Like Liu Changyou, Luo Zenan, a cabinet member and former governor of Zhejiang, who arrived in Shengjing two days earlier than him, had nothing to do in the past two days and was also wandering around Shengjing.

In fact, it can't be said that he is idle, but he deliberately turned around most of the holy capital.

There is no other reason, and like Liu Changyou, he was shocked by the development of Shengjing.

Luo Zenan has served as the governor of Zhejiang for many years, and Zhejiang has always been a wealthy place, and he has devoted himself to governing and developing Zhejiang in an orderly manner. In particular, the development of Hangzhou City is changing with each passing day, from the original population of 350,000 to nearly 600,000, and Hangzhou has developed from 4 million to nearly 5 million.

The prosperity of a place naturally reflects the wealth of this place: as the saying goes, only when you are full of warmth can you think about your desires, and in just eight or nine years of hard work, so many new little people are born, how many young couples have to think about how much desire to create, and how full and warm you have to think about so many desires? This is a very simple phenomenon, and it naturally reflects the abundance of the people here.

Of course, this is not the original words of the great Confucian Luo Zenan, but this truth is not much the same. What's more, Luo Zenan is now studying government affairs and studying the way to strengthen the country and enrich the people, he is not a nerd, he naturally understands that people are fundamental. With the growth of the population, it will further promote the development of various industries in the local area, and the tax revenue will naturally increase.

It's just that he didn't expect that there would be so many people in this holy capital. He felt that he had entered a new era, and everything was clear that the world was ushering in a major change!

When will a city have a population of millions? Even the cities of Bianjing in the Northern Song Dynasty and Beijing in the Ming and Qing dynasties, which reached their peak in population, were only a million people. And this Shengjing, which was not originally a capital, has grown to more than 2 million people today in just 9 years. What kind of concept this is, others don't know, but Luo Zenan's governance of Zhejiang is very clear about how difficult it is to develop the city. At the beginning, the Manchu Dynasty stationed a large number of soldiers and horses in Beijing caused a large number of people to gather, with a population of nearly one million, it was already a problem to even eat and make a fire, and later transported grain from the south with the help of Cao Yun and shipping, and a large amount of coal was used, which solved the problem of eating millions of people, but in this way, the Manchu Dynasty also continued to disperse the population of Beijing, and sent a large number of children of the Eight Banners to the suburbs of Beijing to limit the population in Beijing.

And now, the Holy Capital City, which has more than 2 million people, is still increasing in population, what a bold thing it is.

Luo Zenan saw the bus carriage that he had already learned about yesterday, so he took one casually with great interest, but he didn't expect to be sent to a place called Dachang District by this trendy means of transportation. The people on the side of the road are in a hurry, and when they ask, they know that this is the most famous factory area in the Shengjing City, which was originally a large tidal flat between the Qinhuai River and the Yangtze River, and has always been surrounded by the farmers outside Nanjing City as a vegetable field, but now it has been turned into a factory area by the Jiangning prefect.

Following the more than 20 people out of the carriage, Luo Zenan was shocked by a prosperous scene in front of him: in a wilderness, dozens of chimneys were spitting out billowing smoke, and under each huge chimney, several large factories were located there, neat and orderly, and there was the roar of a rumbling steam engine inside; On the bank of the river in the distance, cargo ships sailed by, and a huge coal steamer was leaning on the shore, and dozens of dock workers were shouting the number to unload coal, all busy.

Looking at all this in front of him, Luo Zenan gasped, he is not a layman, when he was the governor of Zhejiang, he led a lot of factories and mines, and he knew that the production scale of the factory could be heard from the coarse smoke from the chimney and the roar of the steam engine. But there are dozens of factories here, so there are at least tens of thousands of workers working here in this original tidal flat and now a large factory area.

Luo Zenan casually grabbed a stubby man who looked a little honest and asked: "This brother is invited, the student heard that a large factory has been built on the outskirts of this Shengjing City, I thought it was just a few factories, but I don't want it to be so big, it seems that many factories and workers look?" ”

This stout man seemed to be very enthusiastic, and he was a little wary at first, but when he saw Luo Zenan's polite and polite Confucian appearance, he spoke: "You are a scholar in the Shengjing City Higher School, right?" Is there any kind of investigation to be conducted, and what kind of report do you have to write for your teachers? ”

Luo Zenan didn t want to be old, he was still considered a scholar, and he also investigated the report, although this is a new term, Luo Zenan can understand it, this is one of the hurdles that students in the higher education hall have to go through before graduation, so he nodded again and again.

When the stout man saw Luo Zenan's admit, he was not vigilant, and became more enthusiastic: "Oh, I'll just say, I see that you are like a learned Wenqu star, and you are right."

If you want to ask this big factory, you can be regarded as asking the right person! As early as six or seven years ago, it was still a wasteland, because there were too many reeds and it was not easy to cultivate, and not many people were willing to cultivate here. However, five years ago, perhaps because of its proximity to the river, a feng shui master sent by the government took a fancy to the wealth here, so he designated this place as an area for setting up factories and named it Dachangku.

Not long after, there were some engineering teams led by the government to come here to measure and plan, originally thought that it was only to build two or three factories, but did not expect this total, so the land, drainage ditches, roads, wharves, etc. were hit and built, and more than ten textile factories were directly built, and after half a year, several machine factories were built, and villagers were recruited to work, and the wages were more than the harvest of our countrymen in a year, so it became the appearance of today in a few years. ”

Luo Zenan was surprised and asked, "So, the factories here are all private, not governmental?" ”

"It seems that most of them are private, and there are government factories, but they are not here. I heard that the factories built by the imperial court and the government are much more upstream than these private factories. The Shengjing Machinery Manufacturing Bureau alone has dozens of factories, which are like a big city, with tens of thousands of workers. There is also the Shengjing Textile General Factory, which alone has six branches and more than 20,000 workers, and the scale is amazing, which is not comparable to the small workshops in our large factory area.

However, although there are few factories in our large factory, the number is large. There are now 54 factories in the entire factory, and a total of more than 30,000 workers depend on this place to make a living, and have to support 170,000 children and their families. ”

Luo Zenan was shocked, and then began to think about it.

He looked up, this original wilderness, now the big factory area, in fact, is only a radius of ten or twenty miles, if it is reclaimed into a soil field, but one or two thousand acres of land, according to the barren degree of the wasteland here, it will definitely not be able to feed 10,000 people. But now that the wasteland has been abolished and turned into farmland, it has been replaced by these rows of well-located factories, but it does not want to not only arrange employment for more than 30,000 workers, but also support the 170,000 families behind it. Luo Zenan seemed to understand something!

Isn't this exactly what the emperor said when he had a court meeting, the difference between the industrial age and the agricultural age, the huge difference in the efficiency of manual productivity and machines, and the huge improvement in land utilization and labor efficiency!

It's a pity that it's not too early, Luo Zenan doesn't have more time to slowly experience this big factory area, visit this holy capital, and only wait for him to become a cabinet member, and then slowly understand, because he will enter the palace early tomorrow morning to meet His Majesty.