On the rumbling train, the son and Cai'er were lying on the window, holding snacks made of shredded squid in their hands, and discussing the scenery along the train while eating snacks in their mouths. Li Zhi sat behind them, lying on the table, carefully recording what he saw during his visit to Dengzhou.

Yesterday afternoon, they arrived in Dengzhou, and after resting for a night in Li Su's Qi Palace, Li Zhi and his son continued to pick children, and took the train with great interest, and went down to visit every station, and it was already noon, and the whole Dengzhou City was also half turned by them. Thinking of this morning's harvest, Li Zhi was also quite excited.

The son is visiting Dengzhou City with a playful mentality, so wherever he goes, he will run around curiously, and at the same time he is also very fascinated by the local snacks of Dengzhou, and his little mouth has not stopped all morning. Li Zhi is different, he is visiting Dengzhou City with a kind of investigation mentality, so he does not just look at the surface of Dengzhou City, but through this appearance, he sees many deeper things, so he definitely knows more about Dengzhou than his son, of course, he is not as happy and relaxed as his son during this morning's tour.

Li Zhi's train is a special small train, which is usually used for sightseeing, this is because with the prosperity of Dengzhou, many people either take the opportunity to do business, or come to Dengzhou, in order to have a good visit to this fast-growing city, and the train is the focus of these tourists, and because of this, Dengzhou City specially made this kind of small train, specially pulling these tourists to visit the entire Dengzhou City, Li Zhi took this kind of train, And it was specially arranged by local officials in Dengzhou. Except for the three of them, the entire car was full of guards in civilian clothes. On the surface, it looks like the rest of the tourists.

First stop this morning. Li Zhi and they arrived at the fishing port in the northwest of Dengzhou City, which is the largest fishing port in Dengzhou City, next to the wharf of the port, there is also the largest seafood trade market in the north of the Tang Dynasty, in this market, boats and boats of newly salvaged seafood are sent here, and then after sorting and weighing, most of them will be bought by local food processing factories in Dengzhou, and the remaining small part will flow to the vegetable markets in Dengzhou and nearby states.

Although the seafood trade market stinks. Still, Li Zhi walked in with a few guards, carefully observed the living conditions of the fishermen, and also inquired about the volume of transactions here, and then compared them with the data provided by local officials in Dengzhou to draw the conclusions he needed.

Li Zhi also attaches great importance to the fishing industry in Dengzhou, because he knows very well that Dengzhou is mountainous and there is not much land that can really grow food. In the past, all the grain was provided by inland grain-producing areas such as Qingzhou. However, when the sixth brother Li Su came here, he immediately vigorously developed the fishing industry to supplement the lack of local grain production. And this also taught Li Zhi that sometimes food is not only produced on the land, but also the ocean is also a big granary of abundance.

It's also worth mentioning. Right next to this fishing port, there is also a special whaling port, where not only local whaling ships will dock here. Even whaling ships from other state capitals come here, and that's because it's the only place here. There are professional whale buyers, and the prices they give are higher than in other places. So most of the whaling ships will come to Dengzhou to trade.

For the whaling ship, the son is very interested, and even she is not afraid of the stench, and came to this small port to watch in person, but what disappointed her is that the current whaling ship has rarely brought back the whole whale, and it is generally divided and boiled at sea, and the inedible internal organs and bones will all be thrown into the sea, so when the son came here, he did not see the whale being hunted at all.

After leaving the fishing port, Li Zhi and the others came to a three-story cement building on the outskirts of the city, which was originally the headquarters of the local slave association in Dengzhou, where Yanbei often dealt with the affairs of the slave association. However, in recent years, with the collapse of ethnic minorities such as Goguryeo, Silla, Baekje, Wa, and the Khitan in the north of Yingzhou, Dengzhou, the largest slave trade center in the country, has been unable to find a usable source of slaves, so the slave hunting industry here has plummeted, and the previous slave hunters have either changed their careers or gone to Taiwan, Luzon, and even the grasslands or Western Regions in the north of the Tang Dynasty to carry out a new round of slave trade.

Because of this, the Dengzhou Slave Association, which was very excited at the beginning, became increasingly depressed, and finally Li Su simply moved the Dengzhou Slave Hunting Association to Taiwan, and only such a headquarters with no one was left here. That is, the three-story building in front of Li Zhi and them, but although it was abandoned, the local officials in Dengzhou put some materials and items related to slave hunting here, and organized it into a slave hunting museum for tourists to visit.

However, almost every item in the exhibits in this slave hunting museum is stained with a lot of blood, such as the weapons used by the slave capture team, and the shackles that imprisoned the slaves, etc., and even some seemingly clean documents, the words recorded between the lines, are all full of blood and violence.

Cai'er and her son didn't have a good impression of this museum, and they just came in for a while, so they ran outside the door and waited for Li Zhi, because for the girls, everything here makes people feel scary and eerie. However, Li Zhi read it with relish, especially for those documents, and copied a lot of the contents of them, and prepared to study them carefully in the future.

After leaving this museum full of slave blood, Li Zhi and the three of them took the train to the northeast corner of Dengzhou City, there is a very famous ship city, most of the shipyards in Dengzhou are located here, and there is even a steam shipyard here.

When she was in Cotton Harbor, she took the huge Qi King for the first time, which made her also interested in sea ships, so when she visited the shipyard, she seemed much more lively than the previous two places, especially when she saw the sea ships under construction in the dockyard, she was even more excited, if it weren't for the guards who were worried that it would be too dangerous and prevented the son from boarding one of the sea ships under construction, she might really go around the ship.

In fact, Li Zhi is most concerned about the shipbuilding industry in Dengzhou, because here is the foundation for the sixth brother Li Su to go overseas, it was here that Li Su let people build the Fu ship and the Galen ship, thus laying the foundation of the developed shipbuilding industry of Datang, and now after several years of development, the Fu ship and the Galen ship have been re-improved and designed by countless master shipwrights, and have formed two major ship series families, hard sailing ships and soft sailing ships, and various ships with different functions and different uses are built in various shipyards in Datang. Although many of the shipyards in Dengzhou have been relocated to Taiwan, they are still one of the most developed shipbuilding bases in Datang.

After visiting the ship city, the next trip is much easier, Li Zhi took Cai'er and his son, specifically in some prosperous areas inside and outside Dengzhou City, compared to the Chang'an they are most familiar with, Dengzhou here is a large port, so the city gathers a large number of overseas merchants and goods, which also makes the whole city full of strong exotic customs, which is also the reason why the son and Li Zhi feel very fresh.

Although there was a train to travel, Li Zhi and the three of them ran all morning, and they all felt a little tired, so after getting off the train at the next stop, the three of them found a restaurant to eat seafood. Although all kinds of canned seafood are also very popular, the seafood is still fresh and the best, especially for Li Zhi and his son, who grew up in the hinterland, although they have eaten seafood feasts in Cangzhou, but they still think that Dengzhou is the best.

In the next few days, Li Zhi made a comprehensive investigation of Dengzhou, and it was no longer limited to industry and commerce, he paid more attention to some matters of people's livelihood, such as people's usual diet, medical care, travel, housing, etc., and made the situation here in Dengzhou and Chang'an, which he was most familiar with.

As a result, Li Zhi was very shocked to find that although the prosperity and population of Dengzhou are not as good as Chang'an for the time being, most of them have surpassed Chang'an in terms of people's livelihood, for example, in the diet of the people, Dengzhou because of the sea, meat accounts for nearly half of the people's diet, most of which are all kinds of seafood, and even whenever you eat, as long as you push open a people's kitchen at will, you can see all kinds of fish prepared inside. In the diet of the people in Chang'an, Li Zhi has already made statistics, and the proportion of meat only accounts for less than a quarter.

The people take food as the sky, and a single dietary structure has already explained a good problem, that is, the development of Dengzhou in some aspects has surpassed Chang'an, and this is what shocked Li Zhi, he really can't imagine that in just eight years, Li Su has built a port city that is not too important so prosperous?

Li Zhi stayed in Dengzhou for ten days, and during these ten days, he studied all the inside and outside of Dengzhou City very thoroughly, trying to find out the reason for the rapid development of Dengzhou, but unfortunately, although Li Zhi vaguely felt something, he couldn't find the core of these things.

It is precisely because of this that Li Zhi is now eager to see Li Su immediately, and then ask his sixth brother for these things that he can't figure out, but it is a pity that his itinerary Li Su has already made arrangements, and their next stop is not Taiwan in the south, but Sanhan in the northeast of Dengzhou! (To be continued......)