Chapter 236: Fortification and Warfare (Part 3)
Before you move others, move yourself first!
Liberate them and send them back to their homes as free men.
Zhu Xianhai, who had already proclaimed himself a slave liberator, even picked up a map himself in the following days and chose a suitable landing location in the Congo River estuary.
In fact, it is better to just adopt it directly.
Whether it's Brazzaville or Kinshasa, whether they are Belgians or French, they must have their reasons for choosing those places, and they can develop there, which shows that their choice is correct.
After the experience of Nanhua, the next time he planned, it was naturally easy and effortless. Of course, during this period, he also met several scholars who knew about Africa, and was very happy to learn from them that Europeans had no interest in Africa at all!
It's not that they don't have interest, but because of diseases and other reasons, Europeans are afraid of Africa. Of course, all this will change in the next decade or so. Faced with the reality that the world has been divided up, coupled with the advancement of medical technology, Europeans have finally sounded the clarion call to conquer Africa, the last unclaimed land.
But right now – Africa is ownerless.
Well, actually, we can’t say that. There are still some local people... But according to the standards of people of this era, can those barbarians... be considered the masters?
"This is to prepare for the liberation of millions of black slaves!"
Finally, after lightly drawing a stroke on the south bank of the lower reaches of the Congo River, Zhu Xianhai couldn't help but sigh, we go to Africa not for colonization, not for expansion, but for the liberation of black slaves!
However, this requires a long period of preparation, such as preparing ships, collecting rubber seeds from Brazil, and even training the black slaves.
Great undertakings are sometimes started inadvertently, but even the most magnificent facts are essentially based on interests.
rubber!
Everything started with rubber, but Nanhua’s first street light line did not use expensive rubber wires, but instead the most common rubber-coated cloth wires.
As usual, in the early morning, as soon as the sky brightened, Zhu Zhenwu carried a bamboo pipe and went down to the sewer of Zhuque Street with his co-workers. As the first street in Nanhua and one of the widest streets, Zhuque Street is not only nearly 100 meters wide, it also has the most modern sewer in Nanhua.
In fact, the 1850s and 1860s were the era when Europe and the United States made large-scale renovations to their sewers to reduce the spread of diseases such as cholera. Before that, the sewers in Europe and the United States looked like ditches on the roadside, while the worse ones were directly drained on the streets. The sewage flowed in the center of the street like a horse and a carriage, and then entered the gutter after flowing for a considerable distance. The overflow of sewage on the streets not only made it inconvenient to travel, but also brought about the spread of diseases such as incest.
Both Paris and London suffered from sewage and disease. In 1858, Chicago even raised the entire city by nearly ten feet to build underground water pipes.
In fact, Nanhua was the same at the beginning, just digging a few ditches on the roadside to fill the sewers. But in 1861, when the city planning began, at the suggestion of several European engineers, Zhu Xianhai decided to emulate the large-scale sewer system built in Europe. Due to the relatively high altitude and the initial construction of the city, the sewers were directly dug out and covered with bricks and then covered with soil.
However, in the early planning, only Suzaku Street was planned to have a large sewer. But after returning from Araucanía, Zhu Xianhai changed his mind - not because various new things could be installed in the large sewer - tap water, cables and wires, gas, etc. could all be stuffed into this huge sewer.
The more important reason is war!
In the simulator, although the British and American navies did not attack Nanhua, the shelling caused considerable casualties. In the simulator, Nanhua only had a few sewers on the main streets and basements of buildings to avoid the shelling. In most places, the citizens had nowhere to hide from the shelling.
In the era without subways, spacious sewers were the best air-raid shelters. So, with the support of Zhu Xianhai, engineers from Britain and France took advantage of the terrain of South China, which is high in the northeast and low in the southwest, and learned from the successful experiences of Paris, London and Chicago. They designed a plan to discharge domestic sewage to the suburbs, and established a relatively complete set of technologies for the development, cleaning and maintenance of sewer systems.
The sewer on Zhuque Street is very spacious, with a 3-meter-wide drainage channel in the middle and 1-meter-wide sidewalks on both sides for maintenance personnel to pass through. Now, Zhu Zhenwu and his team are fixing bamboo tubes on the sewer walls along the sidewalks, and the wires pass through the bamboo tubes. This is to protect the wires and also to mark the lines of the wires, after all, the bamboo tubes are marked with line numbers and corresponding streets.
Although it is in the sewer, there is no peculiar smell here. After listening to the sound of flowing water and fixing hundreds of meters of bamboo pipes to the wall, Zhu Zhenwu would occasionally stare at the sewer involuntarily during his breaks. Looking at the closed iron gate at the intersection of the sewers of Taiping Road and Zhuque Street, he asked.
"Uncle Li, what is this door for?"
In the light of the oil lamp, Li Mingquan took a look and said.
"There are words written on it... read it."
"Taiping Road 113 War Preparation Room... What is this?"
"What the hell is that? You don't understand. This war room is the basement of No. 113 Taiping Road. If there is a war, the people can hide in the sewers and not worry about being hit by artillery fire. But there will still be war. Haven't you seen that the buildings on Nanhua Road have three-foot-high half-floors and two-foot-thick walls. Guns and artillery can't hit them. Soldiers shoot people through the windows in the basement. I tell you, don't think that Nanhua is a city. When a war breaks out, Nanhua is a... um, what is it? A fortress, yes, a fortress!"
Li Mingquan even pointed at the road sign and said.
"Look at the road signs. They are the same on the ground and underground. If we follow the signs, we won't have to worry about getting lost. The most important thing is that when the war breaks out, even if there is continuous bombing outside, we don't have to worry if we stay here. I tell you, even the artillery batteries in South China Bay are no better than this!"
fortress!
A fortified city. Of course, this is a fortification in a sense, but it just has more sewers. However, these sewers are given some special meaning...
(End of this chapter)
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