On August 28, 1629, the tenth day of July in the second year of Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty, Changhua County, Danzhou.

Almost all of the traversers stationed in Changhua came to the port to bid farewell to Liu Shanxia, the chief engineer who was about to leave here. In fact, Liu Shanxia has not been here for too long, only about three months before and after, according to the construction period of the entire project, this period of time has just begun. But he had to leave early to preside over the next major project, as arranged by the Executive Committee.

In order to maintain a smooth construction progress for a period of time after Liu Shanxia left, the technical personnel in the construction department, including Liu Shanxia, have worked overtime in the past two months, and made the construction plan for the next six months in advance, and divided the railway planning line from Changhua Port to Shilu Mining Area into several construction sections.

Of course, this journey is not without major technical difficulties, such as the railway bridge that crosses the tributary of the Changhua River near Shilu, which is definitely one of the biggest engineering problems encountered by the Ministry of Construction after crossing. However, the span of this bridge is not large, and even with the current level of construction, it is completely possible to build a railway bridge that can be used by freight trains, which is nothing more than a little more time and a higher cost to build the bridge.

After Liu Shanxia left Changhua this time, he would first return to the base camp to report on his work, and then he would have to go north to Hong Kong Island by boat to organize and direct the preliminary work of local development. After the construction began on Hong Kong Island, Liu Shanxia had to turn back to Annam. Now that the bilateral negotiations on the demarcation of the concession in the Da Nang area have ended, and the countdown to the development of Da Nang has begun, the base camp will have to send engineers like Liu Shan Ha who can take charge of themselves to the local area.

Several ports entered the construction stage almost at the same time, and this small probability event came together in a bunch, which basically squeezed out all the manpower of the Ministry of Construction. The main reason for this is, of course, because the Executive Committee is eager to expand externally, hoping to spread Haihan's influence to a larger scale in the shortest possible time, and the development of the port of Annam and Hong Kong Island are both unmissable opportunities in the eyes of the Executive Committee, even if it is worth squeezing the already tight engineering forces even more because of this.

This situation will continue for a long time to come, and although the local technicians who have been recruited have been receiving training and serving as foremen in some projects, they still need a certain amount of time to slowly accumulate experience if they want to take charge of the project independently and share the worries of the executive committee. The requirements for this type of skilled work are much higher than those of ordinary laborers, and even if they are professional craftsmen in this era, it still takes a long time to adapt to the Haihan-style engineering design and construction after entering the Ministry of Construction.

For the road construction project currently underway in Changhua, the temporary departure of Liu Shanxia and other technicians will have a certain impact on the progress of the project, but compared to other areas under the rule of Haihan, the strict military management system implemented in Changhua can minimize the negative impact at a certain level.

Up to now, the total number of prisoners of war and refugees who have been transported from Annam to Changhua since March this year to offset the war arrears has exceeded 5,000, and together with the more than 1,000 naturalized people transferred from the base camp and nearly 2,000 slave laborers in the hard labor camps, the population controlled by Haihan in this area of Changhua has reached nearly 10,000, which is more than twice the number of people under the jurisdiction of Changhua County.

Starting from Changhua Port to the end of the construction site more than 20 miles away in the southeast, thousands of people are working hard every day for the Changhua-Shilu rail transit line to be opened to traffic as soon as possible. During this journey, there were three migrant camps and two larger hard labor camps, and three companies of the militia army with a total of more than 500 armed forces were stationed.

Changhua County, which was once regarded as a hidden danger in the early days of construction, is now insignificant. The two local slave labor camps alone cover a larger area and have a larger population than the county seat of Changhua.

However, Xiao Laosan, the general of the Changhua garrison who took the initiative to get in touch with Haihan, has been living quite nourishingly recently. After reaching a preliminary cooperation agreement with Haihan, Xiao Laosan soon received the so-called "office funds" sent by Haihan shops in the city. According to the agreement, Xiao Laosan began to turn a blind eye to the Haihan armed men in the area under his jurisdiction - although the so-called militia did not enter Changhua City, these militiamen could be seen pressing large groups of slave laborers to the nearby construction sites to build roads almost every day.

Every day, as soon as the sky was dark, the Haihan militia could be seen carrying a long line of shackled prisoners to the construction site to work, and these people often lined up near the planned route, and then sat on the ground, slowly hammering the square stones into gravel the size of goose eggs with small hammers. When the weather is fine, the queue of such stone knocking often stretches for several miles, and the number of people exceeds 1,000, and the sound of knocking one after another has been echoing in the wilderness outside Changhua County all day long. In Changhua, a small and sparsely populated place, the battle made by the Haihan people is quite spectacular.

Xiao Laosan also went to the construction site outside the city to visit this inexplicable way of road construction, he really didn't understand what the Haihan people thought, do they want to use this kind of gravel to pave a road out?

However, when he went, he became more and more confused, and the laborers stacked the gravel on top of it, buried sections of sleepers on it, and then carried long iron rails and laid them on top of the sleepers. Xiao Laosan also asked Qiao Zhiya several times, but every time Qiao Zhiya pretended to smile mysteriously, just asking him to be patient and wait.

Until one day, Xiao Laosan heard a roar in the distance outside the city, and soon saw a big black monster flying white smoke along this gravel iron track road from the seaside. Xiao Laosan's eyes almost fell to the ground, he never thought that there was such a strange thing in the world, the Haihan people spent so much money to build such a strange road, it turned out to be so that this big guy could pass quickly in the wilderness.

Xiao Laosan didn't care about letting people inform the county master, so he went straight out of the city and went to the construction site, intending to take a closer look at what this big guy was.

After getting closer, Xiao Laosan found that this thing was far more complicated than he imagined, just seeing the transmission spokes of those big iron wheels made people a little dizzy. And behind this big iron guy was dragging two wagons with only a chassis, which were all packed with bundled sleepers, densely piled like a hill.

Xiao Laosan circled around the big guy several times, but he didn't see what was dragging or pushing it forward. In the end, Qiao Zhiya stood up and answered the question in his mind: "Do you see the coal piled up behind the front of the car? This car is propelled forward by boiling water with coal." ”

"Use coal, boil water?" Xiao Laosan only felt that the more he listened, the more confused he became, it was not unusual to use coal to boil water, and the Haihan shops in the city had always had very cheap honeycomb coal for sale, which was much more convenient for boiling water for cooking than burning firewood. But how this matter is connected to the big iron lump in front of him, Xiao Laosan is still puzzled.

"You don't have to think about it so clearly, you just need to know that after we build this road, it only takes about an hour to get from here to Shizitong in the inland and take this new type of transportation!" Qiao Zhiya also understood that this kind of scientific knowledge was difficult to explain to Xiao Laosan, the big boss, in a few words, and only talked about the use at the moment, not the principle.

What is the location of Shizitong, Xiao Laosan, who is the highest military governor of Changhua County, is still very clear, starting from Changhua County, along the Changhua River all the way to the west, about sixty or seventy miles of travel, and arrived at the sphere of influence of Shizitong, the Li people's cottage. People with good foot strength can walk in almost a day, but Qiao Zhiya said that this kind of big iron bump can shorten this trip to about an hour, which surprised Xiao Laosan again.

As a low-level officer with basic military training and a certain grasp of military theory, Xiao Laosan is well aware of the important role that mobility can play in combat, and the monster created by Haihan obviously has extremely high mobility ability, and can also carry a large amount of goods - or a heavily armed Haihan militia, if this thing is used in wartime, it is really a terrible tool.

However, the Haihan people do not seem to have such plans, and the running route of this thing also has very big limitations, just to build this special road for its passage, it will cost a lot of manpower, financial and material resources, and it takes two or three months to build only ten miles of road, and it is definitely impractical to use this thing for war. Of course, there is nothing in Changhua County that is worth the attention of the Haihan people, and Xiao Laosan is still very self-aware of this. The only thing he can conclude is that the Haihan people spent so much effort to build the road to Shilu not just to help the local Li people move their homes out of the mountains.

The doubts in Xiao Laosan's heart are destined to be unanswered in the near future, except for the traverser and Huang Sanmu, the lord of Shizitong, only a few naturalized cadres in the Changhua area know what kind of treasure is buried in the place where this road leads. And because the insider involves his own interests, he will never leak Shilu's secrets to the outside world, and when the outside world learns the truth, it will probably have to wait until before and after the Shilu iron mine is put into production.

The people who were resettled in the Changhua area, including prisoners of war who were placed in the camps, were not just building tracks. Nearly 10,000 people live here, and the necessary supplies are a number that cannot be ignored, and the infrastructure projects here may continue for several years with the development of the Shiroku iron mine, and if the people's supply depends on the transportation of the base camp for a long time, it will undoubtedly occupy a considerable amount of capacity, which is not a good solution for the executive committee, which is more inclined to use the limited capacity at sea for foreign trade.

In order to be able to achieve local supply of basic living as soon as possible, a considerable part of the labor force assigned to Changhua undertook the task of clearing and cultivating land. Due to the small number of residents in Changhua County, the unclaimed wasteland outside the county has become a target for reclamation. The geographical conditions and climate here are very similar to those of the Red River Delta across the sea from Annam, and the Ministry of Agriculture considers it very suitable for large-scale rice crops. In the first two months of construction, under the command of the technical personnel of the Ministry of Agriculture, the laborers reclaimed more than 3,000 acres of rice fields and more than 1,000 acres of vegetable fields on the banks of the Changhua River.

Of course, eating a vegetarian diet alone is certainly far from satisfying the energy needs of heavy body labor. Relying only on a few small fishing boats in Changhua fishing village obviously can not meet the current situation, the Ministry of Shipping transferred ten new fishing boats with a displacement of about 50 tons from the base camp to carry out fishing operations in the coastal waters of Changhua Port every day, and the seafood caught is not only supplied to nearly 10,000 people under Haihan, but also occasionally has excess production capacity to supply the people in Changhua County. In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture also sent commissioners to direct the construction of livestock breeding centers, and cattle, donkeys, pigs, chickens, ducks and other livestock were operated from Daben, but the in-demand commodities such as milk and eggs were generally only supplied to local traverser cadres.

In addition to the basic food supply, the Executive Committee is also trying to gradually improve the various infrastructure and permanent civil administration institutions in Changhua. Institutions such as hospitals, schools, and police stations are under construction or are already in operation. It is said that the preparatory work for the establishment of the Changhua Port Management Committee has also been put on the agenda of the Executive Committee. If nothing happens, Qiao Zhiya, who had an excellent performance here in the early stage, is very likely to be appointed as the administrative leader of the Changhua area. Although he still holds a military position, judging from the current personnel situation, there is no candidate more suitable for this position in Changhua for the time being.

When Qiao Zhiya applied to be transferred out of the chemical industry room a few months ago, he probably didn't expect that he would get the opportunity for promotion so quickly. Although Changhua is a sparsely populated area and has poor living conditions, after the development of Shilu Iron Mine in the future, Changhua will build a supporting coal and iron industry, and it is a sure thing to become an industrial hub on this island in the future, and the development prospects are still quite good. Qiao Zhiya himself is from Detroit, the automobile city, for him, a pure industrial city has a natural sense of closeness, which is also one of the reasons why he responded to the call of the executive committee at the first time and was willing to come to Changhua to live here.