In the third lunar month, new news came from Europe.

- A new coup d'état took place in Paris, and Napoleon ascended to the highest seat of power in France.

Chen Ming's smile was unusually bright after hearing the news. Well, that's great news. This means that the French are retreating from Egypt, and it will not be long before the Ottomans are allies with France after Napoleon took on the role of the boss of Paris. At the same time, it also shows that China will soon be able to win a new harvest in the Americas - Louisiana.

Chen Ming has been burying this dark chess for many years. It's really harvest season.

And after China has Louisiana, the lighthouse country can no longer play the westward strategy.

This was an important step in restraining the lighthouse states and dominating the Americas without attracting the attention of Europeans.

Of course, Napoleon could have sold Louisiana not to China, but to the United States, as he has historically done, but would he dare to bear the wrath of Chen Han? Is it necessary for him to bear the wrath of China?

Historically, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans out of strategic considerations, when Napoleon sent a large army to attack Haiti in an attempt to restore French rule there, and the army was completely destroyed. French power in the Americas was at its lowest point. Napoleon did not sell Louisiana to the United States, and it was easy for the British to seize it. At that time, the situation between France and England was already on the same page, and war was inevitable.

You must know that after the crushing of the Second Anti-French Alliance, Napoleon's original wishful thinking was to make peace with Britain in Europe and expand his territory in the Caribbean and North America - so he sent an expeditionary force to Haiti, but the French military operations in Haiti have not been smooth, and the British are unwilling to make peace with France, and a military conflict between France and Britain is inevitable.

So, Napoleon sold the vast Louisiana to the Americans at a bargain price. Even so, the price is still not affordable for the weak lighthouse nation. But this deal laid the foundation for a strong Lighthouse Nation!

Napoleon had always been a very intelligent man, and Chen Ming did not believe that he would not be able to guess what Chen Han was going to gain from him.

In the history of time and space, it was obviously in Napoleon's interest to sell Louisiana to the United States, and now to China.

But I can't eat hot tofu in a hurry, and this fruit will have to wait another year or two.

Now that Napoleon has just ascended to the throne, and his power has not yet been completely firmly grasped, Chen Ming naturally can't reach out to him at this time to ask for Louisiana. Wait for him to consolidate his position of power, and then seek benefits.

Over the next two months, at least 10,000 Chinese laborers sailed to heaven. The excavation of the Suez Grand Canal has already been put into orbit. The technical difficulty of this canal is not big, because it is a sea-level canal, and the technical difficulty is not a problem at all. However, the entire project was carried out in an arid desert with a severe shortage of water. The vast majority of the local workers were Chinese, and a small number of Japanese were not as ignorant of the latter's life and death as the French had historically treated Egyptian laborers.

In the historical Suez Canal, 120,000 migrant workers in Egypt died for it, and an average of 738.5 people died per kilometer. Chinese lives are not so cheap.

Ensuring sufficient drinking water and food is the most basic material support for the engineering headquarters. As a result, a quarter of the entire canal project was transported to Suez by Chinese laborers for material transshipment.

Chen Ming felt that after the construction of the whole project, he would not be able to stop it even if it was 1 billion yuan. The French in history treated Egyptian laborers so harshly, forcing 120,000 people to die, and Egypt had a total population of less than 4 million at that time, so it took ten years to build the Suez Canal and used less than 20 million pounds of funds.

How much does Chen Han have to pay?

Money is not an issue. Even if there are hundreds of millions more, converted into each year, that is more than 100 million dollars. Given China's current fiscal and private appetite for canal bonds, this is not a problem at all.

It's people who have the problem.

The lives of the Chinese are now very precious, not to mention that 120,000 people were thrown into Egypt, even 10,000 Chen Ming could not bear it. Therefore, when the French retreated from Egypt, Chen Ming would transfer tens of thousands of laborers on the canal construction site little by little, whether it was the port of Aden or the South Africa he wanted to go to, tens of thousands of people were a powerful force.

The labor force for the project was mainly based on the Ottomans.

Ruling over a vast territory, the Ottomans had a number of 'lowly people' in their territory, who would be transported by boatload to Port Said, the western entrance of the Suez Canal.

Time has slowly entered the fifth month of the lunar calendar, and it is so fast, in the blink of an eye, half a year is gone.

There is still about ten years, which is the annual summer harvest on the Huanghuai Plain. Since the previous disaster, millions of people on the Huanghuai Plain have had a terrible year.

Drought in the spring, locust plague in the summer and autumn.

The flood was not seen, but a drought and a locust plague delayed the entire Huanghuai for a year.

The relief work of the imperial court is very powerful, but no matter how perfect the relief is, it is impossible to take care of the more than three million people in need. Until the Mid-Autumn Festival, the autumn rain fell in Huanghuai for ten consecutive days, and the rain was not strong, but it rained for ten consecutive days, which truly resolved the drought hanging over the head of the Yellow Sea Plain for more than half a year. The planting of winter wheat was also not delayed.

And in the winter, there are a few heavy snowfalls. Ruixue mega year, this is a good thing. And in the turn of the year, God gave the face, it was the wind and rain, the old traces of the disaster on the Huanghuai Plain were like waves in the lake, which were quickly smoothed out, and the current Huanghuai is still a bumper harvest scene.

The farms around Xuzhou have all become a sea of gold, and countless wheat crops are still grasping the final ripening sprint.

The wheat was blown by the breeze, forming golden waves of wheat, which fell together and rustled, and seemed to be a beautiful piece of music, which was endlessly evocative. This is the joy of harvest!

The wheat waves are rolling, and the wheat fragrance is fluttering. The rolling wheat waves dyed the Huanghuai land into a piece of yellow, and the sky into a piece of yellow, the yellow is solid, tentative, and the yellow is thrilling and golden.

This is the foundation of Chen Han. The bumper harvest of grain is a testament to the prosperity of Chen Han's country. Although the summer is hot, it is a lively season, a harvest season, and an exciting season.

In addition, also in Xuzhou, on the bank of the Yellow River in the northwest suburbs, a construction site is busy with builders. The worker ants in the countless workers' anthills are nervous, diligent and orderly busy.

On the south side of the site, three steam engines roared to the ear, each with an iron 'waterwheel' standing in a large 'pot' into which truckloads of gravel, sand, cement, etc. were poured into the pot. Then the concrete of the pot is stirred by these steam engines, and when the mixing is finished, the valve of the pot is opened, and the inclined concrete is transported to the place where it should go by the conveyor belt brought up by another steam engine standing on the riverside.

Chen Han wanted to build China's first Yellow River bridge in Xuzhou. Is there any technical difficulty? Of course. But can it be overcome? The same can be.

The water depth in the lower reaches of the Yellow River is very shallow, much shallower than in the Thames estuary area.

But the silt and sand at the bottom of the Yellow River will definitely pose a big trouble to the construction of the bridge piers.

At the west end of the construction site, a tall and peculiar steam machine with two large wheels on each side stands quietly in the center like a giant beast, low in front of the machine and high in the back, and there is a high erected chimney at the head of the head department, which is pitch black, and finally it is like a stepping stone high and convex, and it is like a lattice, and the vacant space is installed with glass, surrounded by a dozen workers in red and yellow overalls.

The steam monster is a mixed structure of iron and wood, nearly two feet long, six feet [two meters] wide, and nearly one zhang four feet [five meters] high. This is China's first generation of stereotyped steam locomotives.

This construction site by the Yellow River in Xuzhou is one of the construction sites of the Kaihai Railway, and it is also one of the most important construction sites. If the construction of the Yellow River bridge here is not successful, then the railway bridge will not have to face each other. The opening of the sea railway will also become a big joke for Chen Han.

At the same time as the railway was being built, locomotives and carriages were also arranged in place. Xuzhou Station is a very important station on the Kaihai Railway, and the specifications here are dispatching stations, which are generally higher than the qualifications of Kaifeng and Haizhou stations.

As a shovel of coal was stuffed into the boiler, the steam began to heat up, and with a whistle, the workers in the driver's seat of the steam locomotive No. 04 smiled with satisfaction.

This is a great big guy, with six or seven trailers hanging on the back, each of which is full of heavy loads and weighs tens of thousands of pounds, and this big guy can run hundreds of miles at a speed of 10 miles per hour.

The railroad tracks at the west end of the site are less than two miles long, and they can be easily done at the speed of a locomotive.

"Haha, everything is normal in today's test, and there has been no problem for half a month." Half an hour later, the technician who accompanied the train reported excitedly to the chief engineer of Xuzhou Station.

……

It has been 26 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, and as of the first half of the 26th year of Chengtian, the total population of Chen Han has reached more than 206 million. The birth rate is worryingly high, Chinese have had the idea of having many children and more blessings since ancient times, and now their lives have improved, and they do not have more children, and they are still left as seeds?

This has been accompanied by a decline in the rate of emigration. Not only the Americas, but also the South Seas and the Outer Northeast are also experiencing a significant decline in population migration rates. In today's Americas and Southern Minnesia, many urban populations in the early days did not even exceed 10,000 people.

After more than 20 years of development and more than 20 years of industrialization, Chen Han is still far from completing the industrial revolution, but the basic scale of the country's modern industry has gradually entered a mature period. It's just that the society has not yet entered an industrial society, and it is still a little far from a comprehensive explosive expansion, and the number of industrial workers it relies on is still insufficient.

In China as a whole, the number of qualified technicians who can obtain from formal vocational education schools and on-the-job training is only 50,000 each year, and the overall industrial development is still constrained by the supply of raw materials and the number of skilled workers.

Of course, this is not to say that more than 20 years of hard work have not been effective. In fact, the first major issue initiated by Pang Zhenkun after entering the cabinet was the innovation of transportation construction in the new era.

Compared with the dredging and construction of waterways and land transportation in those years, Chen Han's engineering construction technology has had unimaginable super-large development in more than 20 years, which is full of bridge technology.

The Yellow River railway bridge in Xuzhou is an experiment, and in the next five years, bridges will appear on all major rivers in China to cross the banks of the river, making it easier and faster to 'transport' the previous need for ship transfer.

The middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River are the top priority of this transportation project, who makes the Yellow River so important in the social economy of northern China, and its own river depth is quite shallow?

And on some large and medium-sized rivers, reservoirs will also appear one by one.