In the opening paragraph of Let Bullets Fly, when the train is speeding, why are there several horses running in front of the locomotive, as if the train is being led by horses?

China's railways began in the late Qing Dynasty. However, the Qing government was corrupt, conservative and autocratic, only obeying the rules of ancestors and refusing to accept new things. They regard the construction of railways and the application of steam locomotives as "strange skills and cunning" and think that the construction of railways will "damage me, harm my land and hinder my feng shui", so they stubbornly refuse to build railways.

1On July 3, 876, the first commercial railway in China, Shanghai Wusong Railway, was built without authorization on the land of China. Jardine Matheson, the British agent in China, pretended to build an "ordinary road" from Wusong to Shanghai and opened to traffic. Subsequently, the Qing government paid 285,000 yuan to redeem the railway in three phases and demolished it.

1879, Li Hongzhang, the leader of the Westernization School, invited to build a railway from Tangshan to Beitang in order to transport the coal from Tangshan Kaiping Coal Mine to Tianjin. The Qing government decided to shorten the railway on the grounds that the locomotive "injured crops and shook the grave", and only built a section from Tangshan to Xugezhuang, and dug a canal between Xugezhuang and Lutai to connect the thistle canal to Beitangkou. In order to prevent the locomotive from shaking the grave, it was decided to pull the cart with mules and horses.

Of course, the film implies that the story happened in the 1920s, when the train had used mechanical power again, so the setting was a bit outdated.