When Chen Zeyu learned the news of the assassination of Mutsu Zongguang in Yanjing, he couldn't help but sigh in his heart, and the second day he asked people to send condolences to Yuben.

Putting aside the opposing national sentiments in each other's hearts, Chen Zeyu still admired the early politicians of the Ming Dynasty, such as Mutsu Munemitsu and Okubo Ritsu, who were also descendants of the East, when the Qing ministers who were also descendants of the East were arrogant, they built a small country like the former into a modern country through only a few decades of reform and reform. Whether it was a military adventure or a brave effort, without their efforts, there would never have been a rise of the later story. It's a pity, who let these politicians and Chen Zeyu be born in the same era, God's choice will be destined to make this era of this era take a completely different path.

On August 19, 1898, as if by tacit understanding, not long after the Germans had just forcibly occupied the southern islands, the Russian Far East Fleet suddenly attacked the Kira fortress on Shikoku Island in the early morning of the same day, and only reluctantly repulsed it after the defenders of the Japanese army fiercely counterattacked.

According to the information that Chen Zeyu had, the British fleet in Yokohama had already "disappeared" at that time, and a little thought of it would show that the British and Russian naval fleets must have had some anxiety and confrontation in the waters of the Kira Peninsula in Shikoku, and even the Germans joined in.

To Chen Zeyu's disappointment, the two fleets did not seem to really exchange fire. As a matter of fact, since the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in the East last year, the naval strength of the Russians in the Far East has long since greatly surpassed that of the British Far East Fleet. But even so, Vice Admiral Wittgeft, the commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet, still did not carry out the "military adventure" that Chen Zeyu had envisioned.

In fact, in Chen Zeyu's eyes, the battlefield in the Far East is the best "natural pit", and he, a modern man, has always been "ill-intentioned" waiting for Tsarist Russia and Britain to jump into it. Although it is not enough to go up and pull the bias on his own, it is still possible to fan the flames on the sidelines, and as long as there is the right time, a mutated Anglo-Russian war is still very likely to be realized. It is not only Chen Zeyu who thinks so, but also Germany, a powerful European continent that has been gloating on the sidelines, has also been working in this direction -- if it were not for the fact that China and Germany had been providing arms and supplies to Tsarist Russia, the Russian Far East War might not have been able to go so smoothly.

On August 21, as if to breathe a sigh of relief to his country's Far East Fleet in Yokohama, the British Embassy and Consulate Counselor Sadaoyi, wearing his laughing "Pinocchio" metal mask, "accidentally" injured the Russian Consul General in Yanjing, Blitz, and the unlucky Russian minister broke the bridge of his nose on the spot, as if he wanted to give a sigh of relief to the ministers of various countries......

Not to mention how many "jokes" the diplomatic disputes between the two sides brought to the diplomatic circles of various countries in August, on August 31, the day of the end of the month, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in the Republic of Seris was finally completed after nearly two years of intense construction!

In addition to the Beijing-Yangzhou Railway and the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway of the South Line, the 1,462-kilometer-long Beijing-Shanghai Railway Trunk Line of the East Line of the Republic has been completed, and on September 3, three days later, it joined the existing railway lines in the country and was officially connected to the grid.

On the day of the completion of the north-south railway, Chen Zeyu also personally presided over the grand opening ceremony and invited envoys from various countries to attend the ceremony.

Standing on the 70-meter-high bridge deck looking down on the rolling waves below, many foreign envoys who came to watch the ceremony could not help but admire the majesty of the world's first cross-river highway and railroad dual-purpose bridge.

In order to highlight the perfection of the electrification facilities on both sides of the bridge deck, the organizer of the ceremony, Nanjing Municipal Axe, also specially put the inauguration ceremony of the project in the evening. At this moment, people from all walks of life on the bridge look from the bridge, only to see the 1048 electric lights above the bridge railing are bright, and the 540 high-power lighting facilities on the bridge pier are the entire Yangtze River surface illuminated as day, plus the Chinese lights on the highway bridge, the whole Yangtze River Bridge is suddenly illuminated like the Milky Way white jade, and the original magnificent majestic posture of the bridge seems to be outlined more clearly and charmingly at night.

The whole Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is divided into two layers from the structural design, the upper layer is a highway passenger bridge with a total length of 4589 meters, the roadway is 15 meters wide, which can accommodate 8 Centrino cars to drive side by side, and there are sidewalks more than 2 meters wide on both sides. The lower layer is the railway bridge, with a total length of 6,772 meters, since the completion of the day has been incorporated into the east line of the railway network of Seris, the bridge width of the whole railway bridge is 14 meters, the design is shrunk inward, slightly narrower than the road bridge on the upper level, the bridge deck of the railway bridge is paved with double-track double-track railway, which can be used for the north and south trains to travel in the opposite direction at the same time.

Excluding the approach bridge section connected to the ground, the main bridge on the river surface of the entire bridge is 1,577 meters long. Among them, the highway approach bridge on the upper level adopts the form of a double-hole double-curved arch bridge created by Xu Daobo, the designer of the Ceris Bridge. There are also 200 cast-iron celebrity reliefs on the guardrails on both sides of the main bridge, and 150 pairs of electrified street lights next to the outermost sidewalk.

In addition, there are two 73-meter-high bridgeheads at the north and south ends of the bridge, and there are elevators in the fort that can lead to the railway bridge, the road bridge and the lookout on the bridgehead. The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge has a total of 9 piers, the highest pier is 85 meters high from the foundation to the top, and the bottom area is about 400 square meters, which is larger than a standard basketball court. The span of the main bridge is 160 meters, and a 10,000-ton giant ship can be used under the bridge. The whole bridge is like a rainbow on the river, which is very spectacular.

Whether it is from the technical complexity of the construction or the width of the bridge itself, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in front of you can be called the world's first masterpiece. Not to mention, the bridge itself will have enormous economic and political significance if it connects the East Asian North-South Railway. Coupled with the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and the Yucheng Baishatuo Bridge built before it, the turbulent Yangtze River from east to west, from upstream to downstream, has become a fast and smooth road to the north and south of Seris.

In front of many political officials and foreign envoys in China, Chen Zeyu raised his pen and ink in the bridgehead building of the bridge, and cast a calligraphy to the construction personnel of the bridge...... A bridge flies north and south, and the moat becomes a thoroughfare. The stone wall of the Xijiang River is erected, the Wushan Mountain is cut off, and the high gorge is out of the Ping Lake. The goddess should be unharmed, and the world should be shocked......"

Xu Daobo, the chief designer of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, received this significant calligraphy work with excitement, but the founder of the Ceris Engineering Research Association, who was over forty years old, was speechless with tears in his eyes.

The British Consul General Dou Nale, who was watching the ceremony, looked at the scene in front of him with a complicated face, and I don't know when this oriental country has reached or even surpassed the technological level of European countries in various industrial levels.

Speaking of which, the bridge in front of him also has a "fate" with his own country, just a few years ago, Seris Political Axe came forward to seek British engineers to build this bridge across the Yangtze River in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. The section of the river that the Seris people chose at that time is this section of the river from Anhui Quarry Rock to Zhenjiang in Jiangsu, the terrain here is like a belly pocket, the water is deep and the waves are rapid, the average width of the river is more than 1500 meters, the narrowest place is also 1100 meters, the water depth is mostly between 15 and 30 meters, the deepest is more than 70 meters, the river water flow speed is also very fast, 3 meters per second, because of its dangerous terrain, there is a saying of "the Yangtze River moat" since ancient times. At that time, all the well-known bridge engineers, including their own country, did not hesitate to deny the other party's political axe on the grounds that "the water is deep and rapid, and it is not suitable to build a bridge" after a little investigation.

And now, the bridge construction plan that was originally rejected by engineers from all over the world in the past has been designed and implemented by the Oriental people themselves, and in front of the magnificent world's first cross-river bridge, the refuting remarks of the past have long become the laughing stock of the international engineering community, and at the same time, it also highlights the rapid development of the Oriental people in the construction engineering community.

What surprised the Englishman even more was the overall ability of the project on the part of Seris, and at the same time as the completion of the Yangtze River Bridge, the unplanned Beijing-Shanghai railway line was also completed at the same time, which gave the world's first cross-river bridge in front of him a huge glory like the "finishing touch".

As the first eastern railway running through the north and south of Seris, the Beijing-Shanghai Railway is also too dazzling to ignore.

From the planning to the construction of the entire railway, and finally to the opening of the whole line, these Ceris engineers only took less than two years, and their construction standards, project schedules, and design standards are all unprecedented.

Together with its northernmost railway, the Beijing-Harbin Railway, the Seris have inadvertently created a 2,850-kilometer-long eastern railway artery across East Asia. The entire Beijing-Shanghai railway starts from Yanjing, passes through Tianjin, Cangzhou, Dezhou, Jinan, Xuzhou, Bengbu, Yangzhou, Nanjing and finally arrives in Shanghai. The whole railway project is a 1435mm 75 kg/m quasi-gauge heavy-haul double-track railway, which runs through the four major river basins of Haihe, Yellow River, Huaihe River and Yangtze River, passes through Hebei, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, and connects Tianjin and Shanghai, two largest ports in China. It can be said that the entire railway is the most economically developed new industrial zone along the eastern coast of the Republic, so it has become one of the busiest railway trunk lines in Seris since its completion, which has greatly relieved the economic transportation pressure in the east.

Dou Nale silently calculated in his heart, plus the Jiaoji Railway, Harbin-Dalian Railway, Changtu Railway, Beining Railway, Baocheng Railway, Wenfu Railway, Tongpu Railway, Daqin Railway, Beijing-Wuhan Railway (Yanjing-Ulaanbaatar), Jinghan Railway (the northern line of the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway) and Taiwan's Ring Island Railway and other railway trunk lines, the Seris people have quietly built more than 14,400 kilometers of railway projects in more than three years!

If you add in the several round-the-island railways they completed in the early years of Luzon, the total length of railways in the country has reached an astonishing 21,900 kilometers! That's 1.8 times the length of rail in the UK!

Standing in the bridgehead building, Dou Nale looked at the two 1435mm steel tracks running through the river below the bridge deck, as if overnight, this eastern country had completed the industrialization path that all European countries took hundreds of years to complete.

Just three years after the collapse of the decaying and backward Qing Dynasty, the East Asian empire, which was still ancient and vast and almost moribund, has already taken on a striking modern scene. In the dusty past, the country has built more than 20,000 kilometers of double-track railways, several local steel and shipyards have production capacity comparable to that of European countries, and the famous Chen's Commercial Press has become the world's number one cultural publishing group, now with tens of thousands of employees and workers. Inadvertently, the eastern country has become more of a new profession, lawyers, journalists, teachers, policemen, technicians, doctors, engineers and industrialists...... More importantly, more than 9,000 new schools have been built in this East Asian country, and more than 15 million young people are hungry for new education.

In a trance, Dou Nale's gaze returned to the bridge in front of him, as if he had the illusion that the Seris railroad tracks in front of him seemed to have turned into a serpentine monster in scale armor, wielding its pair of sharp claws and roaring at the world......

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