Chapter 438: Finale
However, the problem of population explosion can be solved by improving the quality of the people and migrating to Oceania and the west coast of the Americas.
But this does not mean that the domestic economic operation system of the Ming Dynasty will not be affected by this population problem, and agricultural production does not need so many people after all.
The concentration of social wealth, the intensification of the gap between the rich and the poor, the thirst for land annexation of surplus wealth, and all kinds of ancillary problems brought about by long-term reproduction will not be naturally suppressed. These new problems, which other ancient dynasties had never seen before, required Zhu Hetan to explore in the dark and seek unprecedented solutions.
Thirty years after Concord, the problem of unemployment and superfluity in the Ming Dynasty has begun to gradually become serious.
So, when facing the pressure of population employment, Zhu Hetan finally thought of the first of the two last words that his grandfather Zhu Shuren confessed to him when he was dying more than ten years ago.
"If the national wealth can still support so many people in the future, but because of the merger of the unemployed means of production, many people have nothing to do and become a hidden danger, then find a way to build a moderate amount of construction and guide the people to find an outlet for profit-seeking funds."
After thinking about it, Zhu and Tan Si knew that the Holy Ancestor was referring to the locomotive and steam engine ship that he had invented only a few years before his death.
So Zhu Hetan finally started the construction of the Daming Railway in the 30th year of Xiehe, which was coordinated by the Ministry of Household and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but allowed private investment. Earlier, the steam shipbuilding movement and the canal renovation campaign were launched.
Anyway, the rich people in society have too much spare money, and it is better to find an outlet for them to vent in heavy industry than to let them go back to annex land and open textile factories without having nowhere to invest.
In the thirtieth year of the Concord, technology and propaganda were also in place, and the minds of people of insight and wealth were open enough, and the imperial court proposed to build railways and allow shareholders to share dividends after repair, which also greatly attracted social wealth that had nowhere to go.
The Ming Dynasty finally diverted the labor and resources that agriculture and light industry could not digest to infrastructure and heavy industry.
However, everything is difficult at the beginning, and from the fifteenth to thirty years of Xiehe, the railway was only a small-scale pilot and run-in improvement in mining areas such as Ma'anshan Iron Mine and Changxing Coal Mine. In the 30th year of Concord, it was the first time that a long-distance transportation railway was built across cities or even provinces.
Countless engineering technologies such as surveying, building bridges, leveling land, and pouring foundations have to be saved from scratch.
For this reason, a bunch of research institutes of Nanjing University, Susong University, Zhejiang University and Daming Academy of Sciences have also set up new railway majors, which are summarized while building. Even talents have to be cultivated.
In the end, it took seven years, tens of thousands of workers were killed and injured, hundreds of times before and after the collapse of the roadbed in the soft geological area, dozens of times the bridge was erected, and several times it collapsed after experimental trains drove up the bridge.
After paying a huge price, the first railway line of the Ming Dynasty was built, connecting from Nanjing to Suzhou and Songjiang, and then detouring south back to Hangzhou.
This railway is also considered to connect the capital of the Ming Dynasty and the richest area at that time, and the total mileage is not long, a total of 700 miles, and it is also a plain area without going over the mountains and holes, nor does it need to pass through the big rivers to build bridges, as long as the bridges are built on some small rivers and canals.
Seven hundred miles were built in seven years, basically only one hundred miles per year, and the hardships of pioneering can be seen.
There are also many opponents in the DPRK and China, and many people say that the emperor built the Nanjing-Suzhou-Hangzhou railway, and tens of thousands of people were killed and wounded, which is no less than the construction of the Grand Canal by Emperor Yang of Sui. But because there were so many unemployed people that they really needed to be addressed, these objections were eventually forcefully suppressed.
After the first seven years of arduous exploration, the strength of Daming's engineering research institutes and colleges has also increased greatly, cultivating the earliest group of railway infrastructure talents in all mankind, and integrating the technology of other industrial sectors, and the overall industrial strength of Daming has greatly increased.
After that, it was a little easier, anyway, there was too much spare money left over from the first thirty years of siltation in society, so it guided them to continue repairing.
From the 38th to the 42nd year of the well-off, the railway from Yangzhou to Huai'an and Huai'an to Linqing in Shandong Province was repaired, and the whole process was in the Jiangsu and Henan plains, and there was no need to cross the big river or climb the mountains. In the 40th to 43rd year of the well-off, the railway from Tianjin to Linqing, Shandong, which started construction in parallel, was also completed.
In this way, Zhu Hetan can be regarded as initially reconnecting the Grand Canal left by Emperor Yang of Sui with a railway, which greatly strengthened the integration of the north and the south, even if he does not move the capital back to Beijing, he will not have to worry about the instability of the north in the future.
Because with the railway, even a million troops can march through the north and south in ten days.
The only regret is that the railway was still not able to build a bridge across the Huanghuai River, let alone cross the Yangtze River, so the railway, which imitated the route of the Grand Canal, was actually divided into four sections, and when the train drove to the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, passengers and goods still had to be unloaded and crossed the river by boat, and then re-boarded.
After the main line connecting the north and south of Beijing was opened, the planning of the Daming Railway after 45 years of Concord was more respectful of the market and the needs of the social economy itself, and the imperial court did not interfere too much.
In the end, from the forty-fifth to the sixtyth year of Xiehe, the Ming Dynasty gathered civil forces and built the second main line from Beijing to Weihui (Weihui is located on the opposite bank of Kaifeng, on the north bank of the Yellow River, because the railway cannot bridge the Yellow River), Kaifeng to Fancheng, Xiangyang to Hankou, and Hankou to Changsha.
This road is roughly equivalent to the Pinghan Road and Yuehan Road in later generations, except that the part south of Changsha to Guangzhou is missing.
Because of the infrastructure strength of the Ming Dynasty at that time, it was really unable to go south from Changsha and cross Hengshan, Wuling and other mountains to Lingnan.
In addition, because it is impossible to build a bridge across the Yangtze River, the Yellow River and the Han River, the railway is divided into two more sections than the Pinghan, Yuehan, and Han dynasties, with a total of four sections. From Weihui to Kaifeng, from Xiangyang to Fancheng, and from Hankou to Wuchang, they all had to get off and take a boat to cross the river.
The reason why Wei Hui was chosen instead of Huaiqing Mansion as the ferry point on the other side of Kaifeng was that the ministers of the DPRK and China took into account the Zhu Hetan lineage, and originally entered the Datong from the line of Zhu Changshulu Wangfu. The fief of King Lu's Mansion is in Weihui, and the minister wants to pat the emperor's nominal ancestor's ass, so he fine-tuned it when planning the route.
In addition, the local branch line from Xi'an to Xuzhou via Luoyang via Kaifeng, as well as its own LAN ring around Chengdu, Sichuan, were also repaired during the same period with the support of the local gentry and private wealth.
Later, the railway in Xi'an was extended further west to Lanzhou, ensuring rapid military dispatch to the northwest.
The Beijing railway also went further along the Liaoning West Corridor to Shenyang, and half of the road branched off in the flat place of Xunyan Mountain in Jinzhou, connecting Jilin and Heilongjiang to the northeast, which was considered to be a complete integration of the Northeast Manchurian homeland with the Central Plains.
After the northeast, northwest and northwest have the ability to quickly transport troops to the front line by rail, the border troubles of the Ming Dynasty can be regarded as completely alleviated, and at least peace can be guaranteed for a hundred years.
By the end of his life, Zhu Hetan had a total of five groups of large-scale railway trunk lines and ring lines/branch lines, and also built a circle of short-distance railways connecting Anhui and Jiangxi around Nanjing.
At the same time as the vigorous development of land transportation, the steamships of water transportation are also flourishing, and the Ming Dynasty began to trial produce steamships from the 20th year of the Concord, from the initial 10 years of the trial period, to the large-scale mass production period of the 30 years after the Concord.
The earliest steam engine ships could be driven in the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and the tonnage was only 200 tons. In the following 30 years, it gradually developed to thousands of tons, and the material also evolved from wooden-hulled ships to iron ships, which together with the railway further promoted the vigorous development of the steel smelting industry in the Ming Dynasty, and the steel output increased more than tenfold in a few decades.
The canal also learned how to build modern locks, and it was driven by steam power and hydraulics to open and close the gates, which basically reached the level of the parallel time and space West around 1850.
In this way, the old Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal no longer needs to let the dock workers load and unload the ferry in sections to solve the problem of the water level difference between the sections of the canal.
The population of dock loading and unloading cities such as Linqing and Huai'an in the middle has also shrunk further, once again squeezing out hundreds of thousands of dock workers. However, fortunately, railway construction was also in full swing at that time, so the "million workers" directly turned into railway workers.
Although Linqing and Huai'an are no longer important canal towns, they have turned into important railway towns, and railway goods still need to be loaded and unloaded across the Yangtze River, Yellow River and Huaihe River.
However, the construction of railways that are too advanced, the forced push led by the government, the waste and abuse of private capital, and the unfair cost apportionment in the process of technical verification, Daming has also accumulated a lot of social problems in the rapid development of decades.
In the process of building railways across the country, at least hundreds of thousands of railway workers have died, and in many cases, 20,000 or 30,000 a year have died.
And the profitability of the railway estimated by the imperial court at the beginning obviously has a lot of discrepancies. After many railways were built, the supporting industrial environment did not rise, and at the beginning, the significance of national defense was greater than that of the private economy.
A lot of private capital that has invested a lot of money can't help but complain when they see that the railway has been completed, but it is far away to collect tolls and rents.
The imperial court also proposed that "those who build railways can obtain a certain width of land along the railway line for industrial and commercial development", but the value of these lands is obviously doubtful at first.
In the end, in the process of building the railway, too much uneven distribution was accumulated, the people who handled it were greedy for ink, and there was a bubble in the planning, and it was difficult to recover the cost, especially the railways in the northwest and northeast were not of much economic value at that time, mainly the national defense value, which was equivalent to taking the money of rich businessmen to fill in the hole for national defense...... The resentment accumulated over the past 30 years has made the call for capital reform among the people louder and louder.
Although Zhu Hetan has made the country rich and the people strong, the problem of unfair distribution still impacts the Ming Dynasty.
Later, when he himself felt that the situation was a little critical, he finally remembered another last words that his grandfather had given him when he was dying.
"If the railway is overhauled in the future, it will definitely arouse opposition from all sides, there are old guards, there are those who hate oil and water, there are those who hate investment bubbles, everything in the court depends on the planning of the rulers, and if something goes wrong, hatred will eventually fall on the emperor.
If you really get to that point, you can think about the reality of the British monarch, and the experience of calming down the people's anger, I have been in the world for three or four hundred years, as long as the emperor retreats humbly, he will not be opposed to that step. ”
Zhu and Tan Sizhi decided to slowly lay out according to their grandfather's will.
He himself is not afraid, after all, he is also a sixty-year-old son of heaven, and he has accumulated great power, and no one dares to question it.
But because he lived too long, his eldest sons did not live as long as him, and he had to find the youngest son to succeed him, and it is estimated that he would be at least forty years old when he succeeded to the throne. He was afraid that his youngest son would not be able to control it in the future.
So, when Zhu Hetan was eighty years old, before he officially abdicated as the emperor, he ordered a thorough investigation of all railway cases over the past decades.
In the end, it was found that several successive heads of household departments and internal affairs departments were involved in tens of millions of taels or even more, and they were all involved in the construction of railways and canals and operating funds.
These guys who were caught, of course, were liquidated and sucked away a lot of hatred.
And Zhu Hetan learned from the pain, and finally decided that the new monarch of the Ming Dynasty in the future would only hold military power and diplomatic power, and be responsible for defending the country and representing the country to the outside world.
The cabinet is responsible for other civil affairs, internal affairs, industry and commerce, construction, finance and taxation, and the constitution is clear, and the emperor will not care about these in the future.
However, the cabinet must pay the emperor the full amount of the country's military expenses, rations, and military supplies, and the salaries and expenses of the country's armed forces are still paid in the name of the emperor, and they owe only allegiance to the emperor.
This can be regarded as being forced by a series of railway cases, embarking on a partial constitutional monarchy similar to the Prussian and German Hohenzollern Empires, or a "dual monarchy", and the degree of power handed over by the Ming Emperor is still far lighter than that of the monarchs of England.
But this is in line with the original trend of history, because after all, China has a long-term autocratic inertia, and if the emperor even hands over military power, it will not be possible to live long at all, and the world will only be in chaos.
It is already the limit of the Ming Dynasty to be able to completely ignore civil affairs and industrial and commercial construction, and let the cabinet select meritocracy to govern. If there is conclusive evidence that this cabinet is very greedy and does not do good things, then the emperor can also use the cabinet to calm the people's anger.
The power structure of the Ming Dynasty finally relied on this trick to stabilize it for a long time.
After the Ming Dynasty dominated the industrial song in advance, with the overflow of technology, Western imitators will learn more or less, and accelerate the global historical process.
In Zhu Hetan's later years, it was about the 1750s ~ 1760s, and the West should have been fighting the Seven Years' War at this time in history, but in fact, the West had already completed a new round of reshuffle.
At this time, even the country of rice had already been established and had thirteen British states in North America.
France did not wait for Louis XVI to ascend to the throne at all, and his grandfather Louis XV did not survive the wave of industrial song output, and was directly forced to submit to the soft reform, but it was not as bloody as the French Song and Napoleonic Wars in history.
The whole world was led by Daming, the locomotive of industrial songs, to run wildly and compete for each other.
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no terra nullius on the earth, and all the colonies were basically divided up by the great powers - of course, the Ming itself was the largest of them, or the "one super" of the "one superpower".
Generations of countless European and American students, in order to enrich the country and strengthen the army, in order to prevent backwardness and beating, have crossed the ocean to study in Daming.
It's best to be able to enter Nanjing University, and it's okay if you can't get into Zhejiang University and Peking University. Many of these people went back to build the motherland after completing their studies, but at least more than half of them directly betrayed the motherland and stayed in Daming to find promising jobs and live a good life.
(Finale)
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There is an easter egg chapter attached to the back to give the final map of the Ming Dynasty.,If you can't brush it out.,You can also look at the chapter comments of this paragraph.,I'll post it again in the comments.。
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(End of chapter)