Chapter 387 - The Quarantine Zone

It seems that without infiltrating their ranks, there is no opportunity to strike. Li Siya pondered this question on the boat back to Beigang. What she had seen and heard today further strengthened her resolve to send people to infiltrate the Australians.

Unfortunately, the most suitable candidate, her foster sister, had already revealed herself as a merchant. She herself was also unsuitable. Although she seemed to be the type of woman the Australians would favor, she had shown her face to that Manager Wen. To mix into the Yuanlao circle would be to walk into a trap.

After much thought, she made two decisions: First, to have her foster sister formally defect to the Australians and become a “person within the system.” With her sailing skills and familiarity with the Indian sea routes, the Australian Navy and Colonial Department had always held her in high regard. Her foster sister had once said that the Australians were recruiting sailors all along the coasts of Guangdong and Fujian, and had also expressed interest in recruiting her on several occasions. If she proposed to join the Australians, she could most likely get a position in the navy—at least a captain. This way, she would not just be a business partner limited to trading with the Australians, but a naturalized citizen who could freely enter and exit many areas forbidden to outsiders. In particular, being able to integrate into the naval community would surely allow her to grasp more secrets.

Second, to immediately select a suitable young girl from her own ranks to infiltrate the Yuanlao circle as a maid. She had had this idea before, and now she was even more convinced of it. If that failed, she would have to send someone to infiltrate the naturalized citizens and get as close to the Australians as possible. This was not only to complete the current mission but also for long-term planning.

If necessary, it would be acceptable to sacrifice Zheng Zhilong’s plan to ensure that her own people could gain the trust of the Australians.

Although this would negatively affect her credibility, the Australians were quickly becoming, or perhaps already were, the greatest power on the East Asian seas. She knew very well which was more important.

The secret of the “Proof of the Seven Seas’ Conqueror” was becoming increasingly out of reach as the Australians’ power consolidated. If she couldn’t drive a wedge among them in time, she would have no chance in the future.

“What are your next steps?” Guo Huaiyi asked her when she returned to Beigang.

“Get me a ship. I need to go back to Anping first!” Li Siya said.

Li Siya met with Zheng Zhifeng in Anping. She roughly outlined her plan and asked Zheng Zhifeng to arrange for a few capable men to be at her disposal.

“I will send people to contact them. Just tell them to wait for orders in Quanzhou.”

After a heavy rain, a considerable section of the road to the port was washed out. The workers were laboriously clearing it up, chanting as they pushed cart after cart of coal cinders to fill the road.

Due to the damaged road and the rain, traffic from the port to Kaohsiung city was once again cut off.

Hong Laojun pushed his straw hat back and suddenly shouted at a labor team leader who was leading people to fill the roadbed. Then he directed the use of large stone rollers pulled by horses to compact the newly paved road surface.

As the head of the project team sent here by the Lingao Construction Company, Hong Laojun and his subordinate Shi Dafu were busy from morning till night.

The infrastructure work in Kaohsiung City was basically their project team’s responsibility. During this period, the Lingao Construction Company also sent some Yuanlao on temporary business trips to handle more specialized work, but the permanent residents were just the two of them.

Now that the main urban area, the batteries, and the port were mostly completed, besides the daily minor repairs, the project team’s biggest project was now water conservancy.

The so-called water conservancy project included not only the canal irrigation facilities for the state-owned farms developed by the Tainan corps but also the functions of preventing seawater intrusion and soil drainage.

Although the Tainan Plain had excellent conditions for agricultural development, it also had many shortcomings.

First, the soil here was relatively sandy. Every summer and autumn was the period of concentrated rainfall, which often caused small-scale flash floods and river overflows, frequently resulting in “mountain water rushing down, washing into gullies and ravines, and accumulating flowing sand, turning fertile fields into wasteland.” Therefore, it was necessary to build reservoirs, deepen riverbeds, and construct canals to contain and drain the rainwater. Secondly, this place was backed by mountains and faced the sea. Without dikes to protect the coast, the seawater would surge in when the sea wind was slightly stronger, causing the land to be inundated with salt and the soil to become severely salinized. Although there was more rainfall here and the land could be replanted after being flushed with freshwater, it had to lie fallow for several years. After the Japanese occupied Taiwan, Hatta Yoichi spent a great deal of effort to build water conservancy projects in Tainan, which finally solved the problem of soil salinization along the coast of Tainan.

After the project team’s municipal and port projects were roughly completed, and they began to enter the water conservancy construction phase, Wei Bachi specifically talked to Hong Laojun and Shi Dafu, asking them to fully implement the “Tainan Plain Water Conservancy Construction Outline” in the next step.

This outline was compiled by Wei Bachi and was quite grand in scale. After reading it, Hong Laojun and Shi Dafu felt that the scope was a bit too large—Wei Bachi had actually compiled this outline based on the water conservancy projects of the Japanese occupation era.

Hong Laojun checked the data on the Tainan water conservancy project carried out by Hatta Yoichi in the old world and felt that the cost of the coastal embankment project was too high at this stage. Although Wei Bachi said that the labor supply was not a problem, the materials were far from sufficient. Therefore, the water conservancy project implementation plan he formally submitted to the Planning Commission was limited to the supporting irrigation and drainage channels and sluices for the state-owned farms.

Even with the reduced target, the progress of the water conservancy project was still slow. The channels and sluices had to be built on leveled land, which depended on the speed of land reclamation. Although the difficulty of reclaiming land in the Tainan Plain was not very high, it was still virgin land. Relying entirely on manual labor was not efficient, and the various insects, snakes, and malaria in the grasslands caused great difficulties for land reclamation and construction.

During the winter when the vegetation was relatively dry, the Tainan corps had carried out several large-scale slash-and-burn operations to drive away poisonous insects, wild animals, and insects. Subsequently, starting from Kaohsiung City, they began to reclaim land in a circular pattern. This land reclamation operation was not just for agriculture, but more to establish a “hygienic quarantine zone.”

To minimize the loss of refugees, a slave route was specially opened from Sanya. Due to the continuous influx of slaves from Quark, there was no shortage of slaves in Tiandu; in fact, there was a slight surplus.

Under the supervision of the militia of the agricultural reclamation corps and the Li and Miao mercenaries, the slaves, jointly commanded by people from the construction company and the Agricultural Committee, advanced meter by meter on the slash-and-burned land. Wei Bachi gave them enough tools—although he didn’t care about the mortality rate of the slaves, consumption without tools was meaningless.

Puddles, small ponds, slow-flowing ditches, low-lying areas… all were filled in. The remaining grass and trees after the slash-and-burn were dug out and burned a second time. All animals were killed, and holes were filled. In some low-lying wetlands with dense vegetation by the river that were difficult to burn, soil was transported by hand for direct landfilling, and the rivers were channelized.

This work was of course severely damaging to the environment, and the personnel losses due to malaria infection, attacks by wild animals and poisonous snakes, and physical exhaustion during the implementation were also quite heavy—every day, dozens of slave corpses were thrown into the sea.

Relying on this violent method and the extensive use of screen windows, mosquito nets, and other defensive measures, the malaria infection and snake and insect bite rates in the entire Kaohsiung refugee camp were reduced to a tolerable level.

Only after this quarantine zone was established did the land reclamation work formally begin. In the hot and humid conditions of Tainan, if the wasteland was not immediately developed into farmland, weeds and miscellaneous trees would quickly reclaim the lost land during the rainy season—not to mention that the destructive effect of summer rain on the bare ground would be even greater. Land preparation and water conservancy projects had to be carried out at the fastest possible speed.

Today it was Shi Dafu’s turn to go “reclaim land.” Hong Laojun was good at organizing large-scale infrastructure construction, so he was mostly in charge of the water conservancy work. Today was considered a “rest” day, and he was transferred to the urban area to do some minor repairs.

Hong Laojun’s “rest” was actually no different from not resting. He was constantly shouting and scolding, and from time to time he had to personally guide the work of the construction foremen. Building bridges and repairing roads was a skilled job. Inexperienced workers couldn’t do it right. In fact, even the “backbone” workers transferred from Lingao were not very skilled in Hong Laojun’s eyes; they were just the best of a bad bunch.

There were a dozen or so sections of the road that had been washed out by the rain. In the old world, with the same number of workers and sufficient materials, he could have repaired them all within two hours using only manual labor, without construction machinery. But here, they had been repairing since seven in the morning, and now at three in the afternoon, there were still the last ten meters of road surface to be paved.

A flatbed cart loaded like a small mountain slowly pushed forward with the workers’ chants. The transport vehicles that had been queuing up on the road since morning were called back by the dispatch office as the road was about to be repaired.

Hong Laojun looked at the few meters of road that had not yet been repaired, called over the construction foremen, and told them to urge the workers to work harder and get the road open in the shortest possible time.

A light railway still needs to be built, Hong Laojun thought, looking at the vehicles queuing up on the road. Even if it costs more manpower and material resources, the traffic efficiency is not comparable to this kind of simple road.

After standing on the construction site all day, pointing and shouting, his energy was exhausted by the heat and noise. Hong Laojun listlessly sat back in his rocking chair under the sunshade, fanning himself. His life secretary brought him iced lemonade. He drank a few sips, yawned, and urged weakly while rocking the chair, “Hurry up… hurry up…”

“Bang! Bang! Bang!…” A burst of cannon fire suddenly erupted from the port, startling Hong Laojun so much that he almost fell out of his rocking chair. “What’s going on! Where’s the firing!” he shouted while quickly drawing his pistol from his waist.