With the approval of Tsar Nicholas II, the following procedures went quickly. The Russian Embassy in the Qing Dynasty received the telegram from Moscow and immediately opened the procedures for Li Yu.
They went to the Prime Minister's Office and submitted it to Yi Kuang. Yi Kuang felt that Li Yu's trip was more like a diplomatic trip, "Isn't he going to Sweden? Why did Russia also send a telegram?"
Although Sweden did not take action against the Qing court, over the years, the Qing court was really beaten by Tsarist Russia in the north. Russia accounted for the largest share of Boxer reparations, and one family alone accounted for nearly 30% of the total reparations.
Therefore, even if Nicholas II did not send the telegram personally, the letter from the Russian legation was extremely respectful to Yi Kuang, and it was even better than one sent by the King of Sweden himself.
When Yi Kuang learned that Li Yu was going to Russia, he directly increased Li Yu's reserve fund by 2,000 silver dollars. If it had not been too late, he would have even wanted to give him an upgrade.
Li Yu didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He quickly said that as a student of the Capital University, he was not suitable for being awarded an official status.
In fact, Li Yu was mainly afraid of trouble. Once he had an official rank, given the official environment in the late Qing Dynasty, he would inevitably have to attend various social events.
At Guangxu's side, Li Yu had to take classes three or four times a week. After Guangxu knew that Li Yu was going to Russia and Sweden again, he had mixed feelings in his heart and couldn't help lamenting: "Now I can only sit in a well and look at the sky, watching this eternal sky." . Professor Li, if possible, I hope you can bring me some fresh Western items, anything."
Guangxu's last tone even sounded like pleading. Li Yu couldn't bear to refuse, so he agreed to him: "I will bring as many new Western products as possible."
Guangxu thought for a while and said: "It is best to have an exquisite pocket watch. I once saw that every foreign minister has one."
"No problem, I'll note it down."
Now to Guangxu himself, the most meaningful thing is time; but Li Yu understands in his heart that the most meaningless thing to him is also time.
Zhang Deyi was a little later than expected. It was not until a week later that he came to ask Li Yu to set off together.
Zhang Deyi said: "I'm really sorry. I may not be able to come back for a few years after I went abroad. It took too long to arrange affairs between the DPRK and China and trivial matters at home."
Of course Li Yu understood his feelings. After all, it was still the late Qing Dynasty, and people's attachment to their hometown was much stronger than in the 21st century. Moreover, transportation was slow, and it usually took several years to return home after going abroad once.
Li Yu smiled and said: "Ambassador Zhang, don't worry, why don't you see your luggage?"
Zhang Deyi said: "There are too many. I ordered my servant to hire more carriages. I will be wandering on the ship for more than a month. I plan to go to the bookstore to buy more books to relieve my boredom on the way."
"I'm afraid we don't need to buy a lot," Li Yuliang showed the documents from the Russian Embassy, "We can take the train this time."
"Train?" Zhang Deyi was extremely surprised, "Brother Li, are you kidding? Are you running a train on the sea?"
Li Yu laughed loudly: "Of course we can't run trains at sea. We need to take the Siberian Railway, passing through Russia, all the way to St. Petersburg, and then take a boat from St. Petersburg across the Baltic Sea to Sweden and the United Kingdom."
Zhang Deyi had seen the world map, but still didn't believe it: "I'm afraid this journey will take tens of thousands of miles. How can there be such a long railway?"
"It's not just tens of thousands of miles. If you count it from scratch, it's almost twenty thousand miles." Li Yu said, "Whether you believe it or not, you'll know after just one ride."
Zhang Deyi said: "If we can really take the railway, it may only take half a month on the road!"
Zhang Deyi suddenly exclaimed, and then he realized: "What you are holding is the authorization letter from the Russian Legation? How did you do it?"
Li Yu said: "Is this it? Several scientific experts in St. Petersburg helped apply."
Li Yu was also very happy when he received Markov's telegram from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences a few days ago, because he really didn't want to wander at sea for so long anymore. It was too time-consuming.
Anyway, I really accepted a big favor from Markov and the others.
Zhang Deyi admired Li Yuzhen very much. When did scientists have such ability? If he applied to Russia, there would be no chance at all. "This time the prince asked you to go with me. Unexpectedly, you were a big help."
Even if they take a train, they have to go to Tianjin first and then take a ferry to Dalian.
Because the Beijing-Tianjin-Shenyang Beijing-Fengcheng Railway has not yet been opened to traffic, only more than 200 kilometers have been built outside the customs, and it will not be officially opened to traffic until 1907.
On the contrary, Russia, which very much wants to occupy the Northeast, has built a "T"-shaped Siberian Railway "Manchuria Branch" in the three northeastern provinces.
So when Li Yu and Zhang Deyi arrived in Dalian and took the train again, it would be a Russian train.
Li Yu's luggage was very small. He only carried one suitcase. Instead, Zhang Deyi carried large and small bags and several entourages.
When the group arrived at Tanggu Port in Tianjin, Li Yu saw that the situation at the dock was completely different from the previous two times. After all, he was on a special mission at the time, and local officials had cleared the port when setting sail and returning.
But what I saw this time was a different scene, and it was a very unsightly scene.
In front of Li Yu, there were hundreds of poor people in ragged clothes who were almost beggars.
They formed several long lines. Li Yu thought at first that someone was giving porridge, but there was no big pot under the tent in front, but a few white people standing there.
Several men in the team were exchanging words:
"Look at this situation, it's really hard for me to survive! I thought I was looking forward to coming to the capital, but I ended up being so hungry that I secretly picked up rotten melon stalks to eat every day."
"I came to the capital the year before last, and even followed my senior brother into the city."
"Then have you met the Emperor and the Queen Mother?"
"What a beautiful idea! I'll stay in the outer city."
"Then why did you come to the dock? Why don't you continue to follow Senior Brother?"
"Hey, I wonder if Senior Brother is still alive? I was beaten so badly that year that I got scared and ran away."
The others laughed at him, and then said:
"If it's like they say, there's gold everywhere, I'll work for him for a few years!"
"It's better than starving to death now!"
"Me too, I hope the white man can choose me."
"Now you are a white man again. I didn't hear you say that the year before last."
"Okay, don't talk about me, you're so hungry that you're here too!"
Suddenly, someone in the tent at the front of the team started shouting loudly: "Listen up! The white man said, if you want to eat and make money, you will have your fingerprints pressed one by one in a while! Then take a ship to the golden paradise, Johannesburg!"
"Don't say you don't understand the terms, I'll explain it to you clearly. The salary is two shillings a day, and you must stay in John, John, ah, Johannesburg for eight years!"
The two boys in the team were a little scared: "Brother, where is the place he mentioned? Is it so far away?"
"I don't know either. Who cares? We have nowhere to go anyway. What are we afraid of?"
The crowd began to rush forward crazily. The white people inside basically only looked at the physique. Anyone who was a little stronger nodded directly, and then a few people guided them to board the rear ship.
Li Yu just heard the shouting and had a rough guess, so he asked Zhang Deyi next to him: "Are these people going to South Africa to dig gold mines?"
Zhang Deyi said: "Yes, go and dig gold mines for the British. Some time ago, the British Empire had an armistice with the Transvaal Republic, and the Transvaal Republic collapsed. The British have already obtained the gold mines in Johannesburg."
Li Yu remembered. He was talking about the Second Boer War that took place in South Africa.
In the 17th century, it was the Dutch who first landed in South Africa and drove away the local indigenous black people. "Boer" is Dutch, meaning "farmer". Since he is Dutch, of course he is also white.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the British also landed at the Cape of Good Hope, and then began to confront the Boers, relying on their strong military power to force the Boers to move inland.
So the Boers established the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State in the interior.
But soon, in 1884, prospectors discovered the world's largest Witwatersrand gold mine (referred to as the Witwatersrand gold mine) on a remote pasture between Pretoria and the Vaal River in the Transvaal Republic. Rand Gold Mine, Rand).
Johannesburg was then founded on this gold mine.
Profits and taxes from the gold mines allowed the Transvaal Republic's economy to develop rapidly, while also intensifying friction with Britain.
It’s all caused by interests!
Kaiser Wilhelm II took this opportunity to add fuel to the fire and sent a telegram congratulating the Boers on their independence. Finally, the conflict completely intensified in 1899.
What people did not expect was that at the beginning of the war, only a few hundred thousand Boers withstood the British attack. The British were forced to mobilize more than 400,000 troops from various places to participate in the war.
Although Johannesburg was captured, the Boers developed guerrilla tactics and forced the British to establish thousands of outposts to protect supply lines.
The two sides launched a three-year continuous war. In the end, the British won a tragic victory at a huge cost of more than 20,000 casualties.
This is the last battle of the colonial expansion of the empire on which the sun never sets.
British politicians realized that modern wars were costly, so they stopped their overseas colonial expansion and began strategic contraction, shifting their strategic center back to Europe.
However, with the world's largest gold mine in South Africa controlled by the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom has been able to control the lifeline of the global economy. Gold from South Africa quickly made London the center of global finance and gold trading.
Li Yu asked: "South Africa has Africa on its back, so why did it come all the way to China to recruit workers?"
Zhang Deyi is the ambassador to the UK and knows all about this. He said helplessly: "They have been recruiting us for decades, maybe they think it is easy to use. By the way, have you heard the word olie?"
"Can you say it again? I haven't heard it." Li Yu said.
Zhang Deyi explained: "These Chinese people who go abroad are called olie by foreigners, which is the transliteration of the word 'coolie'. This phenomenon began about sixty years ago."
Li Yu was stunned. This was a very discriminatory term.
Zhang Deyi continued: "Due to the impact of the three-year war, Johannesburg is now very short of people. I estimate that they will recruit 30,000 to 50,000 people."
Zhang Deyi's estimate was still low. In fact, there were more than 60,000 Chinese workers who went to the South African gold mines this time.
As early as 1845, the first ship filled with Chinese coolies sailed from Xiamen. At that time, colonies around the world allocated special funds to set up labor recruitment halls at Chinese ports, or set up so-called "immigration companies" to carry out " Lure and plunder in the name of "recruitment".
The hard-working spirit of the Chinese people turned out to be a more useful slave option than black people in the eyes of the great powers.
It just so happened that the Qing Dynasty was defeated on the battlefield one after another, and the great powers saw through the Qing Dynasty that the Qing Dynasty was strong on the outside and ineffective on the inside. So after the Second Opium War in 1860, Britain, France and other countries signed the "Beijing Treaty" with China. The fifth paragraph of it was to allow "people to go abroad." Undertake the work."
In 1866, the Treaty on Renewal of Recruitment Regulations was signed, allowing British and French colonists to recruit laborers in China at will.
Of course, this seemingly legal recruitment is actually still a coolie trade.
Recruitment centers often employ a large number of thugs to bribe kidnappers and traffickers to kidnap coolies in the countryside and send them to "Bala Keng" where coolies are concentrated in Xiamen, Shantou and other places to be shipped out.
They would brand the chests of the Chinese laborers with the mark of their destination, and treat them basically like slaves branded with shame. You can imagine how well they were treated.
It is estimated that from 1852 to 1858, 40,000 coolies were shipped out of Shantou alone, and 8,000 of them were tortured to death before the ship sailed, and most of them were abandoned on the beach.
Li Yu sighed, and he soon understood why although Guangdong and Fujian provinces have a tradition of immigration, the workers going to South Africa now mainly come from North China, especially Hebei, Shandong and Henan.
In the later stages of the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing government began to chaos and finally abandoned it, and united with foreigners to strangle it. Many peasants who participated in the uprising fled and had to go abroad to work as laborers to avoid being pursued by the court.
Coupled with the invasion of China by the Eight-Power Allied Forces, the entire northern region was in chaos.
At the same time as man-made disasters, natural disasters hit North China again. Floods, droughts, and insect plagues followed one after another. Severe thunder and hail, earthquakes, and landslides continued to cause disasters, which in turn led to even more terrible and sustained famines.
In this time of natural and man-made disasters, instead of "trading children for food" in the countryside, it is better to go abroad to seek a way out. With this idea in mind, more than 60,000 Chinese workers embarked on the road of no return to the Cape of Good Hope.
In this situation, even if the saint is reincarnated, it will be difficult to come up with a good solution.
Although Li Yu knew very well that the "two shillings" mentioned by the white people would not be fully paid, and would basically shrink to only one shilling per day (almost less than 200 cash by calculation).
But if they stayed in the hands of the local "parent officials" of the Qing court, they might not be as good as going abroad to work as laborers. At least they could eat and have some hope of survival.
Although Chinese workers in South Africa had been subjected to inhuman treatment, working up to 12 hours a day, and often working in the water all day long for several months, death occurred from time to time due to tuberculosis and liver disease.
However, Chinese workers still made huge contributions and sacrifices to South Africa's gold mines.
Johannesburg's 33 gold mining companies went from losing money in 1902 to making profits in 1905.
The output value of South African gold mines has also jumped to the first place in the world.
Even the British government admitted: "Chinese workers made contributions during the most difficult period of the South African mining industry."
It's a pity that no miserable Chinese worker can own this gold, this blood-stained gold!
