Although the traditional concept of the people is that they will not easily open their hometowns, there are still many landless farmers who have left their hometowns to come to the northeast to reclaim land for a land that can be passed on to future generations.

In order to recruit more immigrants, the empire basically gave a large number of preferential policies, although it would not say that free land was directly issued, but the sale price of land was quite cheap, often only a few tenths of the mainland, or even one percent, and there was no need to pay in cash, and it could be repaid with crops later.

At the same time, if you are bold enough and not afraid of hardship, then the more land you can get further north, in the developed southern part of Liaoyang Province, you may only be able to get ten or twenty acres of land cheaply, and if you want more, you have to buy it at market price, but if you go to Heilongjiang Province, especially the land near Heilongjiang, the government's maximum rating is that each person can have a maximum of 50 acres of cheap purchase qualifications.

If it is those lands on the north bank of the Heilongjiang River, it is basically like giving it away for nothing, as long as you dare to go, you can choose on the map, the number is 100 acres, you have to have the ability to develop and cultivate, and you dare to give hundreds of acres.

In order to encourage people to migrate to develop frontier lands, the imperial stepped agricultural tax did not apply to several border provinces and steppe provinces.

The three northeastern provinces, Mongolia, Wutai, Xinjiang, Kokand and other provinces are all provinces that do not implement land quotas, as long as you dare to come, then there is more land.

But even so, ordinary people are reluctant to go, these places are notoriously bitter cold places. Liaoyang is better, but the other border provinces are not good places. It is difficult to cultivate, and the climate is not good. And also faced the threat of border conflicts, and if you are not careful, your life will be lost.

For example, in the area north of Heilongjiang, the imperial army is still fighting with the Russian army, if you dare to emigrate now, it is estimated that you must be psychologically prepared to face the Russian army's attack on the immigration base.

However, Liaoyang Province is now relatively mature in development, a large amount of arable land has been developed, and what attracts the attention of domestic industrial and commercial people is that a large number of coal and iron ore resources have been surveyed in Liaoyang Province.

Liaoyang multi-mine. This is something that people have known for a long time, otherwise the three major domestic mining companies would not have gathered in Liaoyang in the past few years, and then enclosed the land for prospecting.

However, when the North Coal and Iron Company announced that it had detected a super-large iron ore vein with abundant grain reserves and extremely low mining costs in the mining area of Benxi, and its reserves and mining costs were lower than those of the Ma'anshan Iron Mine of the Jiangnan Mining Company, the domestic mining industry was boiling.

When the Northern Coal and Iron Company announced that it would invest in the construction of a large steel plant in Shenyang, dozens of more mining companies were established in Liaoyang province in just a few months.

Although their capital, personnel and technical strength cannot be compared with the three major domestic mining companies, they have also made frequent gains.

But it is a great pity that even today in 1867. Liaoyang is still a province with a very small population, and it is not a problem to have mining funds, but the key is that you can't hire miners.

Most of the country's three major mining companies hire workers from other parts of the country and then go to Liaoyang to work. It is difficult for other small mining companies to do this.

However, the power of capital is infinite, facing development difficulties and the squeeze of the three major mining companies. These small mining companies were soon incorporated and annexed.

In 1866, after the Nanyang Mining Company. China's fourth large-scale mining enterprise, the 'Fuxi Coal and Iron Company', was formed by the merger of more than 30 small and medium-sized mining enterprises. At the same time, it has a certain official background, because the provincial finance department of Liaoyang Province occupies a part of the shares, mainly in the form of mining rights of mines, and owns 16% of the shares.

This Fuxi Coal and Iron Company also has a very obvious feature, that is, it is different from the other three mining giants in China, the other three mining giants are all over the country, even in China, but the core of the business of Fuxi Coal and Iron Company is gathered in Liaoyang Province.

However, although the company is only in Liaoyang Province, its strength is not weak, with many coal mines and railways, three small steel plants, and more importantly, the company also has mineral mining rights in a large number of areas in the three northeastern provinces.

As long as these mining rights are still empty words, no one knows whether there are minerals in other places, but judging from the rich mineral resources of Liaoyang Province, there must be ore veins, but there are more or less, and when to find the problem.

Although these forces are still relatively scattered, once the integration is completed, the company's strength will not be much weaker than the other three major mining companies in China, relying on the rich coal resources of Liaoyang Province.

The establishment of Fuxi Coal and Iron Company proves that the coal and iron industry of the empire is developing rapidly, and it also confirms the rapid development of the empire's industry from the side.

After all, coal and steel, these are consumer goods, if they can't be sold, even if they are developed, it is useless, and the domestic supply of coal and steel is increasing, there is no oversupply and demand, and even the situation that it can be consumed as much as it is produced, is enough to prove that the industrial and commercial development of the empire is very fast, and it is enough to consume more and more coal and steel products, and it is a healthy development.

At the beginning of 1867, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the empire had already made preliminary statistics on the output of coal and steel in 1866, which was 60,000 tons of raw steel, 900,000 tons of pig iron, and 9.6 million tons of coal.

Compared with the data of 1864, it can be said that there has been an explosive growth, especially the production of steel and pig iron is quite gratifying, although there is still a gap between the output of steel and France and Prussia in Europe, but this gap is gradually narrowing, and in a few years, the empire may not be able to catch up with the pace of development of France and Prussia, of course, this is still not compared with the British hair.

As for coal production, in the past two years, a number of minerals have been put into operation at the Luanzhou Coal Mine in Tangshan, while the Pingxiang Coal Mine has also begun to be put into large-scale production. The mining railways in the above two large coal mining areas, namely the Tangshan Railway and the Zhuping Railway, have also been completed and opened to traffic. This has led to explosive growth in coal production at both mines, which have almost doubled in each. Combined with the output of some other small coal mines in China, it has a coal output of 9.6 million tons.

Overall, the production of steel and coal has maintained a growth rate of more than 50% over the past two years.

This data is almost a myth for future generations, but for the era of the Industrial Revolution, this growth rate is nothing.

Because in contemporary times, not only the industrial output of the empire, but also major industrial resources such as steel and coal have increased dramatically, and Britain. France, Prussia and almost all other countries that started the industrial revolution have seen explosive growth in their industrial output.

In the sixties, the speed of industrial development in various countries can be described as a miracle, the scale of industry changes day by day, except for the United Kingdom, the world boss, other Western countries and the United States of modern industry began to develop on a large scale in the fifties, and in the sixties laid the foundation of the industrial country.

In this time period, if a country is lagging behind. If industrialization measures are not taken in time, the opportunity of the first industrial revolution will be lost, and it will be reduced to second-rate.

As a result, there has been a kind of helplessness and even despair for backward countries.

That is, when some backward countries carry out industrial reforms after the 70s or 80s of the 19th century, they will find quite a depressing thing. That is, on the surface, Western countries carried out the industrial revolution only twenty or thirty years earlier than them, but the gap between these two or thirty years will be difficult to cross in the next fifty or even a hundred years.

Because by that time, the other industrial countries of the world were already all over the world to market their industrial products. It is very difficult for you to support the enterprises of the country, because you will be hit by a major impact on foreign industrial products. People are more technologically advanced and reliable than you. Even if the cost is even lower, there will be almost no other way than to use tariff barriers to enforce the protection of domestic industry.

This is why between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, national trade barriers were so serious, and even triggered two world wars, a large part of which is that countries put up the banner of tariff barriers in order to protect their own industries.

Although the Chinese Empire was a little late at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, this delay can barely be overcome, after all, if you relax a little, the beginning of the industrialization of the Chinese Empire was in 1854, that is, when Lin Zhe was in charge of the Shanghai Trade Zone, and after 1857, the establishment of the Chinese Empire was to comprehensively promote industrialization, and now it is calculated that the time for the empire to carry out the industrial revolution has been thirteen years.

If these thirteen years are placed in the later generations, it may not be nothing, and even the industrialization achievements of the empire in these thirteen years are actually nothing in the later generations, and the current steel and coal production of the empire is not even as much as in the late Qing Dynasty in history.

However, if we make a horizontal comparison, that is, with France, Prussia, Italy, Austria and other countries that are also in the period of the industrial revolution, then we will find that although the empire developed a few years late, the speed of follow-up is quite fast, although there is still a big gap with Britain, France, Prussia, but at least they have not been left far behind.

On the runway of the Industrial Revolution, the Reich could still see France and Prussia in front of it, while Britain could vaguely see its back even farther away.

And those other countries, such as Japan, which is still in the midst of civil war, and a semi-colony in Southeast Asia, have not even come up to the runway of industrialization, and when they also board this runway, it is estimated that they will not even be able to see the shadow of the industrial countries in front of them.

It can be said that for the industrial development of the nineteenth and sixties, whether you can surpass the previous few opponents is also important, but the impact is not great, the most important thing is not to fall too far behind, at least you must be able to keep up with their pace.

This is the case with the current empire, although there is still a large gap between France and Prussia and Britain from various industrial data, the proportion of this gap is not continuing to expand, but is slowly narrowing, and this is the biggest achievement of the empire's industrialization in recent years.

The only thing that made Lin Zhe a little dissatisfied was that the coal production of the entire empire was still too small, and a large amount of coal had to be imported every year, which cost real money!

In the past few years, the price of coal in Shanghai's coal trading market has not risen significantly, but it still maintains a relatively high price, and at the same time it is still rising steadily.

In this regard, the Ministry of Mines also does not have a good solution, because there are too many factors involved in coal development, the most important of which is the transportation problem, that is, the railway.

Many coal mines are from inland areas, without railways, there is no way to carry out large-scale development, for example, the current Fushun coal mine in the northeast, where coal reserves are quite abundant, but because there is no railway, the current export is quite difficult, and resulting in high prices.

The coal dug up from Fushun is transported by land to several coastal ports, such as Yingkou, and then transported to the surrounding areas of Tianjin for sale, which is much more expensive than the price of coal in Luanzhou, Tangshan, and if it is transported to the surrounding areas of Shanghai, the price is also expensive.

Without railways for large-scale export, the cost of coal is difficult to reduce, the cost is high, and the development of enterprises will have to lose money, you must know that although the empire is in short supply of coal, but it will also import a large amount of coal every year, from Australia, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and even the United States of coal, can be found in the Shanghai coal trading market.

And these imported coal also have a very obvious feature, that is, the imported coal is generally high-quality coal, and a considerable part of it is anthracite.

At present, the anthracite in the domestic market is basically imported, because there is no anthracite coal with large reserves developed in China for the time being, but ships, especially warships, need to burn anthracite, otherwise the power loss will be very large, and the steam engine will also be damaged.

In order to ensure the supply of anthracite, especially the supply of anthracite coal required by naval warships, the empire has also spent a lot of thought, the most important of which is the establishment of a coal reserve mechanism by the navy itself, the purchase of a large amount of coalless for hoarding, the initial goal is to be able to ensure the naval fleet for at least two years of combat needs in the case of a shortage of foreign anthracite supply.

On the other hand, we are making every effort to develop Vietnam's anthracite coal and expand the supply of anthracite.

At present, almost all of the coal produced in the Quang Ninh coal mine from Vietnam, which is controlled by the Nanyang Mining Company, has been directly shipped back to China, while the anthracite coal in Quang Ninh coal has basically been covered by the navy or those shipping companies.

China is not without coal, Liaoyang is already under development, and has a history of coal production, some mining companies are conducting large-scale surveys in Shanxi, which is rich in coal resources, but both places have the same problem, that is, there is no railway for the time being, even if there are countless coal lying there and you can dig it, but it can't be transported, and it can't be transported to Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other industrial cities, coal can not reflect its value.

Coal production has a serious impact on the development of industry, after all, steelmaking and ironmaking all need coal, the steam engine of the factory needs to move, and coal is also needed for ships and trains, and coal is also needed for coal production, and the coal production is insufficient and the price is high, which is not a good thing for industrial development.

The first three railways of the empire, the Xuzhou Railway, the Zhuping Railway, and the Tangshan Railway, are all typical mining railways, and they are all built specifically for transporting coal.

The Northeast Railway, which is now being surveyed and ready to be built, is actually only preparing to build the southern section, that is, the section from Tangshan to Shenyang, and then the branch line from Shenyang to Benxi and Fushun, the core goal of which is to develop the coal and iron ore resources of Liaoyang Province.

Due to a series of factors, the Northeast Railway, after the Jinpu line, has become the third railway in China to start large-scale construction, the railway is temporarily only built from Tangshan to Shenyang, and the others are rebuilt.

The official establishment and start of the Northeast Railway is also the prelude to the development of Northeast China, which is not only the kind of immigration reclamation in the past, but also the preparation of large-scale development of local mineral resources, and even the establishment of a heavy industry base represented by the steel industry. (To be continued.) )