteenth hospital here.

There are too many people, they keep coming out of unknown places, converging here, yesterday a businessman said in a mocking tone that the Chinese seem to have all come out of the soil all at once, Timothy Lee does not like this businessman adventurer very much, this guy is a drug dealer, an American businessman who wants to make a fortune by selling medicine to the disaster area.

There are a lot of people, but the discipline is very good, because this is already an old relief station, and the stationmaster is a mature Ming businessman, who has been doing business in Shandong for many years and knows the customs here.

In the beginning, it was also very chaotic, and the people who had gathered from all over the country were already hungry and crazy, and Timothy Lee had seen several people who had run frantically when they saw the porridge shack, but they fell in front of the porridge pot that was close at hand, and when people were extremely hungry, let alone seeing the food, they just smelled it, and there was no human law that could restrict their behavior.

But now everything is much better, in order to let the victims learn to queue, the workstation organized laborers to dig a trench around the porridge shed, only a narrow passage through the ditch, the trench is only water, even if it is crowded and falls into the water, it will not be injured. However, this method is still not good, and I heard that there is a phenomenon of stampede to death.

The current rule is that the victims are not allowed to approach the porridge shed, but the victims who have just arrived can sit down in the open field in the distance, and once they sit down, it is naturally impossible to crowd. Then, one by one, the workers at the workstation (who were also the victims at the earliest) pushed the porridge cart and delivered the rice porridge to the victims one by one.

After the victims were enthroned in the open field, they were assigned to live in grass huts according to their families, and then each family was organized by the relief station to participate in different tasks according to their different circumstances.

Timothy Lee thought this was a good way, and before he came here, he had done disaster relief work in Shandong for a year, which could be said to be quite effective, otherwise he would not have been so strong in the local area that the scholars wanted him to lead the uprising. If it was an adventurer, he might have agreed, but Timothy Lee was a missionary, a pacifist, who persuaded the locals not to use violence, believing that violence would not solve any problems, and that when the violence was over, nothing would change, and he later persuaded Sun Yat-sen, who advocated violent revolution.

When Timothy Lee was helping the disaster himself in the past, he also encountered the phenomenon of ordinary people not queuing, and finally ended the chaos by letting everyone sit and pay money. However, when Timothy Lee was in charge of disaster relief, he could only send money because it was not possible to send large quantities of supplies to the disaster area.

Daming is different, directly set out to improve the traffic problem, the way the Ming engineers built the railway is shocking, the kind of rude railway, is Timothy Lee has never seen, he also thinks that the best way to disaster relief is to repair the railway, so that everyone has a job to do, but also to prevent future famines, but he did not expect that the Ming engineers let the railway immediately play a role in disaster relief, because they can build thousands of kilometers of railways within a year.

The rudimentary nature of the railroad is also outrageous, you can even see yellowed dead grass under the railroad sleepers, and apparently some of the land has not been done at all, and the sleepers are laid directly on the land. Timothy Lee heard that this kind of simple railway was originally a common way in road construction projects, and the railway company would use this simple railway to transport materials to the project, but it was often dismantled at any time with the construction of the railway, and now it has to play a regular transportation task over a distance of up to 1,000 kilometers, which is really impressive.

He also treated a patient with sores on his legs, disinfected him, told him to pay attention to his livelihood and warmth, and then asked his family to take him back. There are endless patients to see every day, busy but happy, the only thing that makes Timothy Lee too anxious is that he has never been able to enter Henan.

There are already some colleagues who have gone to Henan, they are the most radical missionaries, young, fanatical in faith, not afraid of any difficulties for the sake of mission, and at the same time with the arrogance of "civilized people" who want to spread civilization to the Chinese. I heard that the progress of these people was not smooth, they all entered the disaster area without the consent of the Qing Dynasty, and suffered from both the local government and the people in the disaster area.

Timothy Lee hoped to use the power of the Ming Dynasty to enter Henan, because he believed that only such organized actions could be effective, and that kind of adventure supported by a fanatical spirit would only bring unexpected trouble.

In the evening, the stationmaster came to Timothy Lee and told him that he could not enter Henan, and that he could not stay here, and that they had to go. The stationmaster said that the locals were very alarmed that there were foreigners at the relief station, and some people planned to disadvantage the foreigners, so all the foreigners on the station had to leave.

Timothy Lee was very disappointed, this is the largest relief station near Yuncheng, not far from the Yellow River, so it has radiated a considerable area, and has collected more than 50,000 victims. After crossing the Yellow River, Henan is Henan, but he cannot cross it when it is close at hand, as if he can never cross the gap between God and God in the hearts of the Chinese.

Timothy Lee tried to stay, saying he could dress up as a Chinese, as he had done, wearing Chinese robes and fake braids. But the stationmaster said no, they didn't want to cause trouble, and if the foreigners were here, it was likely that some local villagers would prevent the victims from coming to the relief station.

Now on the way to the relief station, these villagers are guarding against it, and the villagers are mainly worried that those who pass through their hometowns will bring trouble to their hometowns, so the big clans have organized militia groups.

If there is a conflict with local forces, it will bring trouble to the relief work of the Ming Dynasty, so the Ming government has repeatedly issued notices, requiring every relief station to maintain friendship with local local forces, whether it is the village Yong or the government, to cooperate as much as possible.

Timothy Li agreed, and he didn't want to cause trouble for the relief work of the Ming Dynasty, because he was very soberly aware that in this chaotic time, the Ming government had in fact become the only responsible and only responsible government on the East Asian continent, and it was not conducive to disaster relief to make trouble for the Ming government at this time.

As for the local Qing government, it was completely out of control, and they were incapable of managing the thousands of people affected by the disaster, and they even expressed a certain degree of hostility towards the displaced people from other places, and sent notices to all local townships and villages, asking everyone to guard against the displaced people and adopt a policy of strict prevention and strict defense against the displaced people from other places.

That's why the local government acquiesced in the existence of the Daming relief station, because they found that as long as they drove the displaced people to the relief station, they could prevent these victims from disturbing the local social order.

The inaction and irresponsibility of the local government reflect the responsible attitude of the Ming government, and through the eyes and mouths of missionaries, the image of the Ming Dynasty has been transmitted to the Western society, so that the disaster relief behavior of the Ming Dynasty has produced an unexpected reputation.