On February 1, 1684, an unexpectedly heavy snowfall enveloped the entire Shandong Peninsula.

Under the influence of this bad weather, the originally prosperous short-distance transportation industry suddenly died down, many coachmen no longer took on this kind of business that might damage their vehicles but received little gain, and ships had to be parked on the shore or in the dock because of the freezing of the river.

However, the traditional transportation industry has fallen silent, and the modern transportation industry has risen to the top. Just this morning, a steam train spitting black smoke came from Taocun and Laiyang in the north, and then stopped at the Jimo County Railway Station. Here, the train unloaded a large quantity of hides, daily necessities, wine, livestock and other commodities purchased from the north, and then loaded the entire fifty tons of flour for its final destination, Jiaozhou Port. It was a purely consumer city, home to a large number of troops, officials, technicians, and merchants, and almost all of its daily necessities were imported from the surrounding areas, mainly Jimo and Laiyang counties, whether it was grain, fruits, meat, vegetables, or anything else.

If it was left in the past, Jiaozhou began to hoard a large number of materials two months earlier, and large quantities of materials such as grain, fish and meat, cloth, daily necessities, and even weapons and ammunition were transported to Jiaozhou City through mules and horses, carts or small boats. Every now and then, the commercial area outside the Jiaozhou fortress will usher in a wave of explosive prosperity, all kinds of merchants, coachmen, laborers come in an endless stream, here to trade, consumption, fiercely stimulate a wave of local economy, tax officials often collect taxes to the soft, mouth smile from ear to ear.

The reason why Jiaozhou City began to hoard a large number of materials two months in advance is actually very simple, in order to prevent the arrival of bad weather and cause inconvenient transportation - such as the current heavy snow road closure - so that a large number of materials cannot be transported into Jiaozhou City in time, affecting the lives of its residents and many family members.

But now this problem seems to be completely solved! After the completion of the Jiaoyan Line Railway, the La Plata Star train can transport more than 100 tons of various materials from Yantai to Jiaozhou in two days, which can be described as fast! And this kind of railway transportation, which is not greatly affected by bad weather, can be carried by strong winds, heavy rain, and heavy snow - well, this is a bit bragging, and the same is not good if the snow is too heavy - I don't know how much stronger the adaptability is compared to other modes of transportation!

Therefore, after the opening of the Jiaoyan Line Railway, the horse-drawn carriage merchants, mule and horse teams that run long-distance transportation between the two places have basically begun to fade out of people's sight, and have been replaced by many short-distance transportation undertakings that are active between the railway station and other towns. That is, these people wait at the railway station on weekdays, and as soon as the train is unloaded, they will rush up to transport the unloaded materials to other villages and towns far away from the railway line, and at the same time, they will also transport the goods of these villages and towns to the railway station and sell them to the business owners located there, so as to earn some profit margins.

There is no doubt that this is the old business model that has been changed by modern new technologies. Before the construction of the Jiaoyan Line Railway, let alone Denglai, in the whole land of China, how could there have been such a transportation mode with extremely fast transportation speed, strong transportation capacity, and low due to natural factors? No! This is the power of modernization and industrialization, and an agrarian society cannot exist! Therefore, when the railway is a transportation artifact roaring and roaring in the land of Denglai to transport materials, the traditional transportation industry practitioners have been crushed, and have to find other ways to survive and avoid competition with the railway, because there is no chance of winning. So you can see that they are scattered along the railway, acting as a liaison between the distant villages and the station, and enhancing the radiation capacity of the Jiaoyan line railway in disguise, which is the choice of the market and a sign of the progress of social productivity.

Of course, the counties along the Jiaoyan Railway have been changed, but what are these transportation practitioners? You must know that under the uninterrupted influence and propaganda of the East Coast people for many years, even some traditional social elites in the land of Denglai have been changed to the slightest extent. For example, at this moment in Jimo County, a city governed by Chen Quanzhong, a servant general, some of the few remaining traditional knowledge elements gradually changed their minds and opened many so-called new-style schools.

On a bustling street behind the railway station in Jimo County, there is a school that is said to have been built with donations from large local families, called "Qiuxin Academy", with about sixty or seventy students. The founder of this school was originally a famous gentry in Jimo County, a family of poetry and books, and it was one of the few gentry families who survived the catastrophe in Denglai Erfu. The head of his family is fifty-two this year, known as Li Yuanwai, and even served as Chen Quanzhong's staff a few years ago, and his reputation in the county is not low.

Such an intellectual, who can be called a model of traditional reading, to be honest, originally did not have a very good impression of the East Coast. It is seen that he served Chen Quanzhong back then and was a member of the East Coast camp, but as the East Coast people continued to rampage on the land of China, fighting and killing, his national self-esteem was also traumatized to a certain extent. And when this trauma began to ferment slowly, Li Yuanwai, who knew that he could not turn the situation around on his own, began to let go of many prejudices and began to introspect mentally.

After introspecting for a period of time, this Li Yuanwai made up his mind to open a new academy in Jimo County, and selected "Yingwu children" under the age of 15 inside and outside the county to study classics, history, arithmetic, geography and other courses. He believes that the people of the East Coast are too far ahead in material and technological aspects, and they need to "learn from others", but the Confucian classics cannot be abandoned, so it is still relatively difficult for the students in the new academy to learn both traditional classics and history, as well as various so-called new studies.

Li Yuanwai insisted that China wanted to compete with the East Coast - this monarch is a member of the East Coast camp, but the ass is crooked to the Chinese side, and one has to sigh how much hostility the East Coast people who do not respect famous religions and do not study the classics in Chinese mainland - "It is not just buying arms and guns, it is stronger to learn from China and learn from the East Kingdom." This sentence is exactly the same as the idea of "middle school for the body, and Eastern learning for use" advocated by many enlightened gentry in the Qing and Shun countries, indicating that Li Yuanwai and those people were all the way, although he once served as an official in the East Coast Servant Army.

There are still many people like Li Yuanwai in the control area on the east coast, especially in the southern Ningshao Prefecture. Because of the small destruction since the end of the Ming Dynasty, the gentry of Ningbo Prefecture have retained a lot, and there are many traditional literati. Some of them abandoned traditional Confucianism under the influence of the East Coasters, while others continued to adhere to the traditional classics, at most making minor improvements to adapt to social changes. Of course, the largest number of people are still cooperating with the East Coast on the surface, and there are still people with an inexplicable sense of superiority secretly, although in recent years there have been many fewer of them.

Locally, including in neighboring Qing-controlled areas, some gentry took up employment and opened so-called new-style schools, seeking ways to improve the traditional Confucian classics in the face of drastic social change. Under the banner of "cultivating talents for the imperial court", they rectified and reformed the former academy and began a difficult process of exploration.

Of course, the East Coast government is also very appreciative of such private self-funded schools, and has allocated some subsidies so that these people will not lose too much. After all, no matter what their original intention was to run the school, their behavior objectively refreshed the social atmosphere, further cleansed the traditional feudal etiquette and religion remaining in the society, and together with the many schools invested by the government, they constituted an education system that matched the huge industrial construction. This is especially important in the face of the increasingly booming industrial and commercial situation in the Far Eastern San Francisco — well, the Blackwater Pioneer Squadron is more military, and it seems that it can be removed, everything there is government-funded. After all, the development of the industry also requires a large number of talents, although the quality of the talents educated in these schools is much worse than that of the government-run schools because of the narrow scope of knowledge they have learned, but at least they are also people who have a certain amount of new knowledge, and this is enough.

In addition, in order to improve the overall level of social productivity and create more wealth, the East Coast government also encourages people with the conditions in the private sector to set up professional schools on their own, so as to quickly train more talents. For example, there is another school in Jimo County, called "Liu Laogen Agricultural School", which is funded by the government for school buildings, teaching aids and other miscellaneous expenses, and Liu Laogen, an experienced old farmer, teaches for a fee, imparting tips and knowledge about the field, which is still very helpful for improving the overall level of farming.

There are also such special schools in the area under the jurisdiction of the Southern Pioneer Team, such as the sericulture school, the tea school (and even the strange dialect school...... School buildings, teaching aids, and miscellaneous fees are borne by the government, teachers are experienced in the industry, and students are mostly practitioners. Although the public teaching of the so-called "unique skills" of one's own self-mastery is inconsistent with traditional Chinese perception, and there is great resistance, under the strong promotion of the government and heavy financial incentives, there will always be people who will teach this kind of knowledge. Even if the level of the lecturers is not the top at the beginning, under the stimulation of generous tuition income, teaching bonuses (government subsidies) and huge social status improvement, there will always be top talents who can't hold back and take the stage to teach, which is undoubtedly immediate to promote the level of social productivity.

All kinds of schools have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, or public, or private, or public-private partnerships, all of which have greatly promoted the development of society, and served the gradual start and accelerated industrialization and modernization of the Far Eastern Clan, as the so-called slogan painted on the outer wall of the Jimo County Railway Station said, "Agronomy is the foundation of all industries, engineering is the door of all learning, mathematics is the root of manufacturing, and business is about the great plan of prosperity and strength", which is indeed true: the vigorous development of agriculture, industry, and commerce requires a large number of talents. The government cannot do this alone. You must know that the Far Eastern feudatories are not fully functional governments, at best they are emasculated colonial governments, and they also undertake major tasks including military defense, intervening in the situation, collecting immigrants, etc., and they will definitely not be able to absorb private capital, talents, and technology.

Compared with the control area on the east coast, the behavior of other forces in Chinese mainland at this time is much worse. Taking Shunguo as an example, although the country's handicraft industry has developed relatively smoothly in recent years, the government's military expenditure is huge, and it is impossible to come up with money to do anything else, let alone not have much of this awareness. And what about the folk? At present, the ideological debate has not been clarified, so wait slowly. In Huguang, Jiangxi, Sichuan and other places, there are too many traditional literati, and even if the East Coast government is thrown over, I am afraid that they will have to flee in the wilderness and have no power to reform. The late Qing Dynasty suffered from changes unprecedented in two thousand years, and under the tremendous pressure of the destruction of the country and the extinction of the species, it took a hundred years to do the painful transformation that touched the soul realm, not to mention Chinese mainland today, I am afraid that it will take the same or even longer time, you must know that the intellectuals in the late Ming Dynasty were also very degenerate, such as Li Xian, Gu Yanwu and others who were criticized and criticized by Shilin can be seen.

Compared with Shunguo, the so-called new policy of the Qing State was more forced by military pressure, so it was fully biased towards the field of military industry, and most of the schools opened were also related to this, only some schools run by the so-called enlightened gentry in the local area had some other content, but on the whole it was not a climate. It can be seen from this that the gentry of the land of China have not yet felt enough pain to touch the soul, and without this pain, who will have enough to support and change the current order in which everyone can obtain great benefits? It's simply impossible!

Some other small princes, such as the Li family in Guangdong, the Zheng family in Fujian, the Lu King in southern Zhejiang and the Southern Ming Dynasty, on the whole are not as good as the Qing and Shun countries, and there are not many new-style schools, except for a ship school opened by the Zheng family in Quanzhou and a language school opened in Fuzhou, the others have no awareness of this, and there may be some training institutions for training special talents such as officers and craftsmen, but most of them are not systematic, and most of them are temporary, and the actual effect is not very good.

Of course, all of this is understandable, and these regimes are either under great military pressure or warlords separating the regimes, and it is indeed too demanding to invest in the education sector on a large scale. As far as the Qing and Shun countries are concerned, they are still fighting wars of a certain scale in Jiangxi, Hubei, Sichuan and other places, and the consumption is so great, and the number of soldiers killed and wounded and the materials used up every day is an astonishing number. It is almost inevitable that a large amount of resources will be invested in education and other areas of people's livelihood until the war is completely subsided.