Timothy Lee left Yuncheng, but he did not leave the disaster relief work. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

Although he could not enter Henan, the Ming railway had been repaired to Henan.

The train back from Henan was always full of refugees from the disaster area, and Timothy Lee was crammed into a crowded carriage.

Even if he was just in a hurry, he did not stop the rescue work, he brought some necessary medicines and tools to the train, and kept treating the passengers on it.

The speed of the train is very slow, and the simple railway cannot support high-speed operation, otherwise it is too dangerous, and it can only travel ten kilometers per hour, and it takes ten days to travel from Henan to Qingdao.

Six days later, Timothy Lee returned to the Qingdao port, where he had started his disaster relief.

Unlike when I came, Qingdao was also crowded with victims, all of whom were transported from Shandong, Henan and other places, but in good order, because these victims had been organized before they set off, and they were all whole families.

Timothy Lee knew that these victims would depart from Qingdao, cross the Bohai Bay by boat, and enter the Northeast from the port of Dalian, because he would also enter the Northeast in this way, and continue to provide services to the victims in the relief stations in Daming, helping them to find a stable life in the Northeast.

However, Timothy Li was a little worried, and he inquired clearly, this was a unilateral act of the Ming Dynasty, and it did not have the consent of the Qing Dynasty. When Timothy Li was in Qingzhou for disaster relief, he never understood why the Qing government did not allow the victims to migrate to the northeast, he did not think about the issue of developing the northeast, it was a political issue, he did not care, he was thinking at that time, the price of grain in Liaoning was only one-tenth of that of Shandong, if the victims could go to live, it would allow more people to live.

However, the Qing government strictly implemented the border defense policy, the first is not willing to let the disaster people flow, so as to become a homeless people, the failure to suppress the peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty is because it has never been able to organize the movement of the displaced people, the second is the Qing Dynasty to implement the border ban policy, they are worried that the Han people into the northeast, will occupy the Manchu Longxing land, so that the future loss of the country Manchu people have nowhere to go, two hundred years into the customs, the Manchu high-level has never regarded themselves as a part of the country, just as a conqueror.

Obviously, the Ming government broke the policy of the Qing Dynasty and was moving a large number of refugees to the northeast, Timothy Li did not care about politics, but he understood that this kind of territorial aggression was likely to lead to war, and if a war broke out between the two largest countries in China at this time, it would be tantamount to the greatest disaster for the 200 million victims.

But he supported the measures of the Ming government in his heart, because he felt that this would save more people, and as for what territory, what politics, what interests, that was not what he cared about.

Timothy Lee forwarded his views back to Europe in letters, which were soon published in newspapers.

In this way, a large amount of such information spread from the disaster areas in China to the Western world.

And because the missionaries are elites with relatively high social status in Western society, they have a great right to speak, and their voices can be echoed greater, at least one point, the view that the Ming Dynasty is the only responsible government on the East Asian continent at this time has been universally recognized. Even some Western social elites who recognized the role of the Ming Dynasty in the disaster relief process also issued such an appeal, that is, the Western society should support the Ming government to replace the Qing government and completely manage this continent, so that for the ancient society of East Asia, it can follow the pace of Western civilization and enter a civilized society.

But unfortunately, these voices are not in line with the national interests pursued by their government, and the government is unlikely to adopt them.

At this time, the Western government was still patiently arguing with the Manchu Prime Minister Yamen through official channels, and they put forward various conditions to the Qing government on the grounds of aid, but the Manchu Qing would rather not provide aid than allow Westerners to infiltrate into their country. As a result, the various promised assistance from Western countries has never been implemented, but the missionaries who secretly supported them have already gone deep into the disaster areas in various places.

Obviously, Western governments don't care about disaster relief at all, they care about how to penetrate into the depths of the mainland, how to get benefits from the wider Manchu interior.

Their negotiations with the Qing Dynasty brought convenience to the relief operations of the Ming Dynasty, although the Ming Foreign Affairs Department also negotiated with the Prime Minister Yamen with the Western powers, but did not fall into this kind of bickering, on the other hand, directly acted, set up a railway company, and through the continuous construction of relief stations by the railway company, the disaster relief behavior went deep into Henan and Shanxi.

Originally, this was an invasion, but due to the advocacy of the Ming Dynasty and the British, the great powers reached an agreement to negotiate with the Qing government, hoping that the Qing government would allow countries to enter the interior for disaster relief, which made the Qing government feel great pressure and took a tacit attitude towards the Ming Dynasty's forced construction of railways.

If it was an ordinary moment, the Qing government could take advantage of the contradictions between the great powers and the pressure of the Western powers to organize such actions of the Ming Dynasty.

However, in the name of disaster relief, the Ming Dynasty morally brought all countries together to put pressure on the Manchus, but put themselves in a favorable position. Although the Great Powers were also worried about the infiltration of the Ming into the interior of the Manchu Dynasty, they were morally unable to stop this act of disaster relief. The Ming Dynasty also maintained an open attitude towards disaster relief, and welcomed some Western friends to join, especially missionaries and elites with high social status, whose perception made the Ming Dynasty's disaster relief behavior very recognized in the West, and the Western powers could not interfere.

As a result, the Western powers did not interfere, and the Manchu government did not dare to manage it, resulting in the Ming Dynasty's own entry into the territory of the Manchu Qing Dynasty to build a railway, which became a tacit status quo for all parties.

But it is impossible to have no obstacles, some are local officials who hate the Ming Dynasty, and even the Manchu magnates. Therefore, the construction of the railway was not all smooth sailing, and it was full of various obstacles from the beginning, especially when the railway was opened to Jinan, and the counterattack of the conservative forces in Shandong began.

Secretly demolishing railways and obstructing railway construction often occurs.

The railway company and the Ming government responded with a strong voice, and the railway company recruited a large number of armed men, and they recruited them from among the victims. The Ming government carried out military mobilization, these years of military reform, so that the Ming has 300,000 standing new troops, but also at any time to recruit 300,000 reservists, after the mobilization order was issued, once trained and retired 300,000 reserves urgently armed, so that the total strength of the Ming reached 600,000.

Through the Department of Foreign Affairs, the local officials who took unfriendly measures against the construction of the Ming railway protested against it, and sent 100,000 troops to Qingdao and Qinhuangdao.

Under the political protests and military deterrence of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing government, which was still constantly dissuading foreigners, immediately compromised and removed a large number of local officials who had taken an unfriendly attitude towards the Ming railway project.

As a result, the hostile attitude of the local authorities soon disappeared or was suppressed, and the magistrates, who accounted for the vast majority of the Manchu officials, not only did not oppose the construction of the railway, but also had to guard against the obstruction of the conservative scholars so as not to lose their official positions.

In this case, the railway was smoothly extended into Henan and Shanxi.

Due to the cooperation of the Manchus and the concern of the foreign powers, the Ming Dynasty, who did not want to cause trouble, immediately transferred back the troops stationed in Qingdao and Qinhuangdao, but the armed personnel organized by the railway company were not removed, and these people were armed with simple weapons to protect the safety along the railway line.

This kind of obstruction force because of the official and non-governmental obstruction, in this period of famine, is not serious, because the famine has destroyed the traditional social order, the foundation of the clan forces guarding the power at this time is too busy to take care of themselves, although they are also organized, but the main purpose is to guard against the homeless, and the clan forces that can maintain themselves in the famine are actually a minority, they are like islands surrounded by famine areas, they cannot unite at all, they cannot unite, they cannot become an irresistible force.

At this time, even the most optimistic and most fond of talking about the Manchu magnates were quite low-key and silent, and no one at this time talked about the way of governing the country and etiquette and not scheming.

Britain, France, the United States, Russia and the Ming Dynasty joint negotiations, the mobilization of the Ming army, the Northern Expedition of the Taiping Army, Xinjiang not only completely out of control, even the Shaanxi-Gansu rebellion broke out again because of the famine, Zuo Zongtang and Li Hongzhang Huai army after the change of guard, transferred from northern Jiangsu to Shaanxi, but still unable to suppress this Hui rebellion, the entire Guanzhong Ping was originally in constant war, famine together, it is thousands of miles of red land, ten miles of uninhabited.

Under internal and external difficulties, the diehards became demoralized and became unusually silent, and the Westernists became politically active through diplomacy and disaster relief work.

But silence is also a kind of power, silence means a state of pressure gathering, when the pressure reaches the limit, it will inevitably explode.

The reason for the outbreak of conservatives and diehards is the Ming invasion of the Northeast.

Laborers recruited by the railway company were delivered to the port by train, and then they were transported by boat to Dalian, where they entered further north through a railway built earlier than the disaster relief railway.

Before the famine broke out, because the Russians insisted on building the Kyakhta railway, the Ming decided to build a railway to the north as a kind of confrontation. Construction of the railway, which began half a year earlier than the disaster relief railway, was planned to lead from Dalian to Manchuria.

The starting point of the railway is in Dalian, but the center of the railway is in Harbin, with Harbin as the center, the railway is divided into two sections at the same time, Harbin north to Manchuria is a section, Harbin south to Dalian is a section.

At the beginning, there was no such plan, but it was built from south to north in a down-to-earth manner, because this was actually the most cost-effective and could make it easier to use the role of the rear base.

Zhu Jinglun believed that it was necessary to transfer the population in the disaster area before formulating this segmentation method, so that the labor force could be used to the greatest extent and more people could be resettled.

Therefore, a large number of refugees not only entered Dalian, but also entered Harbin through the Heilongjiang River and Songhua River waterways, from Harbin to the south to the north, Dalian to the north, in three directions at the same time.

However, Harbin is still a desolate place at this time, during the Kangxi period of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Shanhaiguan Pass was closed, and the wicker side was repaired in Jilin, and the people in the interior were strictly forbidden to enter the north of the wicker side, and the Manchurians who originally lived here were mostly entered with the Qing army, so that the entire Heilongjiang and even most of Jilin were in a primitive ecological condition, except for a few military strongholds, only a few local tribes existed, and the intensive agricultural cultivation areas in the interior could not be seen here at all.

As a result, more than one million square kilometers of land north of Heilongjiang were seized by Tsarist Russia, and although it was a pity that the Manchus had no concept of land at all, they were worried that Tsarist Russia would go further south, so they opened the border ban after the tenth year of Xianfeng (1860).

After the opening of the border ban, although the people in Shandong and Hebei began to immigrate to the northeast, they were limited by the primitive ecology and transportation conditions, and most of the people who went to the eastern part of the country were confined to the Fengtian area in southern Liaoning, and Jilin was still a wilderness, not to mention Heilongjiang in the north.

Therefore, the Qing government's control over the Northeast was still very low, and at this time, the Ming Dynasty suddenly organized a large number of immigrants into Harbin, nominally to build a railway for disaster relief, but suddenly the old ministers, especially the elites, felt a strong impact of distress, and they thought that the Qing Dynasty might lose the land of Longxing.

So under strong pressure, the Ming Dynasty built railways in Shandong and Hebei, and the Ming Dynasty bought the hearts of the people in the disaster area, and the Ming Dynasty transferred the victims to the Northeast, in fact, there was no disaster relief to buy the hearts of the people, which made the Manchu doctors more worried, but this was the last straw that pressed their psychology, and after retreating twice, they thought that this time, there was no way to retreat.

Therefore, the conservatives led by the university scholar Wu Ren jointly wrote to the Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor, demanding that the Ming Dynasty be strictly prohibited from building roads in the northeast. Although they also knew that the construction of this railway could house thousands of victims, the railway was opened, the victims were alive, and the northeast was lost.

For these diehards, if the victims die, they can still live and reunite in the future, and if they lose their land, they can't get it back, and most importantly, they can't go back.

A small number of princes of the Eight Banners even made stupid voices to resist the enemy and start a war.

What is strange is that before the great counterattack launched by the diehards, the Westernists, who had been extremely active before, suddenly lost their voices en masse and showed unusual silence.

Under the strong pressure of the diehards, the Qing court had to take action, it was impossible to start a war, and it had to be resolved through negotiations, but the negotiations had to be brought in by the foreign affairs, and only then did they begin to really intervene in the matter.