Chapter 226: Miscellaneous Talk on Aftermath

The dead have passed, and the living are still busy without a moment's pause.

Post-disaster reconstruction began at the very first moment, and the top priority before all other work was dredging the river channels.

Due to the ravages of the rainstorm and mountain floods, the entire Tainan Plain was now a shallow marsh, with stretches of connected puddles everywhere, some already merging into temporary lakes. And at the first moment after the typhoon passed, large numbers of workers, tools in hand, began the operation to clear the flooded areas.

Flooded areas breed mosquitoes, and where there are mosquitoes, malaria will appear. So digging channels to divert water and repairing the river channels became the foremost urgent task. And the somewhat larger "Seabed Scoop" No. 2 vessel, originally busy in the Taijiang, was also urgently dispatched, starting upstream from the lower reaches of the Xingang Creek and clearing away the massive boulders and silt brought by the mountain floods along the way.

Of course, all this only treats the symptoms, not the root cause. The only way to change a region's drought and flood environment is to build dams.

Historically, it was not until the Japanese occupation period that Tainan would see the "Jianan Dazhen" series of water conservancy projects designed and built by the Japanese engineer Hatta Yoichi. And the core of this series is the Wushantou Reservoir.

After the entire project was completed, the Jianan Plain's original 5,000 hectares of paddy fields increased to 150,000 hectares. The irrigation area covered the three counties of Yunlin, Jiayi, and Tainan, making it the largest water conservancy system in Southeast Asia at the time.

Water conservancy projects are just that enticing. If the Crossing Faction could also create such a project, then 150,000 hectares—over two million mu of rice paddies—how many immigrants could that feed?

However, this is of no use.

Historically, the Japanese started in 1920, importing large-scale steam-powered civil engineering machinery, including earth scrapers, pressure water jets, and sand transport vehicles. On this basis, it took seven years to complete a 3,078-meter-long water diversion tunnel through Wushanling connecting to the Zengwen River.

And the current industrial strength of the Transmigrators is very deformed: seemingly possessing both high-precision and cutting-edge capabilities, but generally small in scale. The entire industrial system is still far from reaching the scale of Japan in that year, so building a dam is impossible.

The only way is to first build a few reservoirs upstream on the Xingang Creek as an emergency measure. As for those large reservoirs upstream on the Zengwen River, the current Transmigrators are truly incapable of achieving that.

As the saying goes, destruction is ten thousand times easier than construction.

During the reconstruction period, over ten thousand temporary scavengers grandly and vigorously began a silt-clearing campaign. It was not until five days later that the surrounding stagnant water and mud were cleaned up.

After preliminary normal order was restored, although large numbers of workers began returning to the factories, the subsequent disaster mitigation work remained extremely busy.

One good point is that the current Crossing Faction is no longer as short of manpower as when it first opened. Since colluding with the old scoundrel Xiong from Fuzhou, a certain faction, through the Fuzhou Station's intermediary operations and with the tacit approval of the authorities, has been vigorously transporting immigrants to Dayuan during this period, with quite good results.

In the original history, there was a severe drought in Fujian in 1628, with multitudes of starving people. Zheng Zhilong, with Xiong Wencan's support, "gave three taels of silver per person, and one ox per three people," thus swindling tens of thousands of disaster victims into going to Taiwan. In fact, Fujian had nowhere near that many oxen; in the end, they just handed out some silver and called it a day.

But Dayuan's method of recruiting people here is different from Lao Zheng's. Dayuan has no silver or oxen here, but Dayuan has clean and beautiful affordable housing, abundant food, divinely effective medical care, and ample job opportunities—any famine victim can obtain a space for stable development here.

After the first boatload of famine victims was "swindled" into working at Dayuan, soon some people went back and brought out their entire families. Because Dayuan has a rule here: singles live in collective dormitories, while couples with children can apply for a zero-down-payment wooden house. The more children, the easier the application, and all children attend school for free, with meals provided.

The power of a role model is immense.

As the Transmigrators' reputation gradually spread, more and more famine victims came to surrender to the court one after another. And the Fuzhou Station here accepted all comers: anyone could come, even if they were so poor they were bare-ass naked. Of course, the wool comes from the sheep's back—all expenses, including boat fare and housing, would eventually be slowly deducted from the immigrants' wages.

This is the reason for a certain faction's recent population explosion: large numbers of unplanned Fujian immigrants began entering Dayuan one after another. Coupled with the immigrants shipped from Hangzhou and the locally assimilated natives, the Transmigrators suddenly discovered overnight that the total population under their governance had actually broken through the 60,000 mark.

This was very gratifying. One must know that in ancient times, the total population of many county towns was merely a few thousand people.

Since manpower was ample, many previously small-scale tasks could now be smoothly launched. Currently, Dayuan's industrial layout, supported by the three pillars of mining and industry, infrastructure, and agriculture—the Three Chariots—has already taken shape. Large numbers of able-bodied laborers are gathered in these three sectors, and the entire social landscape is thriving, a scene of vigorous growth.

After dredging the river channels, large numbers of hands began maintenance on the disaster-stricken residential areas. The greatest victims of this typhoon disaster were the earliest batch of dormitories built by the Transmigrators.

Back then, since the enterprise had just opened and resources were insufficient in all aspects, the batch of dormitories designed by Zheng Yangyang had somewhat weaker roof structures. Thus, when the typhoon passed through, the roofs of large numbers of old dormitories with mortise and tenon structures were ripped off, and a small number collapsed, drenching everyone inside like drowned chickens.

And this maintenance aimed to solve all problems in one go: the roofs of the old dormitories would be reinstalled according to the roof structure of the new dormitories, the structure would be reinforced, and all hidden dangers would be eliminated.

As the number of immigrants increased daily and their composition grew increasingly complex, the residential areas here in Chikan were continuously adjusted accordingly. From the initial uniform 10-person dormitories, to the later 40-person large dormitories, and then gradually evolving into large numbers of single-family dwellings, the societal evolution was very apparent.

And this evolution was inseparable from industrial development. From the early manual pile rammers, to the later gas pile drivers, to abandoning the mortise and tenon structure and beginning to use iron nails and wood screws on a large scale—the technological content within these simple-lined dormitory buildings designed by the Transmigrators was actually constantly increasing.

One must know that without the participation of more and more engineering machinery, if these "block" houses were assembled purely by human labor, then the speed of dormitory construction certainly could not keep up with the speed of immigrant influx, let alone those single-family houses specially prepared for complete families.

The current Chikan New District already had the appearance of those residential towns of later generations: rows of wooden buildings were divided into a flat chessboard by straight roads, and all districts were separated by neat camphor trees lining the roadsides. Clean and tidy, on the roads paved with crushed stone, gas buses with attached trailers moved slowly, filled with workers with rosy complexions, wearing linen shirts and cropped pants.

The eternally most bustling place was naturally Chikan Cement Avenue, which reached a width of 30 meters. The funny thing is, this street was only 4 meters wide in the original design plan—later, discovering the situation was dire, the Chikan District "Government" urgently demolished several rows of simple dormitories and widened the street.

Of course, no one can be blamed for this. One must know that when the Transmigrators first crossed the Taijiang, the opposite shore was still a savage land covered in wild grass and mosquitoes. The Designer originally planned this land according to the scale of an American Western town, so naturally the roads were not very wide.

The people of Dayuan—soon to become "people of the Empire"—these immigrants, their happiest thing now was to go strolling and shopping on Chikan Avenue after getting off work in the evening.

At night, Chikan Avenue was like a pedestrian street of later generations, lined with bright street lamps, various government-run shops and barbecue stalls, where large crowds leisurely wandered.

Generally speaking, the most dashing figures on the avenue were those awesome characters with girlfriends—able to lure the scarce girls out from the Textile Factory and Fire Cap Factory for a stroll, even if the one lured was a Japanese girl, such a person was still considered an awesome specimen.

As for those losers who couldn't fart even if beaten with three clubs, honest and simple, and not yet adapted to the Transmigrators' unrestrained management style, they could only swallow their saliva and watch enviously as the cabbage-stealing pigs pulled out work point tickets to treat girls to grilled grouper. However, apart from cursing a few times that this servant would go bankrupt tomorrow and be reduced to gnawing flatbread, they had no better solution—those who dared cause trouble had all been hauled off to cut wood.

Opening a shop on Chikan Avenue was no easy task. Because the Transmigrators' current commercial structure was, in essence, not free trade, but a strictly controlled unified purchase and sale model.

All subjects under the Transmigrators' governance were, in nature, somewhat similar to the state-owned enterprise workers of yesteryear: their work and life were arranged by the upper levels, and these people had few choices.

And the Transmigrators' current business model was also very unique: the industrial products from the Kiln Area Base, aside from those high-cost-performance goods listed for export and sold globally, the remaining daily necessities were not produced in large quantities—just enough for local consumption.

The advantage of this model is that it balances earning foreign exchange through commodity exports with the development of local industry. But there is also a disadvantage: the private economy is temporarily suppressed.

That is to say, if a wealthy Ming merchant intended to come to Chikan Street to buy a government-run shopfront and open a grocery store, he would find that there were no local goods to stock—all miscellaneous goods were directly allocated to the various government-run stores, with no share for him. And for sought-after goods like kerosene lamps, he likewise could not get stock, because those were prepared for major powers like the Dutch.

There was no helping it; in the extremely slow social environment of the 17th century, the Transmigrators could not procure large quantities of various industrial raw materials, so they could only adopt this method to get through the bottleneck period.

Of course, as the situation in Zhejiang and Fujian gradually opened up, and as the Dayuan Shipyard continuously launched large-tonnage cargo ships, this tight unified purchase and sale situation would soon be dismantled by the massive quantities of commodities produced in the Kiln District. By that time, the Transmigrators might even have to cross the sea to kidnap some wealthy merchants to Dayuan to invigorate the economy. You who love to read, how can you not follow this public account? Search on WeChat: or, let's chat about web novels together~