China’s railway history has been dazzling for more than a hundred years. How did it become known to people bit by bit?
China's railways started in the declining period of the Qing government, more than half a century later than the first countries in the world to use railways. So far, China's railway history is only more than a hundred years old.
1. The first thing people knew about China’s railways was not its glory, but its failure.
In the Qing Dynasty, the railway was regarded by the Qing people as a "wonderful skill" that destroyed Feng Shui. At that time, people were too superstitious and believed that large areas of land excavation to build railways would destroy Feng Shui. The ruling class also strongly opposed it. They believed that the construction of the railway would damage the Qing Dynasty's dragon vein. In the second year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty (1876), the British built a railway in Shanghai. It was a narrow-gauge light railway that ran from Zhabei in Shanghai to the north to Wusongkou. It was 14.5 kilometers long. This railway was called the Wusong Railway. It is China's first railway. However, it was redeemed and demolished by the Qing government the following year. The history of railways in early China was full of twists and turns.
2. China Railway is widely known because of Zhan Tianyou.
In the late Qing Dynasty, China had a great railway expert, Zhan Tianyou. He is known as the "Father of China's Railways" and the "Father of China's Modern Engineering". Between 1905 and 1909, he presided over the construction of China's first independently designed and built railway, the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway is China's first railway designed and put into operation by the Chinese themselves. The railway starts from Liucun, Fengtai, Beijing, passes through Juyongguan, Badaling, Shacheng and Xuanhua in Hebei Province to Zhangjiakou, with a total length of 201.2 kilometers. 3. China’s high-speed rail leads the world.
On August 1, 2008, my country’s first independently constructed high-speed railway with a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour, the Beijing-Tianjin intercity railway, opened for operation, and China officially entered the high-speed rail era. In the past ten years, from the coast of the Bohai Sea to the Gobi in the west, from the central plains to the mountains in the southwest, from the snowfields in the northeast to the water towns in the south of the Yangtze River, China's high-speed rail has started from scratch, connected beads into lines, and connected lines into a network. It has completed the construction of modern railways and transported a total of Passengers exceeded 7 billion. ?