The buildings on the Bund Avenue with the styles of various countries and even different historical periods are like a picture scroll, which appears many times colorful, and everywhere you look, you can always see different buildings from the past.

Guo Longyun raised his head slightly, and he could see the tallest Bund Hotel in the distance, and on both sides of the Bund Hotel, there were majestic buildings.

Within a few kilometers, you can see the office buildings of various institutions such as Shanghai Municipal Yamen, Customs Building, Royal Bank Headquarters, Xinde Foreign Bank, Yihe Foreign Bank, and Shanghai Textile Company Headquarters.

Just by looking at it, you know that you are in a well-developed modern city!

Compared with the prosperous Shanghai in front of you, the rest of the country is still in the barbaric era, whether it is Suzhou or Nanjing or Beiping or any other city, these cities now say that the best thing is that they retain a large number of traditional style buildings, full of China's 5,000-year-old cultural atmosphere, but to put it bluntly, it is just backward.

In this era, Shanghai is the most prosperous commercial city in China and even in the entire Far East!

However, the superficial prosperity of Shanghai is not the main reason for attracting countless people to invest and set up factories, these things are actually just the result of the development of businessmen after investment, not the reason to attract them to invest in the first place.

The real reason for attracting even many foreigners from all over the country to invest is because Shanghai has a unique political advantage!

During the era, the trade zone was effectively an independent kingdom, and Lin Zhe implemented a new political system in the trade zone, breaking the traditional government model and adopting a large number of employees to govern the trade zone.

At that time, there was only one real official in the business district. That is Lin Zhe, the supervising minister, and the others are all personal staff or employees belonging to Lin Zhe.

At the same time, he adopted an enterprise-style administrative model. It is very different from the traditional government administration model.

The employees in the business area at that time were the waiters hired by Lin Zhe to serve those merchants. Therefore, we will do our best to treat businessmen, and take the initiative to help you solve any problems immediately.

Later, Lin Zhe rebelled and became emperor, after the merger of the business zone and Shanghai County, but the newly established Shanghai still maintained a relatively special administrative model, first of all, it still retained the 'municipal management committee' of the business zone era and selected five people as members, with the power to supervise the municipal administration, and when necessary, it can directly submit to Lin Zhe the impeachment of municipal officials, and at the same time, in case of emergency, these five municipal councilors unanimously agreed. It is possible to temporarily veto/postpone some administrative orders of the Shanghai Municipal Government Yamen, and directly submit the administrative orders to the Cabinet, which will make the final decision on whether to implement them or not.

Originally, Lin Zhe planned to abolish Shanghai's 'municipal management committee', but many of Shanghai's businessmen and gentry made a statement to try to retain this kind of non-governmental supervisory body, so as to prevent the officials of the Shanghai Municipal Government from making inappropriate moves in some cases.

However, there are no foreigners in the previous committee, and the five members of the municipal management committee are all Chinese. And they are all business tycoons in Shanghai, who are each elected by the Shanghai Raw Silk Chamber of Commerce, the Cloth Industry Chamber of Commerce, the Money Industry Chamber of Commerce, and the Grain and Oil Chamber of Commerce, and one person is appointed by the central government. However, whether it is elected by the chamber of commerce or appointed by the central government, these five people must live all year round. Those who are registered in Shanghai also have to pay more than 1,000 yuan in taxes annually.

Interestingly, among the five current committee members. There are two persons in charge of enterprises belonging to the royal family, one is the manager of the Shanghai Textile Company. This was elected by the Raw Silk Chamber of Commerce, and the other was the vice president of the Royal Bank and the manager of the Shanghai branch. This was chosen by the Money Chamber of Commerce.

If it weren't for the Finance Department of the Palace Affairs Department in order to avoid suspicion, it is estimated that it would be able to occupy another place.

The unique political atmosphere here ensures to a certain extent that Shanghai is completely different from other places in terms of some specific administrative measures, and it can even be said that it is ahead of the curve.

For example, in 1858, Shanghai issued the first local newspaper regulations, officially allowing private newspapers to run newspapers from the official review, but the content published in the newspaper must be reviewed by a special management agency, and it is absolutely forbidden to publish any remarks that slander the empire, incite riots, and slander the emperor and the imperial family.

But it is good to say that it is finally officially stipulated that newspapers can be run, and there is no need to worry about when the government will come to seize them as in the past, you must know that even the central government of the empire does not have laws and regulations related to the newspaper industry, and whether this can be run or not depends on the decision of local officials, and some local officials are more enlightened, such as Shanghai, so that newspapers are allowed.

If the local official is a stubborn conservative, such as Tongzhou, which is across the river, the current governor of Tongzhou is an old Confucian stubborn who is not serious, although he learned to engage in industry in Shanghai, which is across the river, and engaged in the weaving industry, but he is extremely strict in controlling the so-called speech, and if you dare to run a newspaper under his rule, the policemen in black uniforms will have to come to the door and arrest people in minutes.

In addition to the relatively unique political environment, after the merger of the Shanghai Business Zone and Shanghai County, the original employees of the business zone still maintained the mentality that they were only employees and not officials!

Therefore, when you go to other places, you can meet a small section chief and put up an official show with you, but here in Shanghai, even when Xiao Changzhong, the mayor of Shanghai, faces those businessmen, he has to laugh.

How to say, the political treatment is not the same!

If you go to invest elsewhere, those officials treat you as a fat sheep, and you have to laugh when you see the officials.

But here in Shanghai, those officials treat you as a master, and they have to laugh when they see you.

Although the officials in Shanghai did not seem to have official authority or anything like that, the effect was quite good.

Shanghai at the end of 1859 was very different from any other place in China, and to some extent, when you go to Shanghai, you feel completely different from when you go to another world.

And this kind of Shanghai naturally attracted the attention and dissatisfaction of many people, even high-level cabinet officials, such as Jiang Daoquan, who was known for his conservativeness, and he would not be accustomed to many things in Shanghai.

But these people don't like it, but no one dares to talk nonsense in front of Lin Zhe, why?

Because in 1858, the tax revenue of Shanghai alone was as high as 17 million, and if you count about 12 million Shanghai Customs, then Shanghai contributed 29 million in tax revenue to the central government, which is 3 or 4 million more than the entire Jiangsu Province except Shanghai!

Its industrial output value accounts for 95 percent of the country's industrial output value!

How the Chinese army unified China was supported by Shanghai's grain and collected taxes, especially in the period of about half a year from the end of 1856 to the beginning of 1857, where the incident started, the Chinese army relied on the support of Shanghai, a small land, to win the entire southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang, and then laid the foundation for hegemony.

At the same time, many of Shanghai's policy concepts were not formulated by Xiao Changzhong, the current mayor of Shanghai, but were personally finalized by Lin Zhe at the beginning, and it is also Lin Zhe's concept to treat officials as employees, and the adoption of an enterprise-style administrative management model is also promoted by Lin Zhe, and the current Xiao Changzhong is just continuing to implement these policies, so even if those people in the cabinet don't like Shanghai and Xiao Changzhong, they don't have the courage to say anything.

The external geographical and transportation environment, and the unique political environment inside, which made Shanghai burst out with unusual vitality in China in this era, not only many people came to Shanghai with huge funds to set up factories and do business, but also many gentry and wealthy businessmen went to Shanghai to buy real estate and family business, even if they did not move the whole family over, but they would also buy a house as an annex.

As a result, after the Taiping Army withdrew from Jiangsu, southern Anhui and other places in Shanghai after 1857, the population growth rate in Shanghai still did not stop, but continued to maintain a high-speed growth trend, the total permanent population of Shanghai last year has reached 800,000, and this year is expected to exceed one million.

However, it also brought obvious side effects, that is, the land price in Shanghai, the growth rate of housing prices is also like a rocket, a two-story building with a garden about a kilometer away from the Huangpu River, the price in 1856 was about 1,000 yuan, but now there is no 3,000 or 4,000 yuan at all.

As for the Bund Avenue, the land that can be used to build office buildings is basically 100,000 yuan, and if it is a riverside apartment of about 100 square meters in a multi-storey apartment on the Bund Avenue, the price is tens of thousands.

Basically, the land price or holiday is the closer to the straight line distance from the Huangpu River, the more expensive it is, while the Bund Avenue is centered on the Shanghai Municipal Government Building, and it is gradually cheaper to extend to both sides.

The most expensive area is naturally about a kilometer, but it is a riverside section of the former British Concession that gathers the headquarters of famous institutions such as the Shanghai Municipal Government Building, the Customs House, the Royal Bank, the Shanghai Textile Company, Yihe & Co., and the Shun Tak & Co.

However, just as Indian cities in later generations had poor kilns, and Chinese cities had urban villages, Shanghai also had a large number of low- and middle-income people living in this time and space.

For these ordinary people who come to Shanghai from other places to make a living, there is no difference between a small western-style building near the Bund and 10,000 yuan or 10,000 yuan, and those apartments on the Bund Avenue are 10,000 yuan or 100,000 yuan.

These people either live in the factories or in cheap rental houses several kilometers away from the Huangpu River.

Far from the Huangpu River, there are not only factories of all kinds, but also a variety of modest houses around the factories, mostly by professional real estate merchants who buy land and build simple houses that are rented out to those who come to Shanghai to make a living.

Although the single rent is not very high, but these cheap rental houses are very densely built, he can separate five sets of a place of only 100 square meters, and then rent them out to five families, and they are all cheap houses, rain and leakage are common things, it is estimated that in a few years, a typhoon will be blown.

Those real estate businessmen don't care about these, anyway, in Shanghai, where land prices are getting more and more expensive, the house is not worth much, the land is valuable, the house is scraped and repaired, and the land can't be scraped away anyway. (To be continued.) )