Chapter 38

  On the morning of September 12, when Yan Fu's messenger arrived at the workshop, Chen Ke was preparing to go out. The purpose of Yan Fu's messenger was to ask Chen Ke when he had time, and he wanted to talk to Chen Ke about the matter of jointly running a pharmaceutical factory with officials and civilians. Chen Ke politely told the visitor that he was busy today. He had to go to the hospital construction site and would be there all day. If they were going to discuss something, Chen Ke would visit Mr. Yan Fu in three days. The messenger looked somewhat surprised at this reply, but didn't say much and left directly.

  To be honest, Chen Ke didn't really think Yan Fu could settle the pharmaceutical factory's affairs in a short period of time. Given the efficiency of the Qing dynasty's bureaucratic system, Chen Ke thought that if this matter could have some progress within two months, it would already be quite remarkable.

  On September 11, You Yun had asked Chen Ke while making the drug production plan, "If this pharmaceutical factory really starts up, what should we do?" Chen Ke's response was brief and to the point, "We need to do well until 1917, when this pharmaceutical factory has not yet made preparations for production." You Yun couldn't understand Chen Ke's joke, so Chen Ke had to explain, "In 1917, I'm afraid the headquarters will have already moved to Anhui. At that time, you won't even know if you'll be following the headquarters to move to Anhui or not. Don't worry about these things for now."

  According to the plan, on September 12th, all members of Huangpu Book Club will undergo expansion training. Therefore, on the 11th, Chen Ke conducted a simple physical fitness test. At least, that's what it seemed like on the surface. The fitness test consisted of three items: 30-meter back-and-forth run, standing long jump, and shot put.

  Young people all like the excitement, especially this kind of sports event. Those wearing cheongsam and those wearing suits all participated. Cheers, applause, and discussions filled the air, it was truly a lively scene. Everyone took part in the physical test, and those who didn't do well surrounded the judges demanding a retest. It was indeed a joyful atmosphere filled with laughter.

  Chen Ke was very satisfied with the scene, but not optimistic about the result. The members of Huangpu Book Club were not particularly fond of sports. By 21st-century standards, only half of them met the requirements. Chen Ke thought these people were completely unsuitable for the original expansion plan. So the venue for the expansion training was changed to a construction site.

  The name list has been completed. One of the main purposes of conducting physical fitness testing is to improve the collection of personal data. This is also part of a social survey. If you do social surveys and don't even have your own people's information, it's not just a joke, it's a shame.

  After seeing off Yan Fu's envoy, Chen Ke led a group of young people to set out. Zhou Yuanxiao's workshop is at the end of Nanjing Road. It belongs to "old architecture". As for the history of this large workshop, Zhou Yuanxiao has never mentioned it. Chen Ke's nominal Shanghai Renxin Hospital is located at the end of Sichuan Road.

  Chen Ke's hometown had no wooden buildings. As a child, he lived in the factory dormitory area. They were all red brick or green brick walls, cement floors, and red tile roofs. As he grew older, he lived in red brick apartment buildings. Later on, they were reinforced concrete with exterior walls coated with green pebbles, and new apartment buildings with floor tiles inside. When he set up his own household, it was a house in the residential area. It's even more impossible to have any wooden parts. Even the handrails of the stairs were electroplated metal.

  From a young age, apart from wooden beams, he had hardly seen a few wooden pillars. Shanghai in 1905 gave Chen Ke the feeling that, apart from being more crowded, it was not much different from a county town in the 80s. The wooden buildings on both sides were still somewhat flavorful.

  The streets are mostly gravel roads, with many people. There is no green belt. The commercial district has a row of two-story buildings along the street, all identical, with brick walls, wooden doors and windows. Chen Ke thought that what was most special about these buildings was that they each had a small balcony on one side facing the street, surrounded by a wooden railing. Most of the wooden parts of these buildings were painted red, which actually looked quite lively.

  Most of the vehicles parked on both sides of the street were carts and rickshaws. There were many vehicles, apart from those that had already been pulled away, the carters rarely moved, they just casually stopped at places where they thought they could pull in customers, as a result, a considerable part of the road was blocked. Shanghai is the largest commercial city in the Far East, and the transportation industry is naturally quite developed.

  The carters wore coarse linen jackets and trousers, with a thick belt around their waists that also served as a money bag. Their skin was darkened by the sun, and although their bare arms were muscular and had large joints, they lacked the fat layer of modern people, with dull skin tone and lack of luster. The excessive extraction of physical labor and insufficient meat food made the veins on their arms bulge, giving off a very dry feeling to the skin.

  Chen Ke had deliberately dressed in accordance with the requirements, and the group of young people he led were obviously much whiter, with smoother skin. Especially Chen Ke himself, in modern cities, it was rare to see someone walking around bare-chested and wearing only shorts. Chen Ke had even gotten used to wearing long sleeves and pants all year round. It was the same when he returned to this era. Plus, after he came back, he spent his days dyeing cloth, making medicine, and giving lectures, always wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants. Today, he wore short sleeves, finally revealing his robust arms. However, compared to the skin of these laborers, his looked pale and tender. This made Chen Ke feel a sense of inferiority. He was also supposed to be leading a socialist revolution, but as someone so pale and weak, could the people believe in him?

  A group of people acted together, everyone on the road was talking and laughing, the carters would not misunderstand, and no one came to pull business. Chen Ke wanted to take a closer look at the surrounding environment, but Mao Ping, a Chinese overseas student who returned with Chen Tianhua, kept chatting with Chen Ke. Chen Ke thought highly of this young man and was willing to answer more questions for him, his attention to observing social trends was also dispersed a lot.

  Mao Ping's ancestral home is in Fujian, but he himself is a Fujian immigrant to Taiwan. After Japan occupied Taiwan, Mao followed his family back to the mainland. The Mao family was relatively well-off and not conservative. Since Japan could defeat the Qing dynasty, there must be something to learn from them, so Mao went to study in Japan, majoring in medicine.

  In Japan, he saw a more open and technologically advanced culture, and Mao Ping gradually shifted his hatred from Japan to the corrupt and outdated Qing dynasty. The family education of Mao Ping was very good, after reading "Tien Yen Lun", he established the concept of "survival of the fittest". During the Sino-Japanese War, Japan was also fighting for its own national interests. If the Qing dynasty could defeat Japan, Taiwan would not have been lost, and the Treaty of Shimonoseki would not have been signed. Everything is decided by power. Rather than hating Japan's invasion, it is better to hate the weak and incompetent Qing dynasty. Mao Ping couldn't change Japan, but he felt that he should be able to change the Qing dynasty.

  Unconsciously, Mao Ping transformed from a simple youth who hated Japan to a relatively radical anti-Qing activist. Every time there were revolutionary activities among the overseas students, Mao Ping would participate if he had the time. His relatively idealistic attitude also gained him support from many overseas students, and he even made quite a few Japanese friends.

  Mao Ping had read Chen Tianhua's book and highly approved of his intense anti-Qing attitude. Later, when Chen Tianhua arrived in Japan, Mao Ping immediately went to visit him upon learning the news. The two were delighted to meet each other. Mao Ping and his small group became a "small revolutionary party" that firmly supported Chen Tianhua personally.

  When Chen Tianhua returned to Japan from Shanghai again, he brought back a book co-written with Chen Ke. After Mao Ping read it, he was truly amazed by the masterpiece. The book "The Inheritance of Chinese Culture and the Rise of Materialism" thoroughly pointed out the relationship between the development of productive forces and social development, clearly explaining the connection between the Industrial Revolution and national development. Mao Ping felt that all the puzzles that had troubled him for many years were suddenly solved. "If I hear the truth in the morning, I can die in the evening!" Mao Ping exclaimed with such emotion. Mao Ping, who was always diligent in his studies, began to skip classes for the first time and devoted all his energy to organizing a "Reading Club".

  Under Mao Ping's efforts, the reading club expanded to over 100 people. When Chen Tianhua decided to return to Shanghai to join Mr. Chen Ke, Mao Ping firmly requested to go with him, and in the end more than 20 Chinese and Japanese youths from the reading club followed Chen Tianhua back to Shanghai.

  Chen Ke did not disappoint Mao Ping, and his level of explanation was much higher than Chen Tianhua's. Mao Ping felt that Chen Ke was an incredible existence, no matter what question he asked, he could give a reasonable answer based on the theory in the book. The revolutionary party members would only shout "Manchu is the source of all evil" when they encountered problems, but they couldn't explain what exactly Manchu's evil was. Chen Ke never said who was evil, he just analyzed the social phenomena, how the participants were doing it, and what kind of class characteristics made them do so, even if they were forced to do so.

  This mild and rational attitude was even more effective than the most intense opposition. Mao Ping had always been dissatisfied with the Qing government, but before meeting Chen Ke, he was also a constitutionalist in some sense. After listening to Chen Ke's explanation, Mao Ping thoroughly transformed from a constitutionalist into a revolutionary.

  Chen Ke thought highly of Mao Ping, not only because his ideas were quite progressive. Moreover, Mao Ping's performance on the construction site was also excellent. When the number of people in Huangpu Book Society expanded rapidly, Chen Ke set a rule, requiring members of Huangpu Book Society to help out on the construction site. Half of the time was spent listening to classes, and half of the time was spent working. Chen Ke also paid wages based on everyone's workload.

  The rule was that we had to find Chen Ke's way of saying it, "strongly recommended, but not mandatory." The words were very polite, but everyone was somewhat cultured and could naturally hear the implicit meaning. At first, everyone participated in labor with a "helping" attitude. Less than a week later, one-third of the classmates refused to go to the construction site. The other two-thirds continued to persist. Mao Ping and the classmates who came back together were among those two-thirds. Moreover, they worked well, passing through the commercial district and entering the residential area. At that time, Shanghai was in a new expansion phase, and the residential areas were all inside the alleys, not very visible from the outside. Except for the occasional sight of a few buses carrying firewood, there were hardly any people to be seen, as if everyone had gone to work.

  Chen Ke didn't have the idea of going in to take a look, and it would be possible to visit these places again when conducting social investigations later.

  The school is located relatively far away, and the British-run school was not supported or opposed by the local Shanghai government. The core area of Shanghai is on the other side of the Bund. The earliest British Consulate in Shanghai was set up inside a large mansion belonging to a Mr. Gu in the old city of Shanghai County. After Shanghai opened up as a port, the British used the pretext that "Chinese and foreigners living together is inconvenient" and forced the Qing government to sign the "Shanghai Land Regulations" based on the clause in the Treaty of Nanjing that allowed British people to rent land and houses in treaty ports. On November 29, 1845, two years after Shanghai opened up as a port, the Qing government's Shanghai Circuit issued an announcement: "After considering public opinion and taking into account the local situation in Shanghai, we have designated the area north of Yangjingbang and south of Lijiachang for rent to British merchants for building houses and residences." This concession area was 830 acres in size, which later became the British Concession.

  In 1846, Balfour set his sights on the land of Li's Village to build a new British Consulate. Li's Village was located at the southwest intersection of Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek, where the Qing army had set up a battery to guard the river defense during the Opium War. After the British warship broke through the first line of defense at Wusongkou, it destroyed the second line of defense at Donggou, and the intersection of Suzhou Creek and Huangpu River became the third line of defense. In June 1842, the British "Revenge" warship heavily bombarded the Li's Village battery, but the stubborn resistance of the defending troops was unable to withstand the fierce bombardment, which destroyed the battery. This land not only had a superior geographical location but also this historical story, Balfour repeatedly inspected this abandoned battery, disregarding the British law at that time that did not allow embassies to be built outside, and negotiated with the owner of the land, Shi Bingrong, to purchase the property. After Balfour paid the deposit, due to lack of special funds, he had to delay, until the second consul, Allicot, took over and repeatedly applied, finally obtaining approval from the British government.

  After hastily building the consulate house, on July 21, 1849, the British Consulate moved from the old city to the new house in Li's Village, Outer Bund for office use. Only two years later, problems arose with the construction and it was forced to be demolished, and the consulate rebuilt its house again in 1852. Eighteen years later, on December 24, 1870, at midnight, the British Consulate caught fire. The firefighting hose was not long enough to reach the water source due to the winding road, delaying the response time, and the fierce flames burned down the entire building and all the files and archives. Therefore, it is very difficult to see the documents and photos of the early British Consulate today.

  However, the concession centered on the Bund was already overcrowded and it was impossible to get any land. Chen Ke wasn't particularly concerned about this medical college anyway. He would be going to the countryside within a year, and this school wouldn't have achieved anything by then. If the revolution didn't succeed, all the investment in this school would be wasted; if the revolution succeeded, they could build the school however they wanted later on. So Chen Ke simply chose a location close to where ordinary people lived. This was the suburbs, where the land was cheap and there were few residents. Moreover, Wu Xingchen brought those robust Shandong men to personally "persuade" with money, and finally bought this piece of land.

  After walking for nearly half an hour, the school is already in sight. After a month of construction, the main six buildings, two teaching buildings, one experimental building, a library, and two dormitory buildings have taken shape. High scaffolding and various pulleys and hoisting equipment are attached to each building, with many people working on them.

  The destination is almost there, and the young people all showed joy. After walking for a while, I saw that many people were waving their hands in front of the simple school gate, which was the youth who arrived early. Everyone accelerated their pace to reunite with these classmates. However, Chen Ke and Mao Ping soon fell behind. Chen Ke turned his head and saw that there were still several Japanese students following closely behind Chen Ke and Mao Ping.

  "Let's hurry up, don't keep everyone waiting." Chen Ke smiled and said.

  "Hi!" chorused the Japanese classmates in unison.

  A crowd gathered on the playground, which was built according to modern standards. It could be seen that it had been cleaned up, with various building materials piled up on the track and signs of hasty removal on half of the field. In the center of the playground, four wooden obstacles over three meters high were erected. There were also some inexplicable things, which the young people did not understand about these simple games. Everyone had heard Chen Ke explain the significance of "expansion training", which was probably about cultivating team spirit and exercising imagination. As for such an abstruse explanation, everyone felt that there should be a very different place, but this simple playground did not have anything that could be associated with Chen Ke's interpretation.

  Hua Xiong Mao walked over, "Wen Qing, everything is ready." Looking around at the young people curiously watching the simple equipment, he asked worriedly, "Wen Qing, will this work?"

  "Let's see if it works. We'll have to go up anyway." Chen Ke smiled and said. After finishing, he stood on a stool and shouted loudly: "Classmates, our expansion training today is just the first step. I now require that ten people line up in a row and start queuing."

  Such a simple request, I estimate that in the 21st century, fourth-grade students can easily complete it. However, this group of young people from 1905 listened to it and stood there blankly, not knowing what to do.

  Chen Ke pointed at Mao Ping, "You walk five steps forward and stand there."

  Mao Ping obeyed Chen Ke's order.

  Chen Ke pointed at Mao Ping's position and shouted to everyone again: "Take him as the origin, stand north of Mao Ping and behind him."

  The command was executed, and everyone centered on Mao Ping, starting to stand in disarray. Some people stood south of Mao Ping, some stood in front of him. Others watched as everyone rushed around, but were at a loss for what to do, standing still on the spot.

  Chen Ke called out the names of his classmates one by one, ordering them to adjust their positions. After ten minutes, the classmates finally divided into five teams and stood at the north side and back of Mao Ping.

  "How many people are in this row?" Chen Ke shouted.

  "Ten." Scattered responses came from within the ranks.

  "First row, report!" Chen Ke commanded. This time he didn't just let everyone report, but also personally taught how to report.

  Hua Xiongmao looked at everyone's noisy appearance, as well as Chen Ke's skilled guidance of the crowd. His original worries immediately flew away to a distant place. Just organizing such a large group of people and teaching them basic things was so laborious. It seemed that there would absolutely be no idle time. After confirming this fact, Hua Xiongmao turned around and left. There were still many things to do on the construction site.

  Article 38