July 23, 1875.
An oceangoing fleet composed of seven East African warships arrived at the Lanfang Republic and landed at Sanyangkou. Archduke Ferdinand said, "Among the many islands of the Nanyang region, this place has indeed developed rather well!"
As far as the eye could see lay fertile fields, carrying something of the agricultural landscape of East Africa's coastal regions. This shattered Archduke Ferdinand's stereotype of the newly established Nanyang region, formed during the journey through the Strait of Malacca.
The Strait of Malacca was indeed narrow, but the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, two large islands, lay along its shores, leaving vast expanses of land. Yet apart from a handful of cities—which, in Ferdinand's eyes, were really just villages—both sides of the Strait of Malacca were largely uninhabited and blanketed in rainforest.
But the Lanfang Republic was entirely different. The East African Fleet had first reached Banjarmasin, a northern city of the Lanfang Republic, but Dongweng, the Lanfang Republic's capital, lay in the south, so the East African Fleet sailed southward along the coastline.
Along the way, Ferdinand finally saw for the first time how a state governed purely by Chinese people was built. Lanfang's agriculture and mining were highly developed, and its agricultural construction in particular could be considered the most advanced among the islands of the Nanyang region. With such a comparison, Ernst's claim that the Nanyang natives were incapable of great use did seem to hold some truth.
In fact, history had already proven this. In the original history, the Dutch understood the Lanfang Republic best. The Dutchman Gaoyan witnessed the final chapter of the Western Borneo Chinese Company: "The Chinese era in Borneo, indeed Borneo's age of prosperity, was gone forever from that point onward. Local gold mining was replaced by large-scale modern European enterprises, yet