15 February 1723, Yunchuan (present-day Kozhikode, southwest India)

"Look at what! A group of untouchables, hurrying, unloaded the ship's cargo. ”

Several merchant ships from the north docked at the berths one after another, and the coolies who were carrying goods nearby stopped what they were doing, straightened up, and looked over curiously. A large number of arriving guests were disembarking, and among them there were many women with veils and graceful figures, who couldn't help but stare at them for a while, which immediately attracted a loud reprimand from the overseer.

These uninformed inferior people feel very new when they see anything! At this wharf, no one or two ships arrived at the port one day, and they all worked so carelessly, so that the Lord of Qi Guo saw it, and it would definitely make them unhappy.

In addition, the ships that arrive here on weekdays are either merchant ships transporting various goods, or Qi warships patrolling the coast, and most of the people who land are some rude sailors and mighty soldiers, where will there be any women?

Then, it is obvious that the woman who arrived in Hong Kong today must be a guest of the Qi Kingdom, and she must not be offended.

The coolies working on the wharf were also a group of poor people, with dark complexions, hunched waists, frowning, and carrying the goods unloaded by the boom to the freight wagons one by one, without a moment of leisure. After being reprimanded by the overseer, they cautiously peeked at the arriving guests as they moved the goods, as if fearing that they would be beaten with sticks if they showed the slightest disrespect.

In Yunchuan Port, it is not news that overseers abuse and beat coolies. Beating with sticks was commonplace, and it was not uncommon to hang them up without food, and the coolies were far less off than in the rural villages, but the only advantage was that they could eat enough without making mistakes.

However, the "murderers" of the torture coolies were mainly the local natives who first belonged to the Qi country, and the Qi nationality managers and guards in the port were rarely involved, and they only paid attention to the efficiency of the wharf and the basic safety order.

Except for a small number of coolies who were sentenced to hard labor by the Yunchuan City District Court for being traitors, most of these coolies came from landless peasants in the hinterland and refugees from war and conflict.

Yunchuan City currently has two districts, the southern city is the new city, but also the core area, which was expanded by the Qi State more than 40 years ago after annexing the Kozhikode Kingdom on the basis of the earliest established trading station. More than 10 primary industrial enterprises and a large number of commercial facilities, including timber processing plants, building materials factories, rice mills, mills, oil mills, coconut curry processing plants, and paper mills, are located here, with a population of more than 20,000. The northern city was the capital of the former Kozhikode Kingdom, inhabited by more than 50,000 local natives, and the king who had lost his right to rule was still allowed to retain the title of king, but his "ruling area" was limited to the royal palace, which was monitored and controlled by the political officials stationed here by the Qi State.

Every year, Indian trading companies harvest large quantities of grain, timber, pepper, cardamom, coconut, and other primary agricultural products here. In addition to their own use, these goods are also sold in large quantities to Persia, Arabia, Africa, Europe and other regions.

Of course, we must not forget the monopoly of trade on the west coast of India held by the Indian trading companies. The trading company purchases or resells large quantities of daily necessities, cotton textiles, hardware products, machinery and equipment, chemical products, cane sugar, and tea from China, and ships them to the west coast of India for sale, and then purchases pepper, coffee, minerals, indigo, saltpeter, copra and other commodities locally and ships them back to the country, and makes another profit.

This trade has brought huge profits to Indian trading companies over the past few decades and has supported their colonization of the west and southern parts of India.

However, since more than 10 years ago, many businessmen in China who are interested in the profits of Indian trading companies and Bangladesh trading companies have great opinions on the large number of tropical products dumped into China, and they have joined forces in many ways to accuse the two trading companies of dumping tropical products that have seriously squeezed the market share of similar products in Nanyang, Weiyuan (New Guinea Island), Luzon and other regions, and posed a serious threat to national economic security.

The energy of these people is still very large, because it involves many localities and departments, and is related to the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of citizens. Therefore, even though the Indian fleet of the Navy has repeatedly endorsed these two trading companies, it is still somewhat unbearable.

In the end, a compromise had to be reached, and the Ministry of Commerce and Commerce and the Customs Department restricted the import quotas of tropical goods from India and Bangladesh, which undoubtedly had a very serious negative impact on the profits of the two trading companies.

In view of this situation, Indian trading companies are now paying more and more attention to the "overseas" market. They tried to attract agents from Persia, Central Asia, Ottomans, and Europe to try to sell tropical goods from the region through their channels.

It should be said that these efforts had a certain effect, resulting in a certain degree of recovery in the profits of the trading companies, and there was more than enough power to support the trading companies to continue to bring one princely kingdom after another into their colonial sphere of influence along the coastline and inland rivers.

In the area of Qi people's colonial rule, the Qi people and Qi-Indian people from the local country naturally belonged to the free people, and ran their own industries in the form of family farms or commodity agents, and some of them were even the second or even third generation living in India, not only with high political status, but also with a relatively good life.

As for the large number of local natives of India, they had to pay countless taxes to the princes of the princely states (a large part of which had to be transferred to the supervisory authority of the Indian trading company as protection fees and commissions), and in the process of selling agricultural products, they also had to suffer from the exploitation of the merchants of the Qi country, and their lives were miserable, and the standard of living was like that. In some years of famine, they will face even more tragic situations, and it is not too exaggerated to sell their sons and daughters and starve everywhere.

In fact, as far as the Indian trading companies themselves are concerned, they are reluctant to spend money on the construction of so-called colonial strongholds, or new settlements, because this involves a series of problems such as infrastructure investment in the early stage and defense costs in the later stage. Moreover, these neo-colonial settlements are not profitable in the short term, and the meagre land tax revenue alone is not enough to offset the huge investment, and it is completely a black hole that eats up money.

On the other hand, even if a large amount of capital investment was made to build a number of "model" colonies and expand the colonial power of Qi, in the end it was to make wedding clothes for the government. You don't see, Anfeng (present-day Cochin, India), Shanghai (present-day Mumbai, India), Ningyang (present-day Pundixieri, India, also translated as local governance), Fengyuan (present-day Chennai, India, also known as Madras), Rongze (present-day Chittagong, Bangladesh) and other cities with increasingly prosperous industry and commerce, after successively realizing fiscal surpluses, were unceremoniously taken back by the cabinet government and directly incorporated into overseas territories.

But it can't be helped.

Many merchants in the country were angry at the high profits obtained by the trading companies because of their monopoly on trade, and they attacked them collectively, forcing the Indian trading companies to reluctantly open up more colonial bases in order to please certain high-level people who had an eye on the layout of the Indian continent and reduce the pressure of being attacked.

The Admiralty, which stands for the Indian trading community, also actively supported this, and adjusted its deployment, sending a considerable number of Marine battalion officers and non-commissioned officers to help each colonial base form a security militia system with a certain combat capability.

Up to now, the Qi State has more than 10 large and small port strongholds on the west coast of India, from the northernmost Jinmen to the southernmost Nandingbao (now Gennya Kumari, India), firmly controlling the trade access channel in western India.

The two colonies of Diu and Goa, which were held by the Portuguese, were slightly awkward in the face of the increasingly powerful Qi people. If it weren't, Qi's South African territory and its South American vassal state, Qingguo, had close trade contacts with Portuguese Brazil, and their economic ties deepened, making it difficult for Qi to attack the Portuguese Indian colonies. Otherwise, the Qi State would have expelled the Portuguese from India long ago.

India is the India of the Qi country.

Oh, and by the way, given the growing trade in the Malabar Coast (i.e., the southwest coast of India), some well-informed Indian merchants lobbied the Indian trading societies and local colonial governments to build one or more railways to the hinterland to speed up the movement of people and goods and further facilitate trade in the region.

The Indian trading companies are noncommittal, or rather, they don't have much interest in it.

Make no mistake, our Indian trading company is a trading company, and we are here to make money, not to develop the economy for you Indian natives. If it weren't for the fact that there were too many domestic criticisms and pressures, they didn't even plan to build cities and colonial strongholds in a big way. Many domestic investment shareholders are extremely sensitive to the operating conditions of trading companies, and spending a lot of money to build a railway to the inland is an investment behavior that will reduce shareholder dividends, and will be criticized by countless people.

However, the colonial government in Anfeng showed great interest in this, believing it to be the most effective means of encroaching on and controlling the inland areas. A suggestion was made that Indian trading companies and a large number of local businessmen could raise funds and build a railway to the hinterland. Of course, the right to operate the railways had to be controlled by the colonial government.

After weighing the pros and cons, many local businessmen were hesitant and did not respond. Out of a natural distrust of all rulers, they feared that the colonial government would embezzle or squander their funds. Even if the railway is eventually built, will the government ignore the interests of shareholders and divert the funds from annual profits to other uses?

While the Malabar Coast was hesitating to build India's first railway, news came from Bangladesh that construction of a railway to the Rani Ganj coal mine would begin in the near future, starting from Linchuan (present-day Howrah, India, near Kolkata).

This shocked the merchants of the Malabar region and could not help but shake their hearts.

Why don't you build a section of railroad to test the water?