I want to be emperor

Chapter 1188 The Respectable Chu Family

Jiao Tiancheng drove all the way back home, then picked up his wife and children and prepared to go out.

The Tangshan Jiashan series sedan is a typical mid-range four-door, five-seater sedan with a relatively large interior space, which is more than enough for their family of three.

After restarting the car, Jiao Tiancheng drove all the way to West Fifth Street in the suburbs of Xicheng District.

West Fifth Street seems to be located in the suburbs of Xicheng District, but in fact it is one of the few large commercial centers in Xicheng District. There are many office buildings, large shopping malls, hotels, high-end restaurants and other office and entertainment venues here.

As for the traditional urban area of ​​Xicheng District...it is actually a large industrial area and low-end residential area.

The development process of big cities in the Great Chu Empire was quite special. In the early years, many big cities were actually very small in scale. Traditional ancient cities were not very large in scale.

So at that time, industrial zones were formed one after another around the core of these traditional cities, and then a large number of high-density ordinary apartment buildings were built around these industrial zones to serve the working class.

This is how Xicheng District came into being.

You can imagine what the environment is like in an urban area formed in this way!

Then, in order to have better living conditions, people in the middle and high-income groups moved to the suburbs to live. At the same time, the large number of factories and the large population in the urban areas caused poor air quality, which forced many commercial centers to relocate.

This has led to the formation of places such as suburban commercial centers.

Therefore, the contemporary Songjiang City is actually a layer upon layer. The earliest core urban area is the old urban area, which is often used for living and commercial centers. Some of the very good places have developed into ultra-high-end commercial centers, such as Linjiang North Road.

Surrounding the old city are a large number of industrial areas and low-end residential areas, such as the urban area of ​​Xicheng District.

Then there is another suburban commercial area on the outer layer, which has a large number of office buildings, various commercial centers, hotels, etc. This is a place like West Fifth Street.

Further out are various mid- to high-end residential areas in the suburbs.

Of course, this is just a general statement. In reality, it is impossible for them to be layered one on top of another. They are often intertwined with each other, forming towns with different positioning.

All of the above places, even the so-called suburbs, actually belong to the urban area of ​​Songjiang City...

After all, Songjiang City is a megacity with a population of over 10 million. The area of ​​such a megacity is extremely large. It can even be said that it covers most of Songjiang Prefecture. From Huating in the west to Wusongkou in the east, all of them are urban areas in a broad sense.

After Jiao Tiancheng and his family arrived at West Fifth Street, there were obviously more vehicles of various types on the street.

There are trams, large public horse-drawn carriages, various types of taxi carriages, and even freight carriages.

In addition, there are naturally various kinds of cars, including cars, 15 trucks and even some tricycles.

All types of cars can be seen here, and various cars and horse-drawn carriages are mixed together, giving people a feeling of the fusion of ancient and modern times.

But in fact...even those horse-drawn carriages have nothing to do with ancient times. They are the product of the modern industrial revolution.

Without the powerful production efficiency generated by the First Industrial Revolution, it would be unlikely for such a large and complete carriage system to emerge.

Just imagine, in the past, there were hundreds of thousands of horses of various kinds in Songjiang City just to keep the city running. Just imagine, could a city in an agricultural era afford such a scale of horses?

The various feeds needed by these horses alone, if converted into land output, would be enough to feed millions of people.

A country without any strength cannot maintain such a large-scale use of horses.

  And this is just one city!

Therefore, the large-scale use of various types of horse-drawn carriages was not something that ancient agricultural countries could afford, nor was it a characteristic of ancient times. On the contrary, it was a typical characteristic of modern industrial countries.

Therefore, the intersection of horse-drawn carriages and cars on West Fifth Street today seems to be a scene of the fusion of ancient and modern times, but in a true sense it is a scene of the fusion of modern industrial society and modern industrial society.

Because there are more and more vehicles of various types on the streets, and there are also many horse-drawn carriages. There is a certain speed difference between horse-drawn carriages and cars. Horse-drawn carriages can only run at a speed of more than ten kilometers per hour, while cars can easily run at dozens of kilometers per hour.

Although Songjiang City has been promoting the separation of cars and horse-drawn carriages, cars use the inner fast lane, while horse-drawn carriages and bicycles use the outer slow lane.

As for the outer side, there is the sidewalk.

However, this can only be implemented on spacious four-lane roads. If it is a road with only two lanes, then they can only drive together.

At the same time, when cars enter and exit the fast lane, they cannot avoid entering the slow lane, which makes it easier for them to collide with horse-drawn carriages.

At the same time, although the horses pulling the carriages are specially trained, they may occasionally lose control if they are stimulated. Therefore, you still have to be careful when driving when you encounter a large number of horse-drawn carriages.

In the contemporary Great Chu Empire, the accident rate of cars/carriages is actually quite high, with many people killed or injured in various car accidents every year... Contemporary roads are actually not very friendly to pedestrians.

This is not just true after the advent of the car, it was also true in the era of horse-drawn carriages.

Don’t think that there were no traffic accidents because horse-drawn carriages moved slowly. In fact, the urban traffic accident rate in the horse-drawn carriage era was much higher than that of cars.

During the transition period from cars to horse-drawn carriages, the accident rate was even higher.

This also forced the empire's traffic management departments to introduce a large number of traffic rules, set up a large number of traffic booths, and implement a series of traffic rules such as left and right lanes, turning and giving way to straight vehicles.

At the same time, the road network is also differentiated, dividing the highway into two lanes or four lanes, and the four lanes are further divided into fast lanes and slow lanes, and horse-drawn carriages or bicycles are prohibited from entering the fast lanes.

When a car enters a slow lane, the speed must be reduced to less than 15 kilometers per hour.

At the same time, speed limits are imposed in urban areas, and even in the fast lane the speed cannot exceed 40 kilometers per hour.

But even so, the accident rate is still high... at least it is very high compared to the accident rate in later modern society.

Jiao Tiancheng drove the vehicle through the streets with a focused expression, looking in all directions, and moving forward at a moderate speed.

After walking on this busy street for more than ten minutes, he turned into a two-lane road. Although the road here is smaller, there are fewer vehicles, which makes it easier to walk. After walking for a few minutes, Jiao Tiancheng drove into a large open-air parking lot, parked the car, got the toll receipt from the parking lot attendant, and then left with his wife and children to the theater next door.

This theater is not the theater of Chao Bao, but a commercial theater. It is quite large and the main hall can accommodate more than 300 spectators to watch various performances.

Using a large number of traditional theaters to play movies was a typical feature of contemporary movies when they first appeared. There were no commercial movies before, and even documentaries were not many.

It is impossible for people to set up a cinema specifically to show movies. Even the Chaobao Theater is actually a comprehensive theater that usually carries out various publicity, public welfare performances, or hosts some official activities.

Showing films was just one of the tasks of these Chao Pao theaters.

In fact, before this, Jinling Film Company rented theaters from local newspapers and broadcast various documentaries.

Movies like the current Play City Tour are no exception.

With the popularity of the movie City Journey, Jinling Film Company saw the hope of making a lot of money, so they ordered a large number of projectors, urgently trained a group of projectionists, and then found those private theaters for temporary cooperation, playing movies through profit sharing or direct leasing.

The theater that Jiao Tiancheng and his family went to today also belonged to this model. Jinling Film Company directly rented this theater for a whole month just to play the movie City Journey, which would also be interspersed with some short films that were recently invited in.

There are even some Jinling film companies that have re-edited some of their old documentaries on their own, putting together some good-looking scenery and buildings from all over the world to produce several landscape films, allowing the audience to see different scenery from all over the world at once, with some introductory subtitles.

This kind of pure landscape film that combines scenes from all over the world is much better than the previous simple documentaries... Although it is also quite boring, there are enough different scenes. It is also good to have a broader vision.

Unlike previous documentaries, which mainly focus on popular science of a certain area, it seems to introduce a lot, but it is actually very boring... There are really few people who are interested in the living habits and strange history and culture of the indigenous people.

If it is purely for scenery, it can at least attract some people who want scenery.

When Jiao Tiancheng and his family arrived at the theater, it was the afternoon show. There were many people in the theater at this time, and there were many audiences waiting in the waiting room for the next round of screenings. In addition, there were audiences who had arrived one after another like Jiao Tiancheng and his family.

Because there were too many people and there were no seats available for waiting, we had to stand and wait.

But even so, the family of three did not feel any dissatisfaction or complaints, and were even full of expectations.

Jiao Tiancheng's wife Chen Linlin was dressed in a formal outfit, wearing a light green, new-style slim-fitting cross-collar Hanfu that reached her ankles, a small purple round wide-brimmed gauze hat on her head, a pair of black silk gloves in her hands, and a pair of black pointed low-heeled leather shoes on her feet.

He was also wearing a light blue long tweed coat.

This is a common formal attire for young ladies in the Chu State in the autumn and winter seasons. It is basically a new style of Hanfu with a hat and gloves, plus a long or short woolen coat, and then the pointed low-heeled leather shoes that have become popular in the past decade.

It's not just Chen Linlin who dresses like this. In fact, most of the young ladies who come to watch movies around here dress like this, the only difference is the style and color.

On the contrary, some older women tend to dress in a more traditional way. For example, they also wear Hanfu, but their Hanfu is more traditional, generally with high collars and often not slim-fitting at the waist. They often wear traditional double-breasted outerwear instead of tweed jackets.

The Hanfu that many young women wear in their daily lives basically have a cross collar that exposes the lower edge of the neck, or simply the tube-top style Hanfu from the Tang Dynasty. The jackets are not traditional double-breasted ones, but mainly tweed jackets.

To some extent, the clothing worn by young women also reflects the gradual openness of the social atmosphere in the Great Chu Empire.

With the advancement of science and technology, the popularization of women's education and employment have allowed women to gradually break free from the stubborn shackles of the Song and Ming dynasties.

To see the social status of women in the past thousand years, just look at their clothing. During the Tang Dynasty, the status of women was unprecedentedly improved, so tube top style clothing came into being.

During the Song Dynasty, the status of women declined rapidly, and during the Ming Dynasty, the social status of women further declined. This was reflected in their increasingly covered clothing, with collars being the simplest and most intuitive proof.

Well, regardless of ancient or modern times, China or foreign countries, they are all similar...

The development of industrial technology in the Great Chu Empire greatly increased the demand for labor. At the same time, the industrial society also needed a large number of female workers to work in factories. Even some low-end cultural and service industries needed women to work. Therefore, women had the opportunity to receive education and work.

As more and more women receive education and work, their social status will naturally improve.

  And these are finally reflected in the clothing that women wear!

Many young women in the modern Great Chu Empire wear clothes, especially tube-top-style dresses. If they were in the Ming Dynasty, they would probably be thrown into a pig cage...

Well, it’s not that the young women of Chu were undisciplined. In fact, women in the Tang Dynasty also dressed like this, and were even more bold and exposed more... It’s just that the restrictions on women in the pre-Ming Dynasty were too perverted.

Chen Linlin was wearing this outfit, holding her daughter's hand. Her daughter was wearing a thick and cute tweed jacket, and a cute pink Hanfu underneath.

She has two cute braids on her head with hairpins inserted in them. The cute little girl is eating a lollipop with a happy face...

The raw sugar produced in plantations far away in Africa is transported across the ocean to local factories, where it is refined into edible sugar. It is then sold to various manufacturers or stores and made into various desserts, lollipops being one of them.

Jiao Tiancheng was wearing the same black business suit as the other men around him, a black long and wide business tweed jacket, black leather shoes, a round hat, and short brown leather gloves.

  Not far away, a diplomat from the Kingdom of Prussia in Europe who came to watch the movie looked at the family of three and the surrounding audiences and did not speak for a long time! !

These are the people of the Great Chu Empire, civilized people in a civilized world!

Although the Prussians and the Chu people live on the same planet, they seem to live in different worlds.

Just by looking at the attire and mental outlook of the Chu family across from us, we can tell that they are respectable and wealthy, happy and fulfilled...and there are such Chu people everywhere around us, and we can even say that all the Chu people in the theater today are like this!

As for their Kingdom of Prussia, almost everyone was like a walking corpse. They had to work hard every day just to eat enough, but they still couldn't get enough!

Except for a very small number of nobles and wealthy businessmen, there was no light in the eyes of other people!

It was a world like hell, and the Prussians were unable to escape from this hellish predicament because there were nobles and wealthy businessmen inside and the powerful Chu Empire outside. Several rebellions were completely suppressed, resulting in countless casualties.

How can they, the Prussians, break free from their chains?

  How can we live decently and happily like the people of Chu?

How can I live like a human being?

(End of this chapter)