Autumn is getting stronger, and the north is already showing a bit of gloom. The dead branches and fallen leaves that cover the streets add to the solemn atmosphere.

Beijing's streets have been completely restored. Statistics in the spring and summer show that the total number of residents in Beijing has reached more than one million. Great China, second only to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing.

The weather is getting cooler, the night is shrouded, and the pedestrians on the street are also decreasing, and occasionally a few acquaintances meet on the road, and the chatter quickly disperses.

Only the wonton stalls on the street still have lanterns hanging from them.

On this cold day, drinking a bowl of hot wontons is not only to warm your hands and feet, but also to fill your belly sometimes. With the restoration of Beijing's urban appearance, prices have also risen. Some young people who have not yet started a family have no money in their pockets to go to the restaurant late at night. At this time, the restaurants that are still open are not cheap.

As a person who doesn't have much money in his pocket and doesn't pay much attention to eating and drinking, Zhan Tianyou is sitting in front of a very ordinary wonton stall at this moment, holding a bowl of hot wontons, and is drinking happily. Sitting next to him was his friend Ouyang Geng, who was also holding a sea bowl and drinking hot wontons.

Zhan Tianyou, the word Chengcheng, was born in the Qing Xianfeng eleventh year, that is, in 1861 AD, Nanhai County, Guangdong, but the ancestral home is Wuyuan County, Anhui Province, when the great-grandfather of the Zhan family moved south to Guangdong during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, and settled down in Nanhai County under the jurisdiction of Guangzhou. Great, grandfather, and father all run tea estates for three generations, which can be regarded as a well-off family that is half business and half Confucian. When the family business was passed on to the generation of Zhan Tianyou's father, Zhan Xinghong, the Opium and Chip Wars broke out, the country was opened, and the business of Zhan's Tea House was also impacted. The business can't go on, and the family road is in decline. Zhan Xinghong was so depressed that he made a living by writing letters and carving seals. It is already very difficult to support Zhan Tianyou to study.

At that time, the government of Rong Hongtiao Chen Qing selected young children to stay abroad in order to introduce Western learning. Revolutionizing society. Zhan Xinghong and his wife were persuaded by their close friend Tan Bo (a native of Xiangshan, Guangzhou, who traveled to Macao for business) and decided to send their son Zhan Tianyou to apply for the examination and go to the sea. Zhan Tianyou successfully obtained the quota for young children to go abroad, and followed Rong Hong from Hong Kong to Shanghai, entered the preparatory class of the Shanghai Overseas Bureau, and learned Chinese from Chen Lanbin and English from Rong Hong. In 1872, he went to the United States with the first batch of 30 children such as Cai Shaoji and Liang Dunyan.

From 1872 to the present, nine years have passed. Zhan Tianyou has grown from an eleven-year-old Chinese teenager to a bachelor's degree from Yale University. The elite of modern talents cultivated by Western-style education. He and Ouyang Geng were admitted to Yale University's Department of Civil Engineering three years ago, majoring in railway engineering, and to this day, they are the only two of the first 30 children to have completed college in the United States. [At this time, Yale University was still a three-year program]

Of course, among the entire young children in the United States, Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng were not the only ones who were admitted to university. At this time, there are many people who are going to college in the United States. The reason why Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng appeared in Beijing was only because they graduated from college and entered the graduate school stage smoothly.

The two of them are writing a dissertation, and they are going to return to China to participate in the exploration of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway. This is the vehicle for their thesis.

Most of the first batch of young children to study in the United States are from poor families. The family with a better family did not want their son to go abroad to suffer, not long after 1972 in 1912.

Therefore, although Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng's ferry tickets between China and the United States were reimbursed by the Railway Bureau of the Ministry of Communications, and the two of them were in Beijing with the Railway Bureau's money. On the one hand, there is also a 'subsidy' from the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway Company, but it is still very 'simple'.

As engineers and technicians, it is common for the two to forget to sleep and eat. At night, my stomach growled with hunger. came to the street to drink chaos, and naturally it became very common.

The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway is a very important section of Beijing's railway layout. Now Beijing to Tianjin. Beijing goes to the northeast and goes down to Henan. It's all already there. But to the west of Beijing, the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway is the beginning.

This railway connects Fengtai in Beijing, passes through Badaling, Juyongguan, Shacheng, Xuanhua and other places to Zhangjiakou, and the whole journey is 400 miles long. There are high mountains and mountains in the middle, the most masonry, and there are more than 7,000 feet of bridges, and the road is difficult for other places. In particular, Juyongguan and Badaling, with layers of mountains and mountains, and many rocky bends, it is written in the exploration report of the Railway Bureau: The roads that have been built in various provinces are the most difficult, that is, the books of Taixi also regard these projects as extremely arduous. It's very difficult!

The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway in the original time and space is a monument to Zhan Tianyou's life. But now the situation is different, although Liu Xian has Zhan Tianyou, and by the way, Ouyang Geng, if necessary, he can still summon more Chinese technicians than the original time and space Manchu Qing to help Zhan Tianyou, but he really can't 'give' Zhan Tianyou to preside over the construction and design of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway.

Even Zhan Tianyou himself doesn't have such a big 'ambition'. The chief engineer who came to build the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway for China is still a foreigner.

Either English or German.

The chief engineer and a considerable number of engineers of China's existing 10,000-mile railway are from Germany and Britain. The number of the British was greater than that of the Germans. Although the Germans had the advantage of being the first mover, Germany itself has also developed by leaps and bounds in the past decade, and Britain has only struggled out of the economic crisis two years ago.

In 1872, due to high construction costs and declining expected revenues, the growth of railroad lines in the United States began to slow down, and orders for locomotives and rails began to decline. A large part of these things are imported from the UK.

The growth rate of U.S. railroads has declined for four consecutive years, with pig iron production falling from 2.6 million tons to 1.9 million tons, ships down 60 percent, and locomotive production down 70 percent. Imports began to decline in 1872 and fell by 36% for four consecutive years, with imports of iron and textiles falling by 82% and 45%-55%, respectively.

Germany was affected and traumatized. Despite the rapid expansion of the German internal market, there is still a surplus of production capacity. Pig iron production fell for three consecutive years, from a peak of 2.24 million tonnes to 1.85 million tonnes, and it was not until 1878 that production reached and exceeded pre-crisis levels. Large factories such as Krupp laid off between a third and a quarter of their workers. Until 1879, the operating rate of lathes was only 50%. Of course, this has a lot to do with the cold world arms market during this period.

Moreover, China has been able to make such great progress and development in industrial construction in recent years, and the timely economic crisis in Europe and the United States has helped Liu Xian a lot. Under the pressure of economic tension, Europe and the United States simply do not have technology and machinery that cannot be bought and sold. As long as Liu Xian buys a large number of equipment in Britain and Germany, some technologies are a matter of money.

Even some of the British craftsmanship in the manufacture of ironclad ships and steam power was taken by China.

As a direct result of the recession, Britain's pig iron production fell by almost 20 percent, and pig iron exports fell by a third.

Therefore, the construction of railways, which is closely related to the economy, seems to have been subjected to a scorching cold and is completely sluggish. A large number of British technicians came to China, where the railway was developing greatly. It's just that in this 'technical' group, with the development of time, there are more and more Chinese among engineers.

Liu Xian supports not only the young children in the United States studying in the United States, but also more people who go to Germany and Europe. These people don't have the experience of being exposed to Western-style education like the young children in the United States, but there are people behind them who can directly send them to the most suitable school for them......

Ryan. Bellamy, the chief engineer of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway, came to China for four years, participated in the construction of the Longhai line in Shaanxi and Gansu, presided over the construction and design of the Tanggu line, and was a full member of the British Institution of Civil Engineers.

It can be said that among the group of railway engineers in China today, Ryan . Bellamy's is one of the top.

Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng are now in Ryan. Bellamy, a top railway expert who had nothing to do with China in the original plane, worked under him. A large number of calculations and stacks of copywriting are the work that the two of them have to do. It's really no day or night when you're busy.

For example, Zhan Tianyou is now eating wontons while still studying a sketch of railway development. As a man destined to be an expert in Chinese engineering, he, like Liu Xian, wants to build railways to every corner of China.

And at this moment, it was in a dark alley not far from Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng. Two people who had no temperament and no eye-catching appearance features were staring at Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng without relaxing for a moment.

These two people didn't understand why they wanted to secretly protect the two young people. Even if these two young people are college students who stayed abroad, there are more college students who have returned from overseas in Beijing, and they have never seen such a solemn person sent by the boss to secretly protect them.

Of course, for people like them, the order from above is a qiē. If they are asked to protect Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng, they will not hesitate to strictly protect the safety of the two.

In other words, following Zhan Tianyou and Ouyang Geng, except for going to the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Line to explore a while ago, the process was a little harder, and now it is really as easy as a holiday. The two cultural people have been staying in a rented place every day for a while, and they can't go out a few times a day, and they either go to the railway bureau or the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway Company's premises in Beijing.

……

In the zn nautical mile, Liu Xian was comfortably soaking in a hot bath. This afternoon, he took Wei Tuma for a walk around the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. I didn't mean anything else, so I expressed my dissatisfaction.

After seeing that China and Russia were completely involved, this group of British people thought about pushing the Hong Kong issue back. Liu Xian's greeting made Lan Fang's militia move, not towards Sarawak, but towards the east of Borneo. Now Lan Fang has occupied about half of Borneo's land, doubling the area of five years ago!

Moreover, Liu Xian asked the Qin consortium to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary, the Nanyang Oil Company, which has already begun to operate on the island of Sumatra. That's an interesting sign!

Wetuma is going to have a headache tonight! (To be continued......)