Immigration Boom

There were many recruiters like Wang Dazhi. They went deep into their hometowns to promote the benefits of the East African colony and dispel the Chinese people's misgivings.

Of course, they were also finding a way out for these suffering masses, illiterate and ignorant of the wider world. Without access to such channels or someone to give them a leg up, ordinary people would not lightly step into fields unfamiliar to them.

Who wanted to starve in their hometown? Before, they either did not know or had no way in. Now that they knew, so long as they were given a mouthful of food, what did it matter if they sold this life of theirs!

The most exaggerated case was a recruiter named Zhang Gensheng. His hometown was suffering through a drought, and the response when he returned was overwhelming. Even villagers from several neighboring villages came forward voluntarily to register.

The disaster victims knew nothing of conditions in the East African colony, but Zhang Gensheng did not look like someone who had suffered. In this era, one could basically tell how well a person lived just by looking at his appearance. Most ordinary people were sallow-faced and skin-and-bones, without a trace of fat on them.

Yet when Zhang Gensheng stood there, he embodied the sturdy physique people of this era aspired to—a sign that he had eaten his fill.

And Zhang Gensheng! Who in the vicinity did not know him? Back when foreigners had come here recruiting workers, life had still been barely sustainable. Everyone had watched Zhang Gensheng board that "pirate ship" as though it were a joke, after all, what good intentions could those foreign devils possibly have?

Some had even spread rumors that Western devils were man-eating fiends, and that once Zhang Gensheng left, he would surely never return. But now, one year later, Zhang Gensheng had come back, and the rumors collapsed without attack.

Seeing Zhang Gensheng dressed in fine clothes and glowing with vigor, the disaster-stricken villagers naturally questioned him about everything. As for Zhang Gensheng having shaved off his queue, no one cared much. Had they not seen how the local constables bent at the waist and nodded their heads when his group arrived?

That showed he was not afraid of the authorities at all. In this era, the only people in Qing China who shaved their queues were revolutionaries, or those Taiping Rebels in the south who wore their hair loose.

When the authorities encountered such people, they would absolutely not speak nicely. They would follow the procedure and haul them away—at best, imprisonment; at worst, execution by firing squad.

Zhang Gensheng clearly belonged to neither category, so villagers who knew him asked what was going on. Naturally, Zhang Gensheng told them everything he knew.

Upon hearing Zhang Gensheng's description, the villagers became wildly excited. There was actually such a good thing in this world? Villagers who could not even fill their stomachs naturally ran about spreading the word.

Thus, nearby villages learned of the matter as well. There was strength in numbers, and these villagers thought that if everyone went to the East African colony together, they could look after one another.

There was nothing wrong with the immigrants thinking that way, but unfortunately, the East African colony would not keep them together. They would still be broken up and distributed throughout the colony, though naturally these villagers did not know that.

Thus, more than a thousand people registered to go to East Africa in Zhang Gensheng's area that very day. This gave the staff at Jiaozhou Bay a headache. Only after urgently dispatching a batch of grain and medicine were they able to settle these people properly.

With matters having reached this point, they could only report upward and request more ships, while notifying the East African colony to prepare more rations to receive this batch of immigrants.

Ernst also purchased a batch of grain from Europe and shipped it to East Africa for stockpiling.

Thus, in the Shandong and Zhili regions north of Jiaozhou, many chose Chuang Guandong. South of Jiaozhou, especially at the junction of Anhui, Henan, and Shandong Provinces, people chose to go to East Africa. The East African colony's recruitment had one particularly effective point: meals were provided on the journey to the harbor, free rations continued all the way to East Africa, and only after arriving in East Africa did they have to begin working.

There was naturally nothing they could do about those who truly did not wish to leave their native soil. But there would come a day when they regretted it. Whether East Africa was heaven did not matter; what mattered was that East Asia was now hell.

According to the East African colony's population records afterward, this campaign of Chinese returnees persuading people to immigrate brought more than fifty thousand immigrants to the East African colony over the following three months alone.

The surging population rapidly filled the vacant land in the East African Colony Coastal District. Neighboring Zanzibar had only a little over one hundred thousand people, while Binhai District rapidly approached sixty thousand after this immigration drive.

Ernst's family had grown wealthy and powerful by now; otherwise, who could have borne taking in fifty thousand people in such a short time!

Another winner from this immigration wave was the Dutch. Ernst had signed a long-term agreement with them, and these commissions were basically fixed.

But with this sudden surge in immigration, they had to temporarily rent more ships from the Dutch, so naturally the price had to be raised.

Afterward, the Dutch fleet was divided into three rotations. Every six days, ships had to arrive at the East African colony once; after unloading their passengers at Dar es Salaam Port, they immediately returned to East Asia to collect the next load.

After these immigrants arrived in the East African colony, some would be assigned to areas under construction in the west, such as the Great Lakes—Lake Victoria—region and the Lake Tanganyika region...

However, most still first filled the empty areas of Binhai District. After the natives had been driven away, the land there had remained abandoned.

Now that manpower had arrived, they were immediately divided into groups and sent into the hinterlands of Binhai District to reclaim wasteland, starting from the north and continuing southward to the vicinity of First Town.

The unending stream of immigrants did indeed give the Zanzibaris at Dar es Salaam Port a slight shock. After the Sultan of Zanzibar heard of the enormous commotion caused by the immigrants, he made no move at all and instead lay even flatter. It could be said that the East African colony had now thoroughly planted its feet.

Even if Zanzibar and Portugal joined forces, they could no longer shake the East African colony's rule in the region. Relying on military threats before had only been a short-term measure; now that the population had risen, there could finally be lasting peace and stability.

With the help of these immigrants, Binhai District formed more than a hundred villages, each generally numbering several hundred people. Three later-built strongholds were upgraded into three town-level administrative districts due to population growth, with each town-level district holding one or two thousand people.

So long as the populations of these towns grew a little more, Ernst planned to place some simple primary industries there, creating the embryonic forms of towns with modest industries.

Moreover, these immigrants were no longer mostly individuals as before. Influenced by natural disasters, some small families had come to East Africa together to make a living.

To make rule and administration easier, these immigrants were broken up, with immigrants from various regions mixed together to form new villages.

Thus, residents of these new villages might not even speak the same dialect. They were unfamiliar with one another, and naturally became more dependent on the colony's coordination and administration.

Brand-new iron farming tools were distributed into the immigrants' hands. With the means of production in hand, the immigrants worked with tremendous vigor, relying on advanced farming tools, some native captives, horses, and cattle.

The immigrants reclaimed nearly five hundred thousand mu of land, accounting for 10 percent of Binhai District's total land area, 30 percent of its arable land, and 70 percent of its irrigable arable land.

Of this, paddy fields reached two hundred thousand mu, with an estimated single-season harvest of thirty million kilograms of rice. After deducting rations—one jin of unhusked rice produced roughly six liang of polished rice—there would still be a surplus of eight million jin. The remaining land was planted with sisal and other crops.

The grain was intended for further immigration and expansion, so there were no plans to export it. Of the value generated by sisal exports, 5 percent was used to distribute wages to colonial immigrants and administrators. Though the colony's residents had little use for it, after all, East Africa had no entertainment venues or other places to spend money, so Ernst had no need to give them much pay; its symbolic significance was greater.

Thus, each immigrant in the East African colony had to reclaim more than eight mu of land on average, and the physical labor involved was indeed immense. But Ernst did not shortchange them on rations; their per-capita staple consumption nearly approached that of later generations. Therefore, even if he paid them no wages, Ernst felt no burden in his heart.

After all, in the Far East, one could toil oneself to death and still fail to get a mouthful of food. In the East African colony, although the work was still exhausting, the meals far surpassed those in every country of the East Asian region.

Furthermore, although much land was being reclaimed, the intensity was not as great as imagined. For example, these farming tools shipped from Europe were far superior in quality to those of the Far East, while the use of livestock, native labor, and collective operations all reduced labor intensity.

Nor was there any need for the meticulous cultivation practiced in the Far East. Pesticides and fertilizers were all shipped from Europe, and farm management was comparatively rough.

Of course, in order to raise these immigrants' enthusiasm for production, the colony also established an effective system of rewards and punishments. Those who worked well ate their fill, especially when meat was distributed; those who worked poorly might go hungry and be sentenced to compulsory labor as punishment.

During the slack farming season, the East African Colony Coastal District organized the construction of 196 kilometers of primitive dirt roads, basically linking the six most important towns in Binhai District.

By the end of October 1866, the East African colony's old and new immigrants, together with Germans, totaled more than 97,000. In the Tanganyika portion of the East African colony, key locations and lands had basically been brought under control.

Yet between these immigrant settlements lay vast tracts of land occupied by local natives, whose numbers might exceed three million. Apart from Binhai District, the other regions still contained native tribes of considerable scale.

Compared with these enormous numbers of natives, the East African colony could be said to have preliminarily completed the strategy of using cities—towns—to encircle the countryside—tribes.

But immigrants continued to flow without end from the Far East to this land of East Africa, providing the conditions for the East African colony's further expansion.