The first thousand two hundred and ninety-four chapters of the large-scale Hongze Lake project
It is the tenth day of the first lunar month in the 16th year of Xuanping. This time is in the period when spring and Lantern Festival are connected with each other. Many places are still immersed in the festive atmosphere.
The Spring Festival atmosphere in Jinling City has not ended yet. Both the government and merchants have begun to build momentum for the Lantern Festival.
Several places in the city have begun to build Lantern Festival temple fairs. A large number of lanterns of different shapes have been prepared and hung up one by one to create the atmosphere of the Lantern Festival in advance.
Merchants took the opportunity to launch various promotional activities in order to get off to a good start.
But on the embankment of Hongze Lake, there is no Lantern Festival atmosphere at all!
In order to hurry up and complete some key projects before the flood season comes, what kind of holidays are there on the Hongze Lake embankment!
Many officials in charge of the project, whether for the sake of showing off or because they really care about people's livelihood, stayed at the construction site for food and accommodation, and the large number of civilian laborers recruited were also busy every day.
Among the Hongze Lake expansion projects, the most critical project is naturally the Hongze Lake embankment.
According to the Royal Institute of Technology's plan, if it is to meet the ideal standards, a 70-kilometer-long embankment must be built.
The height of this embankment varies from three to ten meters depending on the terrain. The minimum width at the bottom of the dam is more than fifty meters, while the widest one can reach more than two hundred meters. The top width is ten meters.
It varies from 1 to 30 meters.
And in order to improve the flood resistance, this levee cannot be the previous civil levee, but must be a structure combining stone strips and reinforced concrete.
Of course, it is also possible to use a pure stone dam, but the construction period will be longer and the cost will be almost raised to the point where even the Tang Empire cannot afford it.
The large-scale use of concrete with cement, gravel, and steel as the main raw materials is to speed up the construction period and reduce costs.
Even though the cost of cement is high, it is not as high as the cost of huge stone bars!
There is no doubt that this project will be a huge one, requiring a huge number of manpower and funds, and more importantly, the construction period will be very long.
According to the plan, it will take roughly five years to complete all construction!
At the same time, certain sections of the levee were built successively depending on the degree of emergency. Starting last fall, the levee, which is expected to be completed by this summer, was divided into eight different locations with different lengths. The longest section was four kilometers long.
, and the total length of the eight sections of the embankment reaches 14.6 kilometers.
These eight sections are all levees that were in danger last year and have relatively poor flood resistance and need to be built first. The other levees can barely be used now, so their construction has been postponed to the next few years.
The entire Hongze Lake Embankment, to a certain extent, is actually a project that directly blocks the Huaihe River in the middle. It is believed to intercept the river water, control the water output, and thereby protect the downstream areas.
When the Hongze Lake embankment was being built, the relocation work in the surrounding areas of Hongze Lake was also continuing. Because the relocation had already been carried out when the flood occurred last year, the relocation work was relatively easy.
What needs to be relocated now are some areas that are newly planned to serve as reservoirs and included in part of Hongze Lake. The people in the area can be relocated in advance to avoid having to wait until the summer flood season comes and have to relocate in a panic.
Cause big trouble.
The official organizational capabilities of the Tang Empire are quite good. The relocation work during the flood last year was even larger, but there was no trouble. Now it is only a small-scale relocation, so there are naturally no new problems.
As for where will the newly relocated people move?
A considerable number of them migrated to Huguang and Huguang provinces, while only a few remained in Jiangbei and Northern Anhui.
These two places have been flooded year after year. With their large populations and limited arable land resources, it is impossible to forcefully relocate hundreds of thousands of people.
So I simply moved to Huguang.
Now the empire is vigorously developing the two provinces of Huguang and Huguang. These two provinces have a large amount of land waiting to be developed. They have been absorbing immigrants from surrounding provinces over the years.
According to the empire's plan, within the next ten years, the development of Huguang and Huguang provinces will see initial results. Their grain output has increased significantly, and grain has begun to be exported to surrounding areas.
According to the predictions of the Ministry of Agriculture, in ten years, the population and arable land level of the Huguang area will increase significantly. Eventually, its grain output will increase significantly, and it will become the new granary of the empire. Its importance will not be at all
Jiangnan!
The empire's population migration to various provinces in the country, that is, internal immigration, has never stopped. The basic principle is to move people from areas with more people and less land to areas with less people and more land.
The main areas of migration are concentrated in Jiangbei, Wanbei, Henan, Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi. In addition, parts of Jiangxi, Jiangnan, and Zhejiang are also places of population migration.
The main places of population migration are Hunan, Hubei, Guangxi, Guangdong, Liaoxi, Liaodong, Northeast, and Northwest.
Among them, generally some people from Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi moved to Liaoxi, Liaodong, and Northeast China. In addition to developing the Northeast region, they also considered enriching the population in the border areas.
Some people from Jiangxi, Wanbei, Jiangbei, and Henan mainly go to Huguang, naturally for the purpose of developing Huguang.
There are also many small-scale migrations in other areas. The immigrants are mainly concentrated in some developable areas with good terrain, or they are colonizing and guarding borders for military needs.
For example, the Pearl River Delta Plain in Guangdong and several small plains in Guangxi are all designed to develop local agricultural resources and increase food production.
As for the immigrants from Yunnan, Sichuan, neighboring Tibetan areas, northwest Gansu, northeast, Korea Peninsula and other regions, they were mostly driven by local governance and military needs.
In addition, there is the migration of rural people to cities. This kind of thing mainly happens in new industrial cities represented by Shanghai. The rural labor force goes to work in the city to make money, and the factories in the city need more labor force. This combination of
Next, there was a phenomenon of rural population transferring to cities.
However, it is worth noting that this transfer is temporary and not fixed. After the rural population goes to the city, a considerable part of them will still return to rural areas.
This uncertainty is greatly affected by the economy. If the economy is good and there are more job opportunities, more people will stay. If the economy is bad and job opportunities are gone, people will leave.
There are not many problems with the population migration in Hongze Lake. The government has provided generous compensation packages to the immigrants. There is no shortage of land, houses, farming tools and cash subsidies, so most people are still willing to follow the government's footsteps.
Make a move to a new place and start a new life.
Of course, there are many people who are unwilling to leave their hometown, but no matter how deep their feelings for their hometown are, they are not worth a bullet!
The relocation project in the Hongze Lake area is a policy project. Regardless of whether the local people agree or disagree, it cannot stop the empire's intention to expand the capacity of Hongze Lake. If you are willing to go the best way, if you are not willing to go, just arrest people.
, resist and be shot on the spot!
The Tang Empire was, after all, a highly centralized feudal dynasty, and it did not have too many scruples in doing things.
The same thing actually happened during the construction of the Hongze Lake embankment. The construction of the Hongze Lake embankment is a huge project. The number of workers needed this year alone is more than 50,000, and these are workers who work directly.
There are at least hundreds of thousands of people behind the scenes providing indirect services for this project.
For example, in addition to installing the stone strips on the embankment, the stone strips also need to be collected, polished, and transported. All of these require people to do it.
In order to reduce costs, it is impossible for the empire to adopt the employment model. That would cost too much money and the empire's finances would not be able to support it.
Therefore, the source of workers mainly relies on conscription!
The government recruited laborers from surrounding areas and then went to work. Of course, in order to avoid large-scale resistance by the people, this recruitment was conditional.
First, eat for free!
Secondly, subsidies will be issued!
Again, rotation and time limit
Needless to say, food was included. After all, the Tang Empire was a normal dynasty. It could not be like some extremely cruel dynasties that forced the people to do corvee labor and required the people to bring their own food rations.
As for subsidies, they are actually wages, but the amount of this subsidy is relatively small.
Finally, this kind of compulsory recruitment is rotational and time-limited. It is drawn according to the pattern of drawing one out of three. You can go home after serving the corvee for three months. Of course, if you have money, you can also directly pay the money to be exempted from the corvee.
This money is naturally relatively expensive, because for the shortage of people, the government needs to hire others to fill the gap.
Even if the corvee method is used, with only a small amount of subsidies, food and accommodation, the cost is still very huge. Tens of thousands of people work on the embankment, and there are more than 100,000 people working indirectly behind. The personnel expenses alone are a huge amount.
Incomparable numbers.
Not to mention, the cost of materials is also very huge!
The cost of stone strips is very high, and the number of stone strips required for a levee is a very huge number.
Even if concrete is used to reduce costs, because the output of cement is limited, and more importantly, the quality of cement these days is still relatively average, it is actually not enough to face the perennial floods. Therefore, the concrete at this time,
Most of them are used in some non-important parts. On the side directly facing the lake, large areas of concrete are basically not used, but stone strips are used.
If it weren't for such a high cost, the empire would not have spent more than three million yuan on just the first batch of funds.
In order to meet the construction deadline, the Hongze Lake embankment is under construction during the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival, and flood control projects in other places are no exception.
Although the scale is not comparable to that of the Hongze Lake embankment project, it is still very important. Urgent reinforcement projects have been launched in some dangerous sections of the Yellow River and Huaihe River basins.
Cement is also used on a large scale in these projects!
A large number of domestic water conservancy projects use cement, which makes the empire's cement industry truly usher in the spring of large-scale development!
Not to mention areas with heavy industrial bases such as Shanghai and Dangtu, even in places like Xuzhou and Huai'an that were originally industrial barbaric areas, large cement plants are rising from the ground!