In February 1847, Lin Zhen (zhēn) from Gulangyu Island was invited to teach Chinese in the United States. After returning to China in 1849, he introduced American telegraph technology to the Chinese through his travelogue "Journey to the West Sea" . He wrote this in the book: Two wooden poles were erected every hundred steps, with wires placed horizontally on the poles. The characters were coded as codes, and the codes were used to code the characters. They were transmitted using a telegraph machine. When sending and receiving telegrams, there were people at the beginning and the end to perform their duties. , as soon as the head moves, the tail will be known. Regardless of government affairs, you can travel thousands of miles in an instant.
Twenty years later, the British Minister to China, William Wytoma, wrote a letter to Yi Xin, the Qing Premier's Yamen Minister. The general content was to request the Qing government to allow the British-owned telegraph company to set up telegraphs in China. cable. After many negotiations, the Qing court agreed to the British request, but there was one condition. Yixin said: Britain could only place cables underwater, and the thick wire ends were not allowed to go ashore. In June 1870, the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company also saw the opportunity and established the Far East Company and Shanghai Station successively, and rented No. 5 Nanjing Road as its business office.
The following year, the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company, despite the opposition of the Qing court, built a submarine cable from Hong Kong via Shanghai to Nagasaki, Japan, and led a section of the line to the Shanghai Public Concession. From that time on, Shanghai citizens could receive telegrams from across the ocean. In 1873, when overseas Chinese businessman Wang Chengrong was engaged in the shipping trade in Paris, France, he devoted himself to learning the principles of telegraph machines. After returning to China, he asked the Qing government to establish a telegraph business in China, but the Qing government did not accept it.
The Qing court believed that once telegraph lines were rolled out in China, it would inevitably affect the feng shui of the Qing Dynasty, especially in Beijing, where telegraphs were absolutely not allowed. However, even if the Qing government insisted, the momentum of technological development was unstoppable. In 1874, the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company erected a telegraph waterline from Fuzhou Panchuanpu to Mawei Luoxing Tower without authorization. Following the general trend, the Qing government signed a contract with the Dabei Company in 1976, and the Fujian Bureau of Commerce and Industry paid for it to buy the right to use the Fuzhou telegraph line and take it back to the government.
However, there are still no telegraph lines in the Beijing-Tianjin area of ??China, which makes Li Hongzhang anxious. In order to highlight the practicality and advancement of the telegraph, Li Hongzhang conducted an experiment. He asked six fast horses to compete with the telegraph while transmitting information from Tianjin to Dagu, a total distance of 40 kilometers, to see which one was faster. So, after secretly writing the four words "Mi Hong Qiao Chen", he waited for the final result. In fact, how can Kuai Ma and telegraph be compared? Not long after the fast horse set off, the telegram had already reached Dagu. But the postman did not dare to delay, and he still insisted on completing the mission. Finally, after exhausting three horses to death, the postman finally learned the contents of the telegram.
After the results were obtained, Li Hongzhang immediately set up telegraph lines between Tianjin, Dagu and Bei and Tang for military communications. In 1880, China and Russia were negotiating in Ili, and the relationship was very tense. Li Hongzhang asked the court for permission to open a general telegraph office in Tianjin on the grounds that "speed is the most important thing in the use of troops." In 1881, the Qing government opened a telegraph service from Tianjin to Shanghai, but news transmission in Beijing still relied on fast horses. It was not until 1898 that the "old guard" led by the Empress Dowager Cixi finally gave up their insistence and Beijing's telegraph service was officially launched.