What is history: it is the echo of the past to the future, the reflection of the future on the past. - Hugo
Zhan Tianyou was born in The Eleventh Year of Xianfeng (1861) in Nanhai, Guangdong (now Guangzhou), studied in the United States at the age of 11, was one of the first batch of international students sent by the Qing government, and won two mathematical prizes during his studies at Yale University, including the first prize.
In 1881, the 20-year-old Zhan Tianyou graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering of Yale University, and there were only two Chinese students who graduated at that time, and the other was Ouyang Geng, a Guangdong Xiangshan man who was 3 years older than Zhan Tianyou.
In the tenth year of Guangxu, he returned to Guangdong at the invitation of Zhang Zhidong, a famous minister of the late Qing Dynasty, and taught at the Guangdong Museum of Knowledge. Four years later, introduced by Kuang Sunmou, a classmate of the Kaiping Mining Bureau, Zhan Tianyou went to Tianjin China Railway Company as an engineer and embarked on the road of building railways, successively presiding over the construction of Tangshan Railway, Beijing-Tianjin Railway, Pingli Railway, Xinyi Railway, Beijing-Zhang Railway, etc.
The main purpose of the construction of the Xinyi Railway was to make it more convenient for Empress Dowager Cixi to go to the QingXi Mausoleum to worship, and after the completion of the railway, Empress Dowager Cixi was very satisfied, so she specially summoned Zhan Tianyou and gave the jewels she carried with her to Zhan Tianyou, and Zhan Tianyou only took a bell as a memorial, and the rest was given to the engineers involved in the construction.
The Beijing-Zhang Railway is the first railway in China that does not use foreign funds and personnel, and is designed and put into operation by Chinese confidently, which is of great significance. Before 1899, Russia had proposed to build a railway from Kyakhta to Beijing via Kulun and Zhangjiakou, but it was rejected by the Qing court, it is worth mentioning that Zhangjiakou outside Juyongguan and northwest of Beijing has been an important town in northern Xinjiang since ancient times, if this railway is responsible for foreigners or has foreigners participating in the construction, then it will be a threat to our country.
However, at that time, the construction of railways in this section was inevitable, and the voice of the government began to appear in the Qing Dynasty, and at that time, the Guangdong Inner and Outer Railways were very profitable, so Yuan Shikai, who was then the governor directly subordinate to the Governor and the General Office of Guanxi and Internal and External Affairs, proposed to use the operating income of the Guanxi Internal and External Railways to build the Beijing-Zhang Railway, and appointed Zhan Tianyou to preside over the matter.
In September 1905, the railway officially began, but the land where the Beijing-Zhang Railway passed was not so easy to build railways, such as the terrain of Juyongguan and Badaling, with many rocky cliffs and bends, "from the south entrance to Badaling, the height distance is 180 zhang, and every forty feet must be raised by one foot." ”
Chinese had to build his own railway and did not rely on foreigners at all, and many foreigners at that time also made a mockery, calling out that the Chinese engineers who built the railway had not yet been born. But Zhan Tianyou did not give up, just as the so-called more and more frustrated and courageous, he personally led the engineering team to survey the line, and finally adopted the "human" glyph railway.
But on the first day of track laying, and a hook chain of a construction car was broken, you can imagine what the faces of foreigners who wanted to see the joke were, but Zhan Tianyou did not pay attention to the slander, and then used the automatic hook method to solve the problem.
In addition, the 1,092-meter-long Badaling Tunnel was completely excavated by the hands of Chinese workers, but the Beijing-Zhang Railway was finally opened to traffic in October 1909, and the construction period was two years earlier than the scheduled plan, according to the budget of 7.29 million silver taels, and the Beijing-Zhang railway actually used only 6.93 million taels.
Now more than 100 years have passed since the construction of the Beijing-Zhang Railway, during which it has encountered wars and chaos, and this herringbone railway has been listed as a cultural relics protection unit today, and was selected as the first batch of China's industrial heritage protection list in 2018. In addition, the photo album "Jingzhang Road Workers' Shadow" records the construction process of the Bridge, Tunnel, Station, Water Tower, and Locomotive of the Jingzhang Branch Line in that year, presenting the history of a hundred years ago to future generations one by one.