Great Entrepreneur of the Universe

Chapter 261 Don’t we even change our uniforms?

January 1906, 1, the tenth day of the twelfth lunar month in the Yisi year of the lunar calendar.

Wang Shouliang stood at Buffalo Bay in Lechang and Pingshi Town, under the jurisdiction of Shaoguan, and watched several diesel rollers, with their engines roaring, running over the stone path in front of them under the control of the driver.

A few steamrollers in the distance are groups of people in rags and with pale faces. Only the desire for life and the drive to live in many people's eyes have allowed them to make it all the way from the north.

Such scenes made Wang Shouliang himself numb.

Before today, as early as 1902, when a large ship went to Shandong for disaster relief, we saw many hungry victims everywhere.

He himself looked numb, and Xu Si and other members of the guard also looked numbly with a hint of fierceness in their eyes. They looked like they wanted to kill someone, and they couldn't suppress it.

Buffalo Bay in Pingshi Town is the Guangdong-Hunan Ancient Road that has been open for two thousand years. It starts from eastern Guangdong and takes a boat all the way north from the Pearl River Estuary. The road to the Xiangshui River ends here. It is gone. If you want to enter Hunan, you can only walk along here. On the stone road, take the 90-mile mule-horse road.

After arriving in Chenzhou, you can turn into the Dongjiang River, a tributary of the Xiangjiang River, and continue to take a boat all the way north to enter the Xiangjiang River, Dongting, and Yangtze River systems.

Wang Shouliang looked at the starting point of the Guangdong-Hunan Ancient Road. A large number of porridge shacks greeted the victims and provided relief to the hungry. There were also barefoot doctors who had studied the barefoot doctor's manual for several years. When they cooperated with a group of old Chinese doctors to diagnose the bodies of the hungry victims, they were watched by him from the moment they got off the boat. Bai Xiuzhu, whose face turned pale with shock, trembled and said, "Big shopkeeper, is this the way to eat? It's too scary."

Few of Bai Ling's group following Bai Xiuzhu could maintain normal expressions.

She felt something was wrong in his tone. Bai Xiuzhu looked at him with shock, lowered her head and closed her eyes. She was really frightened by a group of skinny and almost inhuman victims and refugees. She suspected that she was going to have a nightmare. .

Found information on the cholera epidemic in 02.

As early as when the floods broke out in the summer, Wang Shouliang's grain transport ship also headed west along the Yangtze River and entered the Xiangjiang River, selling grain at low prices along the way, trying to contribute as much as possible.

As long as he gives money, food from North America, food from India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and other places will be shipped to China ship after ship without interruption.

As for why Wang Shouliang's tone is so bad, it is natural that although natural disasters are terrifying, what is even more disgusting are those corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry who use natural disasters to create greater man-made disasters.

The summer floods of 1905 were just the beginning.

Regardless of the years when Lu Dong was there or the years when she went to the capital, she had always been a rich young lady in a boudoir. At most, she watched and imagined romantic events through gatherings with celebrities and reading poetry and storybooks.

Of course Wang Shouliang would prepare something in advance at this stage. He had long known about the flood in Hunan Province in 1905, and the local tyrants and evil gentry took the opportunity to drive up the price of rice, thus artificially creating the horrific disaster.

He is not short of money or food to provide disaster relief.

"The Hungry Road describes a road filled with corpses that died of hunger... On this ancient road between Guangdong and Hunan, at least a large number of victims came alive."

In March last year, my brother took me to Port Arthur, where I witnessed the world of giant ships and cannons for the first time. I was then sent to Yau Tsim Mong Girls' School, and then I entered a normal life.

Wang Shouliang sneered, "How can this be considered starving?"

In the previous year of 1905, he was busy with many major things. Apart from going to Hunan Province to sell low-priced grain, he had no other major actions in Hunan.

Hoarding, manipulating food prices, and making a lot of money!

He didn't know about the cholera epidemic in the northern land in 1902 at first. He ignored it. He only found out about it when a weird guy like Kevin mentioned it, and he looked for information from the annual events of Plan A prepared before the time travel.

After Qin Shihuang's 1906-strong army expedition to South Vietnam, the army trampled the Guangdong-Hunan Ancient Road. The teams of victims and hungry people entering Guangdong lasted from summer to January 1, and they were still so continuous.

Due to natural and man-made disasters, it was not until the end of 1906 that an uprising spread across many places. It was called the largest military uprising after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

The land of China is so vast. The Jingxiang land parcel is located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and his farm group has not even opened the land yet.

This time, Wang Shouliang led a team to go north for disaster relief and called Bai Ling and a large group of literacy teachers from girls' schools, including a large number of women who were rescued from brothels. They had been literacy for nearly a year and had been exposed to the Barefoot Doctor's Manual for more than half a year.

Then he took them to the front line of disaster relief to watch their learning progress.

Wang Shouliang originally thought that selling grain at low prices would be enough, and that the Sihai Escort Bureau should have a certain deterrent effect in the south, but he still did not expect that the victims would come all the way down the Xiangjiang and Dongjiang rivers starting in the summer.

Among the major events he collected in advance, the flood in Hunan Province in 05... was a flood that lasted for several years. The peak was in 1909, when a huge flood swept across Hunan.

The next moment, Wang Shouliang lit a cigarette for himself and waved to Bai Ling and many other literacy teachers and the brothel rescue team, "You go ahead and follow the seniors to try front-line rescue."

This group of rescue teams, which have been trained for nearly a year, basically have short hair or ponytails and wear neat black uniforms with leggings and armed belts. There are more than 300 people in total.

When Bai Ling and others took the order with a complicated mentality and headed in the direction of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Group and the Barefoot Doctors Group, Wang Shouliang looked at Xu Si and said, "Take the list sent by the Intelligence Department and let the anti-corruption team take action."

Before he came today, he had already obtained the results of half a year's hard work of the Intelligence Department.

The result is that ships carrying grain from all over the world are sailing almost all over Hunan to sell grain at low prices, and there will be an endless stream of hungry people who will last for half a year.

All I can say is that list, the things the people on the list did, and the various tricks they did in order to make a fortune, shocked even him, a time traveler.

For example, some disaster-stricken villages managed to buy low-priced food and were able to survive for several months... The boats and people from all over the world left, and suddenly the river burst its banks and flooded... This is just an ordinary operation. ! !

This is the list of fruits that can watch your liver explode in place.

Before Wang Shouliang browsed and watched those things, Xu Si, as the captain of the guard, would often take a brief look at them. It was only then that he and the nearby guard members would become numb after seeing the many victims, with eyes that wanted to be stabbed and pressed. Can't hold it down.

To put it bluntly, Xu Si and the other guards were the first to be victims of the disaster who fled famine in Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi and arrived in Yau Tsim Mong in search of survival.

On this escape route, the young man might reach the end of the road with his wife and brothers because of his physical strength, but his father, mother, uncles and uncles would starve to death while walking.

Xu Si saluted, then turned back to the ship to activate the radio station for work.

Wang Shouliang looked at Bai Xiuzhu and said, "Contact your brother and ask him to continue buying large quantities of grain. Whether he buys food from Yanlun or North America, the food cannot be cut off."

At this stage, it is already an era when radio stations, receiving and receiving messages, etc. are popularized on every large warship of various European powers.

It is nothing more than a radio station in this era that can only communicate using Morse code and must be equipped with a decoding translation.

The radio station itself is not only very large and inconvenient to move, but also needs to be equipped with a generator. Once it is set, it is generally equipped on large ships. On land, before entering the age of cars and trucks, the usage rate is very low.

Therefore, even when World War I broke out, Hans Cat's navy could still rely on a relatively simple and efficient semaphore system to gain an advantage in naval battles by relying on lookouts and semaphore systems. The radio wave generation and decoding system were widely used in World War I. Many of them were used, but they were too cumbersome. They could only transmit messages during non-war times. They were relatively common and could allow Yin Lun to receive transoceanic messages transmitted by Montana within one day.

During the First World War, when the European continent fought against each other, they dug and bombed cables to destroy wired communications, and then allowed various wireless communications to travel across the ocean to decrypt each other and engage in information warfare.

Bai Xiuzhu couldn't help but said in horror, "I'll send out the radio later, but will there be many major disasters this year?"

This was like facing hell for her.

Wang Shouliang shook his head speechlessly. 1906 was also a year of severe floods in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Floods not only broke out in Hunan Province, but also affected the entire lower reaches of Hubei, Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang.

However, the information collected in the 1994 plane can only be recorded in a few words. For example, the number of casualties and casualties caused by dikes bursting in various places is in the tens of thousands, and the figures are certainly not accurate.

Another example is the floods in many counties in Zhejiang Province, and hungry people rioting... The hungry people are preaching.

What is even more outrageous is that in 1906, Hong Kong Island also suffered a once-in-a-century typhoon disaster. On the morning of September 1906, 9, a hurricane with a maximum wind speed of 18 kilometers per hour struck Hong Kong Island. In just a few hours, it caused 143 deaths People die!

That's right, 32 people died in a few hours. However, the original total population of Hong Kong was only 5. A strong wind directly killed % of the people in Hong Kong.

hurt? It can be said that there were casualties and casualties. According to the statistics of the Ghost Bear War, the number of Japanese casualties exceeded 300,000, and only 80,000 or 90,000 died.

Not only were there heavy casualties, but more than 3000 fishing boats and nearly 700 large and small cargo ships were directly sunk, including steel ocean-going cargo ships. The number of houses that were torn apart and destroyed is only a record in history.

In just a few hours a day, I don’t know how to calculate whether the economic losses caused to the entire Hong Kong were tens of millions of Hong Kong Island silver dollars or tens of millions of US dollars.

Now Wang Shouliang can only say that we should go all out to prepare for various disasters. There is nothing we can do about floods. The horrific typhoon on Hong Kong Island on September 9 is relatively easy to control.

The biggest reason why a hurricane in history was so destructive was because the observatory forecast said that the weather would be sunny and windy that day. Everyone should do whatever they wanted... No one was prepared at all. They just got up and went to work.

Super hurricanes are coming just now... hurricanes that can capsize steel ocean freighters. Nearly 4000 large and small ships have sunk. It is too easy to blow people to death and drown in the sea.

This is a surprise from the hurricane.

After September 9, there were also super hurricanes that landed on Hong Kong Island on September 18 and 9, but they could be avoided with early warning, and the damage caused was basically the same as the lethality of the typhoon season in normal years, and they could not make big waves.

In September 06, as long as Wang Shouliang gave many factories a holiday in advance and the workers went home and hid in their homes or factories instead of going out on the streets, there would be basically no serious problems.

His Pearl River Construction carried a large number of reinforced concrete buildings, which had strong wind resistance.

........................

The broad Yangtze River rushes from west to east. In the waters of Dongting Lake near the Spring Festival of the new year, a steel destroyer with a displacement of more than 2,000 tons, coupled with a group of small steel gunboats, is lingering at the mouth of the Yangtze River, cruising and waiting for something.

On the deck of the destroyer, Zhang Yi, who had long been in the uniform of the Blue Jackets and was working as a mid-level bodyguard, grabbed a telescope and looked forward. It seemed that there was still no result. Zhang Yicai complained, "Why haven't you come yet? I'm almost here." Wait until you get hungry.”

No one responded to him. Several blue-shirted teams near the deck who also had escort and intermediate escort titles were looking around.

After a while, a certain senior escort with the highest rank put down his binoculars and shouted to the guard beside him, "Give me the order. The target is here. Let's fire a few shots first."

"Don't hit the target accurately. The artillery department misses eight out of ten shots in daily training. Now it's better to miss out on ten out of ten shots when it threatens the foreign grain ships that have recruited the North American ghosts!"

This small ship covering the destroyer Wuzhishan has a displacement of more than 2000 tons and a full complement of 240 people from two senior escort divisions, with two senior escort divisions serving as captain and first mate respectively.

At the moment, the Wuzhishan is cruising here with a few small gunboats, just doing business.

It’s true that I don’t understand what magic is until the disaster year. It’s obvious that since the summer of 05, there have been floods in Hunan Province, the victims have been starving everywhere, and the local tyrants and evil gentry have been hoarding.

There are also a large number of foreign companies from Yinglun, France and North America. They buy rice and grain from here and transport it to Shanghai, Nandu or Hangcheng and other cities with relatively high rice prices to sell and make money.

That's right, the local tyrants and evil gentry are hoarding money. They are taking advantage of the disaster years to sell rice at high prices to ordinary people who cannot afford it. They sell their houses, land, children, and daughters to sell themselves!

Otherwise, you die.

However, one by one the local tyrants and evil gentry targeted grain buyers at Gui Lao Foreign Traders, selling large quantities at low prices... and selling them to other provinces outside Hunan.

To put it bluntly, in the year of catastrophe, what the local tyrants and evil gentry want is the houses, fields and people of the common people, loan sharks, etc.!

Regardless of whether they exploit maids, male servants, or other human resources, what they value most is not how much money they can earn from high-priced rice, but other people's resources.

This is another matter than selling rice and grain in large quantities to foreigners and directly exchanging money.

Moreover, after the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded China, where did the hundreds of millions of taels of silver compensation demanded by the great powers come from? It was distributed to all provinces in China, and Hunan was also the hardest hit area.

No matter how bad the year is, this kind of money cannot be spared.

Zhang Yi and his junior brother Ma Feng, since they joined the Sihai Escort Agency, one has become an intermediate escort and the other has become a junior escort, relying on...

They are super capable of fighting, but they seem to be in the wrong profession. They are super skilled. In an era when they are constantly firing cannons and doing things, the navy's sailors and bodyguards rarely have the opportunity to fight the enemy in close combat.

Even so, after the captain of the Wuzhishan spoke, his guards hurriedly ran to give the order.

Zhang Yicai said quickly, "Commander Liu, let's simply cover up the four characters "Wuzhishan" with canvas, instead of flying the Four Seas flag, hang a pirate flag, and do it like this? Don't we even change our uniforms?!"

This is not too rough!

The Wuzhishan is also a serious steel steam ship purchased from the navies of Yalun or other powers.

Commander Liu glanced at Zhang Yi excitedly, "Where's all the nonsense? This is what the big shopkeeper personally ordered. Our grain transport ships from all over the world enter Hunan one by one, and their grain selling ships leave Hunan one by one."

"Even if they are ghosts, it's time to teach them a lesson."

As the commander and captain of a small ship, there is no need for him to explain anything to his mid-level escorts. This is not about fighting side by side for a year or two... Zhang Yi is so capable of fighting when he throws away his guns.

It's easy to pick ten.

(End of this chapter)