Therefore, the French and the Americans who took over the project in history had to change the design route of the lock-type canal, but after learning about these circumstances, Li Hui had another idea, "Since the use of the lake can only be built into a lock-type canal, then why do we have to use the lake?" ”

Of course, Li Hui knew that the use of the lake could reduce the amount of construction of the canal, thus saving a lot of construction costs, especially since the part that had been repaired by the French was already placed there, and it would be a pity not to use it, but the advantage of the planned economy was that it did not have to care too much about the short-term interests in the immediate situation, and could look at the long-term. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

It is true that according to the historical design ideas, the construction cost can be much saved, but the maintenance cost of the lock canal is much higher than that of the Haiping canal, and the speed of ship passage is much slower, and it will be much more difficult to further widen and dig in the future; In contrast, although the one-time investment of digging a sea-level canal on another route will be relatively large, after completion, the maintenance cost will definitely be much lower than that of the historical Panama Canal, and it is more convenient for ships to pass through, and the profitability will be doubled. Moreover, once the Haiping canal is completed, it is much more convenient to expand it on this basis than the lock type, which can save a lot of money.

According to the estimation of technical experts, even if the traffic volume between the east and west coasts of the Americas remains unchanged at the level of 1900, the Haiping Canal will only need to wait for more than ten years, and the net profit will exceed that of the lock canal plan, and the gap will continue to widen after that. Western canal companies are joint-stock and must make a profit as soon as possible before they can account to investors, so the construction cost of this one-time huge investment can be saved, but China does not have this pressure, and the attraction of the Haiping canal is greater.

Li Hui decided to find a new route and dig a Haiping canal, and he soon realized that he might not have to spend that much money at all, because the Panama Canal was extremely expensive because most of the Isthmus of Panama was still undeveloped rainforest.

This has brought about two problems, one is that the transportation is extremely inconvenient, and the transportation cost of all kinds of necessary materials is extremely high and time-consuming, and the reason why the American Canal Company will continue to use the old plan, and having a ready-made railroad next to it is also a very important factor, but Li Hui can send a "doppelganger" there to directly "deploy" the required materials, and the problem can be easily solved. It didn't matter if there was no railway, and a new ...... was easily built

Second, the difficult working conditions in the tropics (mainly various dangerous tropical diseases and highly poisonous snakes and insects) have caused a large number of workers to fall ill and even die, which not only makes the labor cost high, but also greatly delays the construction period, making the construction cost of the entire project terrifyingly high.

However, China can send hundreds of thousands of Nanyang prisoners (the proportion of the population who have been sentenced to heavy prison sentences and long-term labor camps is much higher than that of the mainland, especially Filipinos who have been convicted of original sins but have not been completely liquidated because they are of mixed Chinese descent). They are adapted to the rainforest climate, they don't even have to pay their salaries, and their labor costs are negligible compared to those of the French and American canal companies.

China's unique products such as cool oil and herbal tea to cope with hot and humid weather and mosquito bites also helped to keep workers motivated, so the construction progress was much faster than when the United States dug the Panama Canal......

In addition, there is another difficulty in digging the Panama Canal, that is, it is necessary to open the watershed in the Isthmus of Panama, although after entering the province of Panama, the altitude of the watershed decreases rapidly, but even the lowest place is 84 meters, with the current level of Western science and technology, it is not so easy to chisel. In a sense, this is also an important incentive for the Franco-American canal companies to choose to build locks, because the use of locks to raise the water level can reduce digging tens of meters, which alone saves almost one-third of the amount of excavation work.

But for China, this is not too much of a problem, the Chinese have been good at opening mountains since ancient times (since the beginning of Dayu's water control), and over the years domestic water conservancy construction has accumulated rich experience, especially the "Shengli Canal" in Linxian County, Henan Province (a copy of the "Red Flag Canal" in this time and space) is a miracle on earth, known as the "artificial heavenly river". What's more, China has a material condition that the Franco-American canal companies cannot hope for, that is, a huge amount of cheap explosives!

According to Chinese sources, the central government has produced more than 100,000 tons of explosives specifically for the Panama Canal (although they are all ammonium nitrate explosives and are included in the production statistics of industrial explosives, not the production statistics of fierce explosives). Its power is even much greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped by the US military on Hiroshima for a long time, and only China, which has completely mastered the technology of synthetic ammonia and has begun mass production, has such a supply capacity, even if the entire West unites to do so for the time being.

So many explosives are used for engineering blasting, not to mention just a low mountain range at an altitude of more than 100 meters, even if it is higher, it may not be impossible to explode, in fact, this batch of explosives does have a lot of leftovers, and after the project is completed, it is given to local farmers as fertilizer, which is also a kind of compensation for the damage to the local ecological environment.

Well, the main reason is actually that it is troublesome to bring it back to China, after all, ammonium nitrate is a dangerous product and needs a special ship to transport it. If Li Hui really paid attention to the local environment, he would not have chosen the Haiping Canal, which would lead to the salinization of the land along the coast. In the final analysis, Li Hui only cares about environmental protection at home and in the rest of the world that can affect China's immediate neighbors and the rest of the world......

In 1906, the Panama Canal, which was thought to take at least a dozen years to complete, was completely opened, and it was wider and deeper than all the Western media had estimated in advance, and even a giant ship with a draft of up to 10 meters could pass safely in any season, and even the speed did not have to be deliberately slowed down.

"Panama Speed" thus caused a sensation in the world and became an insurmountable benchmark in the history of world engineering. The total cost of the entire canal project is less than 200 million Chinese yuan, and even if 100 million yuan is added when it is announced to the public so as not to be too shocking, it still makes Westerners stunned. Of course, the Western media did not forget to seize the opportunity to once again criticize China's human rights issues, but this did not stop them from enthusiastically hiring Chinese companies to help them complete some difficult construction projects...... (To be continued.) )