After a meal, Sun Xu and Sun Dawei returned to the apartment with a full meal.
Sun Xu originally wanted to pay for the meal just now. After all, he came all the way to join Faxiao. He had to live here before finding a job. Naturally, he was embarrassed to eat another big meal in vain.
But Sun Dawei insisted that this was a wedding banquet. If Sun Xu paid for it, he would look down on him and not regard him as a brother... In the end, he couldn't resist and gave up the idea.
After returning to the apartment, he took a hot bath and finally lay down on the floor in the small living room outside. Although Sun Xu was a little tired, he still couldn't sleep!
After all, this visit to Songjiang is the first time in Sun Xu's life that he has traveled far away. He has never left the county before.
Now I have traveled across half of the country in one go, and have been traveling for several days to reach Songjiang.
To be honest, he was full of uneasiness and even a little fear about this.
It's just that as a manly man and carrying the hope of a good life for his family, Sun Xu didn't show it all along the way.
Now that he has arrived in Songjiang, thousands of miles away from home, and settled down here in Faxiao, Sun Xu breathed a sigh of relief, but he couldn't help but feel a lot of emotion in his heart.
I don’t know if my mother is well these days when I am away from home. I don’t know if my father’s work is going well. I don’t know if my younger brother can study hard at school with peace of mind.
These things that he would not pay attention to deliberately in the past have appeared in Sun Xu's mind after being thousands of miles away from home... The most important thing is that he can no longer learn every bit of his family in time.
I also don’t know if it’s easy to find a job in Songjiang. Although Songjiang is a big city with many job opportunities and many companies recruit mechanical repairmen, Sun Xu also knows that there are many people like him in this city who have grown up A mechanical repairman who came to Songjiang to find a job and pursue a new life.
And Sun Xu didn't know whether he could compete with these people.
After all, he is just a novice mechanical repairman who has been working as a mechanic for less than a year. Strictly speaking, he has not even been responsible for solving some of the more important repair business independently.
Therefore, Sun Xu was also a little worried about whether those factories would take a fancy to him.
If you can't find a job for a long time, it will be difficult.
After all, he doesn't have much money with him. Apart from the train tickets and money for meals along the way, he only has three yuan and two cents left with him now.
After arriving in Songjiang, although I could borrow money to stay at Sun Dawei's place, the expenses were still indispensable.
When you go out to find a job, you have to spend money on taking a public carriage, eating and drinking, etc.
If you can't find a job for a long time, it will be more troublesome.
If possible, Sun Xu still hopes to find a job as soon as possible, even if the salary level is slightly lower.
You can't always rely on others, right?
Thinking like this, Sun Xu, like most people in the city, gradually fell asleep.
In the four-story apartment where he was located, the lights in each house gradually went out, the men yelled and cursed, and the sounds of crying children gradually subsided.
However, the dim whale oil lamp at the door of the apartment did not go out. Instead, it continued to emit a not-so-bright light to illuminate the small area at the door, preventing the entire apartment from being completely swallowed up by darkness.
Looking into the distance, other apartment buildings or shop entrances on this street also had whale oil lamps emitting a faint light.
Although the dozens of public whale oil lamps in total were sparse and the light emitted was very weak, they still brought light to this street in Xicheng District.
But on the main road 'Shencun Street' outside the intersection of Shencun East 7th Lane, the world here is much brighter!
Because the night was not too dark yet, there were still some shops on both sides of the street that were not closed, including a clinic and pharmacy at the intersection of Dongqi Lane.
In front of the clinic is an iron pillar several meters high, and on top of the pillar is a gas lamp that has appeared in big cities in recent years.
This gas lamp is much brighter than the whale oil lamp. It not only illuminates the area in front of the clinic, but also allows the streets to the left and right to be seen clearly.
The history of gas lighting in the empire is actually not short, but its large-scale application has only been in recent years.
To be honest, this thing is actually an additional product of the Dachu Empire's steel industry.
In order to make more and better steel, the steel plants of the Dachu Empire began to use coking coal to make steel very early. Therefore, while developing the steel industry, the coking coal industry was also developing simultaneously, which was not noticed by outsiders.
During the development of the coking coal industry, as technology continued to advance, scientists discovered that coking coal would produce a flammable mixed gas.
And this flammable gas is called gas.
However, for a long time, because the gas contained carbon monoxide, which is very easy to poison, and the coking process was not very good, it was difficult to safely recycle the mixed gas produced by coking.
Therefore, for a long time, the gas produced by the coking industry of the Da Chu Empire was treated as a kind of waste gas. Even because the gas is easily poisoned, it is very troublesome to deal with. The gas is usually directly ignited and burned... You can't directly discharge a large amount of mixtures rich in carbon monoxide and other gases into the air on a large scale, right...
Later, technicians tried to find ways to harmlessly treat these gases and find ways to recycle these waste gases.
But the biggest impact is on lighting and heating!
After all, this thing is a flammable gas, and it is very feasible to burn it directly as fuel and use it as a lighting lamp.
At the same time, it can also be used directly to boil water and then provide central heating.
However, as for lighting, because gas contains carbon monoxide and is easily poisoned, it is rarely used indoors and is usually used outdoors.
In the 29th year of Chengshun, Huainan Mining Company signed a contract with the local government and took the lead in designing and constructing a batch of gas supply pipelines, corresponding gas lamps, and gas heating stations for central heating in the Huainan area.
This started the large-scale commercial application of gas in the Chu Empire, and many cities subsequently followed up and built gas lamps for outdoor lighting.
The capital Jinling City was the first to follow suit. Thirty years after the founding of Chengshun, it had already invested in the construction of a batch of gas lamps. The first batch was used for outdoor public lighting in the palace and the administrative areas outside the palace. The following year, it began to be used in some commercial streets.
As the most developed economy in the Great Chu Empire, Songjiang Mansion, with its local finances not short of money, has always been very interested in such advanced public facilities.
For example, asphalt roads are something that only Songjiang City likes to play on a large scale at present... Moreover, Songjiang City is also planning to build an urban rail track. In addition, in this urban train track plan, many sections, mainly in bustling urban areas, are planned to be directly underground. It is accessible by digging tunnels, so they even gave it a special name: the underground railway...referred to as the subway!
Don’t doubt the technical feasibility of tunnel construction in the Chu Empire these days. In the original time and space, the London Underground was completed and opened to traffic in 1862...
The method of tunneling proposed by Songjiang Prefecture is also very simple and crude. It does not directly dig a hole as people are familiar with in later generations. Instead, it digs a large trench directly into the ground and then reinforces it with bricks and cement. And seal the roof, and then backfill with soil after completion...
This is naturally very costly and time-consuming...Cities that don’t have a lot of money in their pockets can’t even think about it.
But Songjiang Prefecture is not short of money, and the city is developing too fast, the population and buildings are too dense, and the traffic pressure is extremely heavy. Therefore, the urban railway plan must be carried out, and when passing through some downtown streets, you cannot directly build the ground Railways, not to mention the loud noise and so on, the land cost alone is not small.
Songjiang Prefecture is even considering building a subway, not to mention gas lighting.
Although they only started building the first batch of gas lamps in the 31st year of Chengshun, they were very wealthy. Five thousand gas lamps were installed in the first phase, directly covering the main city center streets, followed by the second phase. Twenty thousand, 30,000 in the third phase... and the fourth phase of gas lamp construction is still under way.
There will be more in the fourth issue, 50,000 at one go!
According to Songjiang Prefecture's plan, they want to build at least 100,000 public or private gas lamps in a super city with more than three million people!
Public gas lights are directly invested and constructed by local finance, while private gas lights are supported and subsidized.
On this scale... there are more gas lights in one city than in all other cities in the country combined!
In Jinling City, the current capital, there are actually only about 25,000 gas lamps, let alone other cities.
By the way, gas lights are actually quite expensive these days. The hardware costs of buried gas pipes and gas street lights are very high, and the cost of continuously burning gas is also high.
Nowadays, most cities in the empire that use gas lamps sign contracts with gas companies and settle the fees based on monthly quotations for each lamp... It depends on the gas cost, pipe length, quantity, etc., but they are not cheap.
Therefore, those who can spend a lot of money to install gas lamps in cities are actually cities with relatively good economies, and Songjiang is the richest and most willing to do so. One mouth can provide 100,000 gas lamps, and this is still the early stage plan. In the end God knows how much gaslighting there will be.
By now, gas lamps have been installed even in streets like Shencun Street in Xicheng District, which are actually far away from the real city center.
Provide basic lighting for people to travel at night.
It's just that Shencun Street is just an ordinary street, and when you continue to the Huangpu River, you set foot on Huangpu River Avenue.
The public gas streetlights here are more densely packed, and a large number of commercial buildings along the avenue will also have private gas streetlights erected in front of their doors.
Numerous gas street lamps illuminate the entire Huangpu River Avenue brightly, without any darkness at night.
Under the light of the street lights, Huangpu River Avenue was still very busy. From time to time, carriages hanging glass-shaded whale oil lamps passed by on the asphalt road more than ten meters wide.
A large number of four-wheeled carriages loaded with goods are passing on the road, taking advantage of the fact that the traffic is not so congested at night, transporting goods to every corner of the city.
In the majestic buildings beside Huangpu River Avenue, people wearing decent business attire or traditional Hanfu would come out of the building from time to time, wave to the taxi waiting on the roadside, and then get on the taxi.
However, more overtime workers who came out of these buildings, although they were wearing decent woolen business attire or silk Hanfu, still went to the public carriage platform, dragged their tired bodies and got on the public carriage, and the carriage swayed all the way back. Home.
As the public carriage passes along, you can still see some brightly lit restaurants and teahouses, which are even more lively than during the day. They are hung with various red lanterns that attract people's imagination. From time to time, you can hear the sound of playing, playing and singing from inside. The sound wanders through the dim streets, proving to the world that Songjiang is still bustling and lively even at night!
Not to mention the bustling Huangpu River Avenue, where countless amounts of money have gathered, even in the slightly more remote Xicheng District, many places are still brightly lit at night.
In the Anhua Textile Factory in the Xicheng Industrial Zone, the lights in several huge spinning factories have been extinguished, and the workers have finished work and gone home early.
But the office building on the side of the factory was still brightly lit.
In the conference room on the third floor, a dozen middle-aged or elderly men wearing new business attire sat on both sides of the rectangular table. The conference room was filled with smoke, so much so that even in the winter, the windows were opened for ventilation.
Sitting directly in front of the rectangular table is a middle-aged man in business attire. He holds a Donghua brand cigarette in one hand and flips through the documents in front of him with the other.
After a while, I saw him holding the cigarette and taking a deep breath. Then he put the cigarette butt out in the ashtray in front of him. After the smoke was blown out, a cloud of white smoke was formed in front of him.
Tobacco was introduced during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty and quickly spread throughout China. In the beginning, both the Ming Dynasty and the Eastern Banners actually banned tobacco, but the effect was not great. Folks began to plant large quantities of their own tobacco. suck.
After the era of the Chu Empire, Luo Zhixue also thought about banning it at first, but it still had little effect. In addition, the profits from tobacco were too great, which made a great financial contribution.
Later, the tobacco monopoly system was simply implemented, and while conducting effective management, it also obtained a large amount of financial revenue.
Later it developed into the use of pipes and even cigarettes.
Today's tobacco industry is very large and its financial contribution is huge.
Especially in the 15th year of Chengshun, the Chu Empire adopted large-scale industrial production of salt. However, salt is a necessity for human survival. It is impossible for the empire to make people unable to eat salt for the sake of profit. It even continued to produce salt after industrialization. , has repeatedly lowered salt prices on a large scale.
Nowadays, salt has become very cheap in the empire and even in overseas territories... so cheap that even if you engage in salt smuggling, you can't make much money.
At the same time, salt was also dumped on a large scale to various indigenous countries...such as Fuso, India, West Asia, America, Africa, and even Europe, where high-quality and cheap salt from the Dachu Empire appeared.
Under such circumstances, although salt is still a specialty and the output is huge, the actual profits and taxes contributed are far less than before.
At this time, tobacco replaced salt and became the largest government-owned industry, contributing a large amount of tax revenue and profits every year.
People also started smoking local cigarettes, then moved to pipes, then rolled their own cut tobacco, and now to paper cigarettes produced in factories.
It is very popular especially among the middle and upper class!
The smoke lingering in the conference room today can prove the rapid development of the tobacco industry in the Chu Empire in the past few decades... Of course, this is not a good thing. After all, smoking is harmful to health. If you smoke for a long time, various lungs will be damaged. The disease has been cured. Pulmonary edema and lung cancer have all come back.
This thing is more harmful to people's health than the dust industry. The dust industry is overwhelming and affects a small number of employees, but tobacco affects countless people.
However, in the contemporary Chu Empire, people obviously did not realize the dangers of tobacco, and regarded it more as a consumer product like tea.
Luo Zhixue was also a little helpless about this... He also tried to ban it in his early years. After all, he did not smoke and knew the dangers of smoking, but it was a pity that he could not ban it... Both officials and the people felt that Luo Zhixue's move was meddling in other people's affairs.
Later, Luo Zhixue simply gave up and did whatever he liked... He just happened to set up a franchise to ruthlessly harvest those smokers.
However, Luo Zhixue's attitude towards real drugs such as opium is very firm. Except for specific medical industries, the cultivation, processing, transportation and sales are completely prohibited.
Moreover, the restrictions are very strict, and if caught, they will basically be shot!
In order to crack down on opium, we not only banned its cultivation domestically, but also went to the central and western parts of India and Bangladesh, which are important opium producing areas, to carry out crackdowns... prohibiting the cultivation of opium in local princely states.
The method is simple and crude... If you dare to plant it, I will start a war!
At the same time, there was also a complete ban on any overseas trade in opium.
However, while completely banning the opium trade, the Chu Empire engaged in tobacco trade on a global scale...
In addition to its own consumption, the large amounts of tobacco in the Chu Empire were also exported in large quantities!
Nowadays, in Europe, imported paper cigarettes from the Chu Empire have become the new favorite of local upper-class nobles and businessmen.
Take a puff of Chu Empire's brand paper cigarette, and you will feel like a respectable gentry of Chu Kingdom!
