Chapter 35 Section 3 The Blood and Tears of the Road Workers

During the 36 years from the beginning of the Wusong Railway in 1876 to the collapse of the Qing government in 1911, my country built a total of more than 9,100 kilometers of railways.Except for a few railways independently built by the Chinese, such as the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway, the vast majority were built and operated by imperialism. Among them, the important railways directly controlled by imperialism include the Middle East Railway (Tsarist Russia), the South Manchuria Railway (Japan), and the Jiaoji Railway. Railway (Germany) and Kunhe Railway (France), etc.These railways directly served the imperialist policy of aggression and expansion, and had an obvious colonial nature.The construction of these railways has brought serious disasters to the Chinese people, especially the road builders. Next, let's take the construction of the Kunhe Railway as an example to see the miserable lives of the road builders at that time.

Located in the southwestern border of the motherland, the Kunhe Railway, formerly known as the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, is a narrow-gauge railway directly controlled by French imperialism.This strategically important railway was completed in 1910. It has a gauge of one meter and a length of more than 460 kilometers. It is located in the central and southern parts of the Eastern Yunnan Plateau.It starts from Kunming in the north and reaches Hekou, an important frontier town in the south.During the construction of the road, the French invaders committed countless crimes, and more than 80,000 Chinese laborers died on the railway construction site, leaving behind "blood-stained Nanxi River, corpses on the Kunhe line, thousands of mountains covered with bones, and thousands of valleys with blood and tears." The tragic history of "flow".

80% of the line of the Yunnan section of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway passes through the mountains, and the road construction project is very arduous.French colonialists brutally enslaved and squeezed Chinese road construction workers.They exploited the workers to the bone and sucked the marrow, and they disregarded human life in a lawless manner.Many road construction migrant workers could not bear the slave life like cattle and horses, and fled one after another.Almost all of the more than 400 migrant workers on the construction site of the Six-hole Stone Bridge in Bisezhai escaped in half a year.

The escape of migrant workers has seriously affected the construction of the project.In order to supplement the labor force for road construction, the French railway company had to recruit additional workers.During the eight years of road construction, they successively recruited more than 60,000 migrant workers from Sichuan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Hebei and other provinces.According to "The First Collection of Dangerous Words about the Dian Incident": "It is reported that workers from various provinces were recruited, and those who were able to save their lives were actually only two or three out of ten."At that time, the French railway company had recruited more than 3,000 migrant workers from Tianjin, and in the end only more than 20 people died.The 1,499 migrant workers recruited from Guangdong died in large numbers, and almost all those who survived escaped.Only a handful of them fled Yunnan and returned to their hometowns.When they arrived in Guangzhou, they learned that the French railway company was still cheating and recruiting workers, so they made extensive complaints to the society, enumerating the heinous crimes of French imperialism that killed migrant workers in railway construction, which aroused strong social repercussions.In the end, the governor of Guangdong was forced to cancel the French contract to recruit more than 4,000 migrant workers in April 1905.

The Nanxi River Valley, which the Kunhe Railway passes through, is located in the tropics, with a very hot climate, and has always been a deserted and infested place.A terrible malaria (commonly known as miasma) is prevalent here.As long as you contract this malaria, if you don't get timely treatment, you will die within a day or two. The death rate of the road construction migrant workers here was astonishingly high in the first few years.In the first year (1903), migrant workers who were tortured to death accounted for more than 70% of the total number of migrant workers.According to the French "Dian-Vietnam Railway", a great plague occurred in the Nanxi River Valley in the spring of 1905, and the dead workers accounted for more than 1/3 of the total number of workers on the construction site.

Regarding the tragic experience of migrant workers, He Zongzhang, the official office of the Qing government stationed in the French Railway Company at that time, had such a record: "The company ... recruited Chinese workers ... and the Chinese worked together with several or dozens of people, that is, they built a shack by the side of the river; Three-pronged wooden slats, covered with grass, lying on the ground, severely damp, filthy and fumigated, and intolerable to miasma, within a few days, disease and death continued, and even every shed was able to move only one person out of ten, and outsiders hated it when they saw it. Regardless of whether he is dead or not, his shed is set on fire, or he is sick and lying on the roadside, dying. If outsiders pass by, he will be kicked into the deep stream with his feet. It is a blessing for him to be buried." This He Zongzhang also said in his notes with grief and indignation Wrote: "Wow, this road is actually made of the flesh and blood of our people."

The criminal acts of French imperialism aroused strong resistance from the people.However, due to the corruption and incompetence of the Qing government, the people's struggle to regain the right of way was suppressed. In 1910, the Kunhe Railway was finally barely completed.The railway, which took seven years and 11 months to construct, is a blood vessel for the French colonialists to suck the fat of the Yunnan people, and it has also become a criminal evidence of imperialist aggression and plunder of the Chinese nation's railways.