The first thing the mission saw in Nanjing was the railway system here, which is a city connected by railways, and it is very rare to build a railway network in a city, but the Europeans did not find it strange, firstly, they had never seen a railway, the first railway of the British had just been built, and the rest of Europe had no plans to develop their own railways, but they already knew that this means of transportation appeared in China, and secondly, they did feel that Nanjing needed a faster and more border means of transportation, Because the city is really too big.

Long before the founding of the Great Zhou Dynasty, Nanjing was one of the largest cities in China, with a population of 800,000, second only to Beijing.

The most important thing is that the construction idea and area of the city are too big, too big for the size of China, let alone the Europeans.

When Zhu Yuanzhang built Nanjing City, he may have considered it too far ahead, and Nanjing City was composed of four city walls: the palace city, the imperial city, the capital city, and the outer Guo from the inside to the outside. This layout is also similar to Beijing, but unlike Beijing, Waiguo City is too big to be completed with the national strength of the Ming Empire.

Legend has it that after Zhu Yuanzhang built Yingtianfu City, he took his sons to the nearby Zhongshan to observe the situation of the capital. They found that the palace was too close to Zhongshan and that the palace was easily hit by setting up cannons on the mountain, and there were also some important commanding heights, such as Yuhuatai in the south and Shogunate Mountain in the north, which were left outside the city, which was very unfavorable to the city defense.

So, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the construction of Waiguo City. This outer Guo city is mainly built by using the loess hills on the periphery of Yingtianfu City, and only a part of the city wall is built in some weakly defended areas and 18 city gates are opened, so it is commonly known as "Tuchengtou". Its circumference is said to be 180 li, but it is actually about 120 li (60 km), and the brick parts of each section add up to about 40 li (20 km). The famous Tang Dynasty Chang'an City is only 36 kilometers away. Luoyang City is about 27.5 kilometers. The actual total length of Beijing Sijiu City is only 23.55 kilometers. It can be said that the length of the Nanjing city wall is the highest in all dynasties.

Not only is the city wall long, but also the area is large, and this kind of natural geography such as hills, mountains and rivers around the city are incorporated into the city, and the result is that the outer Guocheng of Nanjing is 230 square kilometers. By 2000, the urban area of Nanjing was only 500 square kilometers, and the area of Beijing was only 735 square kilometers.

Compared with ancient times, the population is not as large as Chang'an City in the Tang Dynasty, and in the case of Beijing City in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the area is several times that of the other party. Compared with modern times, in the era when there is no huge industrial area and no dense factory buildings, you can imagine how empty Nanjing City, with a population of less than one million, will be.

Out of the city wall of the capital, you can almost see a large vegetable field and pond. But it's not just vegetable patches and ponds, but towns are interspersed with them, the twelve-floor restaurants built in the Zhu Yuanzhang era are outside the city, and some government agencies can't find space in the inner city, and there are more buildings here, and other temple buildings.

According to the Ming Dynasty missionary Matteo Ricci's description in Matteo Ricci's Chinese Notes, Father Matteo Ricci landed on a suburb outside the triple walls of Nanjing, a large and densely populated place that could be called a large city.

It can be seen that when Matteo Ricci came to China in 1583 (the 11th year of Wanli of Mingshenzong), the suburbs outside Nanjing were no longer pure farmland, but fields and towns. By European standards at the time, it could be called a city.

The Portuguese Jesuit Zeng Dezhao, who spent 22 years in China between 1613 and 1636 in the late Ming Dynasty, wrote: "I consider the city of Nanking to be the largest and best city in the country, with its fine buildings, its wide streets, its elegant people, and its abundance of fine goods. It has an enviable playground and a large population in the territory, where you can still encounter crowds everywhere and the streets are difficult to pass. In addition, countless palaces, temples, towers and bridges make the city very magnificent."

It shows that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the city of Nanjing was already quite crowded, so it must have developed outside the city.

During the Qing Dynasty, Nanjing lost its status as a capital division, and only served as the Jiangning Mansion of the Liangjiang Governor's Office, and compared with the end of the Ming Dynasty, the population barely increased.

After Zhou Lang occupied the city, he found that this was also the case in the suburbs, in the Yuhuatai, Shogunate Mountain and Purple Mountain, as well as traditional villages, a little further in, there were mainly private gardens and temples of the rich, and there were still fields, but they were all small, such as the vegetable gardens of the monks of Jiming Temple.

In addition, there are a large number of ponds in Nanjing, which are not private but public. It is connected to the moat, the Qinhuai River and the Yangtze River, and is a pool of living water.

Zhou Lang was very fond of water area, and he naturally knew how important water area was to regulate the climate of a city, so in the process of rebuilding Nanjing, protecting these public and private reservoirs was a rule.

Needless to say, the inner city of Nanjing is very lively in the old crowded streets, but the outside of the city is even more charming, with pavilions, ponds and fields, all like ink paintings.

This kind of charm between man and nature, Westerners can not appreciate, their painting art is still very short, the representative of Western painting art, oil painting was born and died from 1385 to 1441 Dutch painter Jan van Eyck created, and China's early Qin and Han paintings, have been in the long history can not find authentic. Of course, this is not something to be proud of, compared with the history of the Europeans, it is really too unproductive, China is also inferior, when the Chinese just began to learn painting, the murals of the Indians have reached a very high height. When the Indians were learning to paint, the artistic height of the Egyptians was also beyond the reach of the Indians......

History is actually better than inheritance, China's predecessors and fellow travelers fell behind one by one and disappeared into history, while the Chinese inherited and carried forward, this is the best!

As the latest Westerners, the early Western painters thought that Chinese painting art was very backward, that the paintings of the Chinese could not even make the figure paintings true, obviously they had not yet understood the charm of the Chinese pursuit of god-like but not similar shapes, and when their impressionism and abstraction came out, Western painting art could really stand on the same level as China.

Therefore, even if the embassy full of nobles who have been well educated in art cannot understand the cityscape that is combined with nature maintained under the auspices of Zhou Lang, they are amazed by the cleanliness of the city.

In this era, the leaders of Western urban culture are the most important countries in Europe and England, France has the largest number of large cities in Europe, and London in England has developed on the basis of the ancient Roman era to the present. In fact, they still failed to reach the height of the ancient Roman era, and the inheritance caused by the cultural fault is a loss for all mankind.

The Romans in ancient Rome could also enjoy clean, drinking water from afar through elevated canals, and the wealthy could have private bathrooms in their homes. However, in the time of the British, the dung on the streets of London was full of ditches, and the offal of slaughtered animals was still on the streets, and the residents living in the buildings dumped urine at will, which led to the British wearing high clogs with clogs on the outside to avoid stepping on the mud. The well-developed leather industry in Paris, France, dumped all sorts of filth into the Seine, making the river stink, and the citizens of Paris drank only beer.

China's urban water supply system is not as high as ancient Rome, but there is another way to ensure safety: relying on wells instead of natural rivers.

In the industrial age of Europeans, cities were already much better built than in the Middle Ages, and butchers in London were prescribed not to dump animal entrails at will, but were required to pour them into the River Thames. But they still haven't restored the water supply system of the Roman Empire, and the Westminster Abbey area, where the royalty and magnates lived, is a separate town, completely cut off from the city of London.

At first, Zhou Lang thought that Westerners had lost the essence of the ancient Roman era in terms of urban construction, and China's inheritance was relatively better, but later, with the summary and research of Chinese and French scholars in the Royal Academy of Sciences, Zhou Lang found that China also lost a lot of valuable things, and the inheritance was not good.

Combined with his knowledge, he found that the construction of Chinese cities has taken a big detour. After the Republic of China, learning from the West everywhere has lost a lot of traditional experience that can be used.

So Zhou Lang began to focus on the construction of Nanjing, otherwise with his style, it would be impossible to waste too much energy on building the capital, and he preferred to use resources for industry.

In later generations, China learned from the West everywhere, but it was inferior to the West everywhere. When it rains, Beijing is full of water, but the Forbidden City, where the Qing Dynasty emperor lived, is fine, and the ancient drainage system of the original palace is still working!

The unified planning of Nanjing City was about ten years ago, when the Prime Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Lei Guangyuan, a son of the famous Style Lei family, submitted a report requesting the repair of the internal and external official ditches in Nanjing.

The head of the Prime Minister's Qin Gong Office was the highest official in charge of official projects under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was not a big official, but in the Qing Dynasty he was the head of the craftsmen who built palace gardens for the emperor, and after the capture of Beijing, Zhou Lang protected a large number of these traditional craftsmen. The style Lei family is one of the leaders, their ancestors entered the internal affairs office as early as the Kangxi period, and then were responsible for the construction of the imperial palace, the Old Summer Palace and other royal gardens, known as half of Beijing's ancient buildings are built by the style Lei family.

Their family's craftsmanship and knowledge have been passed down from generation to generation, and the reason why there is the title of style Lei is because the style of the Lei family represents the high-end.

Zhou Lang wanted to combine tradition with modernity, so he sent the children of the style Lei family to learn drawing geometry from French scientists, and reshaped their style drawings in the way of modern engineering.

The results of the more systematic engineering combined with traditional construction science in the West are brilliant, giving birth to a large number of talents, Lei Guangyuan is one of them, he was able to take charge of himself more than ten years ago, leading the team to repair the infrastructure of many cities.

Nanjing's Guangou system was restored and replanned ten years ago when he was in charge, and it has now paid off.