"Chinatown is an amazing place, and I guarantee you won't find anything like it in all of Europe... Well... What can I say..."Clay looked up and opened the sunroof on the top of the cab.

"You want to say the Gathering Place?" Verbe dusted off his cigarette in the ashbox.

"Hmm... It can be described as such, sir, but not very precisely, and the reality is much more complicated than the information records. Clay pressed the cigarette lighter under the dashboard and pulled a cigarette out of the car's cigarette case.

"According to the information we have, these Chinese are in a very bad situation right now, and they are desperate to get help from the outside world." Verbe frowned and flipped through the papers on his lap.

"Outside help?" Clay laughed, and he gently tapped his cigarette roll on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, then pulled out the popping cigarette lighter.

"I wrote the most recent report, Mr. Verbe." Clay lowered his head and lit a cigarette: "Obviously, the gentlemen squatting in the office have confused some of the most basic concepts. But that's completely understandable, and that's the biggest difference between them and those of us, we use our brains to think about things. ”

It seemed that the agent was quite unhappy with his superiors, but given what had happened to him, Verbey felt that he could understand this feeling, and that he might have fallen into that predicament, perhaps a hundred times more bitter than Clay.

There are indeed mistakes in the General Intelligence Bureau, this hidden plan seems to be a little hasty from the beginning of the formulation, many details have not been taken into account, after all, these agents have received very comprehensive training, and their psychological endurance is very high, if it were replaced by those trained by the General Security Bureau in the early days, I am afraid that a big mistake would have been made.

"You mean there's something wrong with the material?" Verbe asked, shaking the papers in his hand.

"No, there's nothing wrong with the data, but it's up to you to interpret it, sir." Clay tilted his head and rolled down the window on the driver's seat.

"Hi, officer! What the hell is going on up ahead! The driver shouted at a patrol officer standing in the middle of the road with his waist crossed.

"Don't stop, keep going, sir." The patrolman didn't answer Clay's question, he just kept drawing circles with that baton.

"Stupid strip, it seems he doesn't know what's going on." Clay took a sharp drag on his cigarette and shifted it to his left hand.

"At this rate, we're going to be late nine times out of ten." Verbay glanced at the patrolman through the window.

He looked to be in his thirties, wore a crisp navy blue uniform, and wore an S... D's seven-pointed star emblem, wearing a full set of armed belts, and a large M1917 revolver stuck in the holster.

"Why don't we turn right?" Verbe proposed.

"You have to go through the first two intersections to find a way to get around, the whole street on the right is a tram line, look at the cars ahead, we're not the only ones here, sir." Clay pulled another cigarette out of the cigarette case and put it in his mouth, holding the remaining half-cigarette butt in his right hand to refill the fire, then pressed the cigarette butt into the ashbox under the dashboard.

"Well, it's up to you." Welbay laughed cheerfully, a subordinate with character, and this was not a bad thing.

"You're not done yet, Clay, about Chinatown." Verbet pulled back the conversation.

"Oh, those Chinese, when I first arrived in San Francisco, I didn't deal with them less." After crossing the intersection, the traffic moved a little faster, and Clay changed gears neatly.

In the 1940s, San Francisco's Chinatown far outnumbered the rest of the world's Chinese communities in terms of area and population, and the world's largest Chinatown was not just an advertisement for tourists, but a well-deserved honor.

Modern Chinese going out into the world is not an inspirational story full of positive energy, full of darkness, gore and dirty deals.

The wave of abolitionism in the world in the mid-nineteenth century was seen as a great victory for human rights and moral reform organizations and the Church, and of course it should not erase the merits of those who were morally upright, but we should also see the huge and substantial interests hidden behind the wave of abolition, both in politics and economics.

For example, the abolition of slavery in the United States was a game between industrial capital and agricultural capital, reformists against conservatives, between the new aristocracy and the old aristocracy, and between new immigrants and old immigrants, which eventually led to the Civil War, which determined the redivision of the political and interest map of the United States and directly affected the direction of the development of the United States in the coming century.

Although the abolitionist movement was successful, it also brought a lot of sequelae. Although politicians benefited handsomely in politics and fame because of their abolitionist stance, for the colonial capitalists, this was simply shooting themselves in the foot, and it was a complete disaster.

This was because both the Americas and Central and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, had to obtain a large number of cheap labor to fill the gap created by the emancipation of black slaves.

When blacks became wage workers, they severely reduced the net profits originally obtained by slave capital. The former slave owners had to find a substitute for the black slaves as soon as possible, toiling in their cornfields, sugar cane plantations, tobacco fields, coffee plantations, and cotton fields, as well as taking on heavy manual work that did not require much skill in road construction and mining.

The British colonists soon found an excellent candidate, and that was the "Great Qing Dynasty" with almost unlimited human resources.

From the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, for about half a century, China's national power was in constant decline. The old man successfully lost all the savings left by his ancestors, even if he left a and Zhongtang for his son to slaughter, but the vitality of the country has been injured, and the decline has appeared, and Jiaqing's ability is not able to turn the tide at all.

More importantly, the people's hearts began to be chaotic with the decline of national strength, and in the past half century, a series of natural and man-made disasters have occurred one after another on the land of China, with floods, droughts, locusts, and plagues appearing almost every year.

At the same time, China's total population has grown explosively, rather than decreasing. In the short period of 50 years from the 60th year of Qianlong to the first year of Xianfeng, the population of the whole country increased from 310 million to 430 million.

At the same time, the opium trade led to a large outflow of silver, but the state instead used silver as the currency of agricultural taxation, in order to exchange copper coins for silver, most of the peasants' annual harvest fell into the hands of landlords and grain merchants, and a large number of yeoman farmers lost their land and became tenant farmers, and the situation of land annexation throughout the country became more and more intense, and even fell into a vicious circle.

Economic decline inevitably led to political upheaval, beginning with the eight-year White Lotus rebellion in the Sichuan-Chu region in the last years of Qianlong, and ending with the Taiping Rebellion in the first year of Xianfeng, in which the Manchu government gradually lost its ability to control the region.

The previous Opium War completely revealed the essence of the Manchu government's external strength and middle cadres to the whole world. When "I Daqing" can no longer hold up the bluffing shelf, it will not be far from the day when it will bow and step down.

In the early days, Chinese coolies were recruited in Xiamen, and at its peak there were six intermediary shops in the city at the same time, five of which were owned by the British and the other by Dutch. Every year, more than 2,000 Chinese coolies are exported from this place, and the exclusive term "selling piglets" was born from this time.

At that time, because of the language barrier, foreign intermediaries usually subcontracted their recruitment shares to local Chinese brokers, who were called "customer heads" in Hokkien dialect, and each coolie recruited, the customer head could receive a large commission.

After a large number of refugees from the north poured into the coastal areas during the Jiaqing period of Qianlong, the already scarce arable land became even more tight, and a large number of landless peasants appeared in the countryside, and going to sea to the South Seas became a helpless choice.

Residents of Fujian and Guangdong basically chose to go to Southeast Asia, such as Borneo, Vietnam and the Philippines, which is the route that Zheng He's fleet once traveled.

These coastal people are not averse to making a living overseas, but the number of people recruited by intermediary companies has been difficult to rise, because most people still do not want to leave the land where their ancestors lived unless absolutely necessary.

At that time, for each coolie recruited, the Chinese brokers received a commission equivalent to a month's salary for a local worker. In order to make more money, some people began to ignore their conscience, and they colluded with the local dynamic social groups, that is, the notorious "triads", these scumbags colluded and joined forces to engage in the business of cheating their compatriots. He did not hesitate to use the methods of cheating, abduction, and even open plunder, and sent one Chinese person after another to the coolie ships of Westerners.

In order to deceive the coolies into boarding the ship, the brokers will do everything they can, for example, they will deceive some ignorant Chinese people, saying that one hour in China is equal to two hours in a foreign country, so the time signed on the contract is actually only half of the Chinese year, and it takes half the time to earn double the money, this kind of opportunity cannot be missed.

The best way for triads is to open a gambling game, and then make the gamblers owe a large amount of gambling debts, with the aim of forcing the other party to go to sea to pay off the debt. Even worse, they directly adopted the method of kidnapping tickets, intercepting innocent passers-by in the field, loading them into sacks and sending them to coolies.

These people who boarded the coolie ship were as ignorant as newborn piglets, and many of them still had the hope of returning home with wealth and fine clothes, and they had no idea what kind of fate awaited them on the other side of the ocean.

PS: Thank you all for your support.