Although he had clearly judged China's strategic direction, Bismarck was cautious and did not reveal to anyone that Prussia had plans to unite with China.

On the contrary, he found that Austria was very close to the Chinese diplomatic service, and seemed to be engaged in secret diplomatic activities, and Austria was also bitten by Russia in this revolution, and the territory that divided Poland was taken away by Russia. This territory contains Galicia, an important industrial region in Poland, and the other territories with a total population of more than five million, and Austria will not be willing to lose it.

Because this territory, when it was divided, it was not arbitrarily claimed by Austria, but had historical origins.

As early as the thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary, formed by the Magyars, expanded to this area. In 1221, King Andrew II of Hungary officially added the title of "King of Galicia and Lodomeria" to his crown, of which Galicia is located in Poland, and Lodomeria is the Volhynia region of the Russian Empire, which was also directly taken away by Russia this time.

When the Habsburgs inherited the Hungarian throne in 1527, the Habsburgs also inherited the title, but the territory was no longer under the control of Hungary, but was taken away by the once powerful Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. In 1772, Maria Theresa, Grand Duchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Queen of Bohemia, used this title as the name of the first partition of Poland.

Now that the Russians have taken away these lands, and the Austrian emperor is left with only the title, it is naturally impossible to give up. Obviously, Austria also saw the contradiction between China and Russia, and was trying to establish an alliance with China to jointly fight Russia.

Austria's national strength and geographical location made them not have to worry too much about British interference, but Prussia couldn't, Prussia and Britain were across the sea, Britain was Prussia's largest trading partner, once Prussia and Britain were at odds, the British blocked Prussian ports on the one hand, and could land Prussia at any time to fight. Britain's influence was enough to bring them together land allies against Prussia, including the states from Germany, and possibly even strong Nordic neighbors such as Denmark and Sweden.

Therefore, even though Bismarck remained silent even though Austria was trying to form an alliance with China, he needed to know more about the country's national power.

He doesn't care much about Jiangning, unlike all Westerners, who admire the garden city style of Jiangning City, and doesn't care about the lotus that is full of lotuses, but it's actually a pond that is the function of urban rainwater regulation, and he doesn't care about the underground sewerage built by the Chinese who combine ancient Roman and traditional Chinese techniques, and he is not interested in the elevated railway that is as high as three zhang, built of iron, and can run trains on the bridge and pedestrians and carriages under the bridge.

He is interested in China's industrial zones and China's arsenals.

So after straightening out some work in the capital, he rushed to Songjiang Province, which is currently the most prosperous region of China, and he really saw the most modern side of China here.

Since it has not yet reached the era of high-rise buildings, cities with floor-level buildings tend to have large frames, and as a result, the factories here connect Shanghai, Huating, and Qingpu along the transportation waterways such as the Wusong River and the Huangpu River.

The cotton textile industry is the main industry, as well as developed shipping, shipbuilding, machinery and other industries, as well as the financial and commercial development based on these industries. Nowhere else did Bismarck see such a large industrial and commercial area in Europe, not even in England. Along the Wusong River into the Taihu Lake Basin, although the industrial areas here are not connected together, but scattered in the two large cities of Suzhou and Huzhou, the two cities themselves are separated by only one Taihu Lake, which is equivalent to being connected by waterways.

In addition, Wuxi, Changzhou and Jiaxing around Taihu Lake are all very prosperous big cities, with a population of three or four hundred thousand. Further south, Hangzhou and Ningbo are both big cities with a population of one million.

According to the data released by the Chinese themselves, with Taihu Lake as the center, Jiangning Province in the west, Songjiang Province in the east, Yangtze River in the north, and Hangzhou in the south, more than one-tenth of the Chinese population lives in a small area of nine provinces and one prefecture, totaling as many as 40 million people, and eighty percent of them live in cities, making it the largest urban agglomeration in China. This is a staggering number, larger than the population of the vast majority of countries in Europe. In addition to the big cities, there are countless bustling towns and cities, all of which are sizable cities in Europe.

There are two such industrial regions in China, one in Fujian and the other in Guangdong, which are inferior in scale, but they are still more developed than others. For example, the machinery industry in Fujian and the iron-smelting industry in Guangdong far exceed the Yangtze River estuary.

Bismarck, after looking at this, understood one thing, the British liked to exaggerate in many places, but one thing they were not wrong about was that to confront China, the whole of Europe must be united. Even the whole of Europe united, slightly inferior. The wealth of the Yangtze River estuary alone, Bismarck believed, would be enough to wage a war on the scale of the Seven Years' War.

After Bismarck did not go south, he did not think that there was any point in seeing, he went to the north, he wanted to see the relatively backward, but rapidly developing region of China, the northern coastal areas.

Under the influence of the Songjiang Prefecture, the surrounding areas are backward, and capital, manpower and resources are converging in the central area, creating a black hole of resources, and the surrounding areas are the most affected. As a result, the northern part of Jiangsu was not as well developed as the coastal area of Shandong, and Bismarck saw a slightly weaker but fast-growing textile industry in Shandong. Seeing a large number of prosperous ports, Shandong is close to the sea on three sides, the length of the coastline is second to none in China, although it is difficult to transport raw materials from overseas, but the local minerals are relatively rich, coal and iron resources are being developed, and cotton cultivation in southern Shandong is quite large-scale.

But Shandong was not the economic center of the north, and Bismarck considered the best city in the north to be Tianjin. Relying on the seaport, the resources of the Northeast are concentrated here, the resources of Mongolia and Siberia are gathered here through the railway, and the export is on the one hand, bringing a prosperous transportation industry, huge port facilities, and a merchant fleet, but there are also a lot of resources processed here.

The grain processing industry, flour industry, and oil extraction industry are all very developed with agricultural products in Northeast China as materials; Raw hides and wool imported from the steppe region gave birth to the leather and wool textile industry. Coal and iron were processed here in Luanzhou and Handan, forming a metallurgical and mechanical industry of considerable scale, and it can be said that the resources of the entire north can support the development of the city through railways, canals and ports, Bismarck believes that the potential of the city is immeasurable, and at the current level, it is comparable to the Ruhr area in western Prussia, and even surpasses.

Bismarck also heard that there were also some metallurgical industries in Handan and Kailuan, and that the coal and iron industry in Northeast China, centered on Shenyang, was also quite large. But he didn't need to go to all of them, as you can see from Tianjin, where the significance of the war is not so much financial support, but more of potential, and the industrial power here is enough to provide weapons and equipment for millions of Chinese troops.

After some investigation, Bismarck fell into deep thought. China's geographical location is really good, from the world's point of view, they are located on the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, the main part, the west is the plateau, the Gobi and the desert, the middle is communicated by the narrow Hexi corridor, the north is the east and west vertical and horizontal mountains, the Chinese also rely on these mountains, on which the Great Wall was built, isolating the northern steppe, and the north in addition to the grassland is also the vast desert, Gobi, and Siberian ice and snow, primeval forest.

This kind of terrain protects their warm side facing the ocean, so that they will not be too threatened, and can develop behind closed doors, even if they are closed, the vast hinterland, with the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, two large rivers that crisscross thousands of miles from east to west, has made it easy for them to operate in a large area since ancient times, and to establish an independent regime in this closed and vast area without outside interference.

To be honest, Bismarck was somewhat envious of this superior geographical structure, although the Bode Plain was flat enough and the conditions for the development of agriculture were excellent. However, located in the land of the four wars, where many wars in history when the population was reduced by half, the Prussians, under the pressure of no danger to defend, developed a high-intensity militarism; As a neighbor of Prussia, Poland, which was once ten times the size of Prussia, failed to form such a highly centralized system, but instead formed an English-style aristocratic parliamentary system, and the king began to become a symbol, elected by the noble parliamentarians, and developed an extremely free veto power, and no nobleman with a different opinion could pass the policy of the state.

For a country like Britain that is isolated overseas, this kind of balance between the aristocracy and the king, and even the system of the aristocracy slightly pressing the royal power, can maintain stability for a long time, and eventually brew a social system with more equal power; For a country like Poland, which is located in the land of the four wars, the inefficiency brought about by the long-delayed national resolution will inevitably bring about the disaster of national destruction.

From 1648 to 1720, there were constant wars on Polish soil, two Northern Wars (1655-1660; Between 1700 and 1720), for the first time, the population of Poland fell by a third to six or seven million. Half a century later, there was a second war, and the population dropped to seven million.

The free elect of the monarchy and the one-vote veto prevented Poland from rapidly gaining strength after the two Northern Wars, and many Polish nobles abused the veto for their own selfish interests to block any bill that was beneficial to the country but to the detriment of their own individuals. Between 1652 and 1764, Poland held more than 70 national conventions, more than 40 of which had to be interrupted by the veto of some nobles.

After the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Europe began to walk out of the Middle Ages and into modern times, with the formation of strong nation-states such as Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands becoming the first capitalist country. The formation of the nation-state and the commercial system has greatly enhanced the national strength and mobilization capacity of the powerful countries. In the 18th century, France had an army of 400,000, Russia and Austria had an army of 300,000, Prussia had an army of 200,000, and Poland, which was nearly 10 times the size of Prussia, had only 10,000 troops.

Such a loose aristocratic democracy was indeed often pulled out by the Poles in later generations to prove their civilization, saying that their constitution was earlier than the English Magna Carta, but it also became the root cause of the partition of Poland.

When invaded by the great powers, their temporarily mobilized armies could not fight a war against the standing army of the enemy, which was a huge number of enemies, and they could only face defeat. When they were divided up by the Russian-Austrian countries for the first time, they were left with only one-third of their land and population, and they had completely lost the opportunity to become a great power, although at this time they still had more territory and population than Prussia.

Ironically, the aristocracy, who would never sacrifice their own interests for the reform of the country, were forced to vote for the partition.

Fortunately, even if China has a slack of armament, it will not encounter such a partition of Poland, at most it will be destroyed under the blows of foreign races, but even after the demise, they are still a country.

Bismarck did not delve into the fact that China is a country on the scale of Europe, and the reason why China did not have the fate of being carved up in its own closed territory is because it had swept away various countries and different peoples thousands of years ago. The same applies to China's geography in Europe as a whole, or to parts of Europe.

Europe also has a relatively closed area, separated from China by the desert and the Gobi in the east, and surrounded by the sea on three sides. Or just in terms of the topography of Central and Western Europe, the Balkhaqian Mountains in the east and the Pyrenees in the west turned the vast Central European plain into an independent terrain, but in this independent geography, no unified cultural people were born, and the Germans, Slavs, Celts and Gauls, whom the Romans called barbarians, competed with each other for a long time.

If European civilization had not been imported from Greece and Rome, it had slowly penetrated from the coast to the hinterland. Rather, an agrarian civilization emerged from the Bode Plain, expanding and merging to the surrounding areas, similar to the Xia and Shang civilizations in the Central Plains of China. Or a civilization was born from the Austrian plateau in the upper reaches of the Rhine, and then expanded outward, just as an agrarian civilization was born on the Loess Plateau in China, and then spread downstream along the Yellow River and the Yangtze River from the upstream. Perhaps Europe will also give birth to a unified nation, a unified state.

Once upon a time, the Chinese people living in the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River were as complex and barbaric as Europe. But among them, a Zhuxia civilization was born, and they began to build cities to defend against nomadic bandits not far outside the city. When the Western Zhou Dynasty had already spent half of his life, in the surrounding area of the Zhou King City, there were still nomads like Yiluo Zhirong. At this time, the Zhou Dynasty had already established hundreds of vassal states throughout the Yellow River Valley through the feudal system.

The ancestors of the Chinese gradually occupied the land, expelled or assimilated the nomads, and integrated them by building cities and cultivating them. It took thousands of years and the span of several dynasties to make the Yellow River a Han land.

Europe has not seen this historical process, they have spent a long time in the barbarian era, they have consumed the Roman Empire, established a state on the ruins of Rome, and still continue to fight in barbarism.

Bismarck agreed with Britain that all the nations and states of Europe must unite in order to confront China. But he will never participate in it, what Prussia wants to do is not to unite with other people to fight against China, what Prussia wants to do is to unify the German nation and then expand its own power. It's like if the Celts had told the Slavs and Germanic peoples that they had to unite against the Latins (the Roman nation), they might have agreed, but they cared more about their hunting grounds and land.

In this sense, what Bismarck thinks Prussia should do now is actually no different from the Polish aristocracy of the past, first of all, whether there are enough serfs and manors are not large enough, and secondly, whether the country has enough defensive forces to resist the invasion of the enemy.

The story of Europe is always repeated in this way, just as China is always rising and falling.

Bismarck, who despised Poland, which put the country on the back burner, and who repeated that he put European interests behind Prussia, quickly rushed to the Black Sea coast after finishing his expedition to eastern China, where he believed that his strategic opportunity would definitely appear.