Transmigrate to 1800: From the Start, I Have a Ten-Thousand-Ton Cruise Ship

A sudden deep-sea fog tears the modern cruise ship Ocean Blue Star, with a displacement of 120,000 tons and more than three thousand passengers and crew aboard, from its moorings and hurls it back to the west coast of North America in 1800. At this time, San Francisco Bay has no magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, only untouched redwood forests and the isolated missions and adobe forts of the Spanish Empire. More urgently, the ship has only forty days’ worth of heavy fuel oil left. The generators are about to shut down, the refrigerated stores are on the verge of failing, and all three thousand modern people aboard are about to be cast into the wilderness. Panic, riots, and struggles for power soon follow. Yet this steel island, packed with metal lathes, modern medical equipment, and a stockpile of science and engineering technology, is also a seedbed for civilization. Blast furnaces roar to life in the wasteland. Minié rifles and metal percussion caps replace hunting knives. Iron-hulled sailing ships set out once more against the Pacific’s warm currents, bound for the southeastern coast of the Qing Empire, where the Qianlong Emperor has just died and the Jiaqing Emperor has newly ascended the throne. They will ferry countless compatriots from Fujian and Guangdong across the ocean, people driven to the brink by tyranny, armed feuds, and famine. Distribute land, divide the fields, enlighten the people, and establish laws. Starting from a beachhead camp in San Francisco Bay, three thousand modern survivors become the fuel that awakens hundreds of thousands of Chinese people shackled by feudalism. While the fledgling United States on the East Coast is still paving the way westward, and the European powers remain embroiled in the smoke of the Napoleonic Wars, a steel nation spanning the Rocky Mountains and built around the Chinese people quietly rises on the far side of the vast Pacific.