The teams recruited enough refugees and began to march along the Eurasian Railway.

They would take the train at the station along the way and be transferred to Gaochang Station. They would walk more than 300 miles from where they would go to Tingzhou to settle.

Now Tingzhou has been renamed Dihua Mansion. Fucheng is Dihua City.

Half a month later, Mi Dashan and his family of eight followed the craftsman team to a station in northwest of Tianjin.

One thousand families gathered in chaos on the open space outside the station.

They have both hope for the future and fear of the unknown world. I heard that it was the territory of Moxi Mongolia, but they were recently conquered by Dingyuan Hou.

These craftsmen enjoyed special preferential treatment along the way.

Before returning, among the thousand refugees, those with craftsmanship would be picked out separately, and they would be treated as two pieces of cake. In the morning, there was a bowl of porridge made from Chen Dami.

Many small cities were built on Yang Fan's new territory as nodes that control the vast territory.

Every small town needs handicraftsmen. Whether it is a carpenter, stonemason, bricklayer, doctor, cobbler, basket and basket weaving, any necessities must be produced by anyone.

The railway task now is to serve the war first, and the second is to transport refugees to the northwest. The car ships are full. Judging from the popularity, it is estimated that the railway will recover the cost within five years.

Affected by the positive annual report, Eurasia Railway stocks have risen sharply this year.

Now the transfer of refugees is a regular job in the Yang Mansion.

The refugees mainly go to three directions.

The first is to go out to sea from Beitangkou Wharf, get off the boat at Vladivostok Port, and go to Sanjiang Plain and Songnen Plain to settle down. They mainly plant rice, sorghum, corn, beets, and some of them also work as lumberjacks and miners. The miners mainly use gold rushes, and there is a lot of sand gold in the northeast.

The second is to go to the Mongolian area in the south and north of the desert to live with herdsmen. They are responsible for reclaiming small plots of land and growing vegetables and grain in areas with agricultural conditions within the abstinence team.

The third is to transfer to the Western Regions through the Eurasian Railway. With Yang Fan's continuous western expedition, they will also be distributed within a hundred miles on both sides of the railway.

They will be allocated land and established towns. Han immigrants will change the local population composition and will also play the important task of protecting the railway. Han people will isolate them from the vicinity of the railway to prevent local people from destroying the railway.

Yang Fan frantically looked for gold mines and organized people to mine them. He has accumulated another 5,000 tons of gold in recent years.

He offered a terrifying price comparison of 10 to 1, and exchanged the cheap industrial silver he sent for gold in this world.

Capital is profit-seeking. With such an astonishing proportion, European gold is now rushing towards the Ming Dynasty.

Yang Fan's exchange ratio completely disrupted the trade order since the beginning of the Age of Discovery. In the past, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and the English in India all used the entire ship of silver to exchange for gold for the Ming and Japan.

At that time, the exchange rate of the Ming Dynasty was six to seven to one. Japan was even lower, only four to five to one. Westerners used 7:5 or even eight to one to exchange. At that time, gold was outflowing in large quantities, so Qianlong was very confused. Why did the Han emperors have so much gold when they read historical books, and it was so difficult for him to get some gold.

Now, Yang Fan directly offered the price to 10 to 1, which led to a backflow of gold.

There has been a golden shortage in Europe.

Their gold standard is basically out of reach, because gold is rushing towards the Ming Dynasty.

Especially in the past two years, Western sea ships have begun to trade in Luzon.

The Luzon Palace replaced Quanzhou and Guangzhou, and Macau became a new east-west trade hub.

With the development of the Port of Manila and becoming a new overseas trade base, a large number of industrial products from the new city poured into Luzon Palace. Re-export trade was conducted in Manila.

Yang Fan found from the report that the product purchased by Westerners was actually iron nails.

He was shocked when he checked the history. This little thing actually had such a big demand and profit.

At this time in the West, iron nails can be paid directly as currency.

Whenever a merchant ship returned from the Ming Dynasty docked, countless merchants would come up to buy nails.

Iron nails will be auctioned directly on the dock by boxes. There is no need to ship them out of the dock for sale at all.

In Western history, iron nails were handmade by professional nailers. When making them, workers first processed the red-hot iron blocks into slender iron rods, and then the nailers used hammers to process them into nails. The process was very responsible and wasted time.

This method of artificial nail making is extremely costly and the price of iron nails remains high.

This situation continued until the end of the 16th century, and the cutters only improved when they appeared in Britain.

For hundreds of years, Britain, which had a slitting machine, was the largest producer of iron nails in the world.

The cunning British exported iron nails as trade weapons and means of sanctions.

In modern times, Britain was once the starting point of the world's nail travel.

During the War of Independence and for some time afterwards, the United States faced serious nail shortages.

For this reason, there have even been records of burning houses for recycling nails in many places in the United States.

The British nail blockade inspired the Americans' independence spirit and patriotism. They began to invest in nail factories, which triggered changes in the world's main production areas.

Why do they have such a strong demand for nails?

Because the Europeans did not invent the mortise and tenon structure, their houses and various wooden buildings, even carriages and ships, needed a large number of iron nails.

In the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, iron nails were hard currency, and like later generations of oil, they could be used for international payments.

From the perspective of the development of human civilization, although the nails are small, they have huge effects.

Without nails, humans could not complete the invention of wheels, and they also missed the ability to move quickly and long distances because they could not nail horseshoes, and could not make the building taller, bigger and more beautiful.

Regarding the role of nails in history, Daniel E. Cice, a professor of socioeconomics at Wellesley College in the United States, pointed out in his article "Nail Prices Since 1695: A Window to Insight into Economic Changes":

In 1810, nail consumption in the United States accounted for 0.4% of the total GDP that year, which is equivalent to the spending of American residents on electronic products and air travel in 2019.

This shows that 200 years ago, nails were very important in people's lives.

Yang Fan naturally would not miss this opportunity to suck blood in Europe.

There is a saying in the Ming Dynasty that iron should not be made. Yang Fan used metal scraps to make nails, and the cost was an outrageously low.

Moreover, it has a large amount of stamping equipment powered by hydraulic and steam engines, which can produce a large number of nails. After the scale is increased, the cost is greatly reduced.

He not only produces iron nails, but also steel nails.

The complete range of product categories and specifications are basically the same as those in later generations. No matter where you use them, you can find the right nails.
Chapter completed!