On the morning of September 12, when Yan Fu sent someone to the workshop, Chen Ke was just about to go out. The purpose of Yan Fu sending someone was to ask when Chen Ke would be available; he was prepared to talk to Chen Ke about the joint government-merchant pharmaceutical factory. Chen Ke politely told the messenger that he wasn't free today. He was going to the hospital construction site and would be there all day. If they were to discuss matters, Chen Ke would visit Mr. Yan Fu in three days. The messenger looked somewhat surprised by this reply but didn't say much and took his leave directly.

Honestly, Chen Ke didn't really think Yan Fu could negotiate the pharmaceutical factory matter in the short term. Given the efficiency of the Manchu Qing bureaucratic system, Chen Ke thought it would be remarkable if this matter had any prospects within two months.

On September 11, while making the drug production plan, You Gou had asked Chen Ke: what should be done if this pharmaceutical factory really got set up? Chen Ke's answer was concise and to the point: "We must be prepared for this pharmaceutical factory not to have started production by 1917." You Gou failed to understand Chen Ke's joke, so Chen Ke had to explain, "In 1917, I'm afraid the headquarters will have already moved to Anhui. By then, you don't even know if you'll be moving to Anhui with the headquarters. Don't worry about such things for now."

In the plan, all members of the Huangpu Book Society would undergo outward bound training on September 12. So on the 11th, Chen Ke conducted a simple physical fitness test. At least, it appeared so on the surface. The fitness test consisted of three items: a 30-meter shuttle run, standing long jump, and medicine ball throw.

Young people all like liveliness, especially this kind of sports activity. Whether wearing long gowns or Western suits, they all participated. Shouts of "Bravo!", encouragement, and noisy discussions truly made the place boil with voices. Everyone participated in the sports test; those with poor results even surrounded the referees demanding to start over. It was truly a scene of laughter and joy.

Chen Ke was very satisfied with such a scene but very pessimistic about the results. The members of the Huangpu Book Society didn't particularly like sports. According to 21st-century standards, only half met the standard. Chen Ke believed these people were completely unsuitable for the originally planned outward bound program. So the location of the outward bound training was changed to the construction site.

The roster was already done. An important purpose of conducting the physical fitness test lay in improving the collection of personal data. This also counted as part of the social investigation. Conducting a social investigation without even completing the data of one's own people would be not just a joke, but a disgrace.

After sending off Yan Fu's messenger, Chen Ke led a group of young people to move out. Zhou Yuanxiao's workshop was at the end of Nanjing Road. It belonged to "old architecture." Zhou Yuanxiao had never spoken about the history of this rather large workshop. Shanghai Renxin Hospital, where Chen Ke held the nominal title of principal, was at the end of Sichuan Road.

The city where Chen Ke was born had no wooden buildings. As a child, he lived in the factory family quarters. Those were single-story house areas with red or blue brick walls, cement floors, and red tile roofs. When he grew up a bit, he lived in red brick buildings. Later, it was reinforced concrete, walls coated with blue gravel on the outside, and new buildings with floor tiles laid inside the home. By the time he set up his own household, it was an apartment in a residential compound. It was even less possible to have any wooden components. Even the stair handrails were electroplated metal.

From childhood to adulthood, apart from wooden beams, he hadn't even seen many wooden pillars. 1905 Shanghai gave Chen Ke the feeling that, apart from having more people, it wasn't much different from a county town in the 80s. The wooden buildings on both sides, however, still had some flavor.

The streets were mostly gravel roads, with many people. There were no green belts. The roadside of the commercial district was lined with identical two-story buildings: brick walls, wooden door planks, wooden windows. What Chen Ke found most special was that these buildings all had a narrow balcony enclosed by wooden fences on the side facing the street. Most wooden parts of these buildings were painted red, looking quite lively.

Parked on both sides of the street were mostly carts and rickshaws. There were many vehicles; apart from those that had already picked up work, rickshaw pullers rarely ran around. They just parked casually where they felt they could pick up customers, resulting in blocking quite a part of the street surface. Shanghai was the largest commercial city in the Far East, so the transportation industry was naturally quite developed.

The rickshaw pullers wore coarse cloth short jackets and coarse cloth trousers, with a thick belt bound around their waists. This belt also doubled as a money bag. Their skin was tanned dark yellow; although the arms exposed outside had solid muscles and thick joints, compared with modern people, the fat layer was obviously thinner, and the skin color was dull and lacked luster. Due to excessive extraction of physical strength and insufficient meat food, veins popped out on their arms, and the skin felt very dry.

Chen Ke had specifically instructed on clothing requirements. The group of young people he led was obviously much whiter, and their skin color was more lustrous. Especially Chen Ke, who took the lead; in modern cities, fewer and fewer people went shirtless wearing big shorts. Chen Ke had even become accustomed to wearing long sleeves and long trousers all year round. It was the same after returning to this era. Plus, after he returned, he dyed cloth, made medicine, and lectured all day, always in a long-sleeved top and long trousers. Today he wore short sleeves, finally revealing his muscular arms. But compared with these working people, his skin appeared white and tender. This gave birth to a sense of inferiority in Chen Ke's heart. He also claimed to want to launch a socialist revolution, but could the people believe in revolution carried out by such a fair-skinned person?

Moving together as such a group, everyone talking and laughing on the road, the rickshaw pullers naturally wouldn't misunderstand, and no one came up to solicit business. Although Chen Ke wanted to look more at the surrounding environment, Mao Ping, the Chinese student who returned with Chen Tianhua, kept chatting with Chen Ke. Chen Ke thought highly of this young man and was willing to answer more of his questions, so his attention to observing social customs had to be distracted a lot.

Mao Ping's ancestral home was Fujian, but he himself was a Fujianese immigrant to Taiwan. After Japan occupied Taiwan, Mao Ping returned to the mainland with his family. Mao Ping's family was reasonably wealthy and not considered conservative. Since Japan could defeat the Manchu Qing, there were naturally things to learn; Mao Ping simply went to Japan to study, majoring in medicine.

In Japan, seeing Japan's more enlightened technological and cultural atmosphere, Mao Ping, who was originally full of hatred for Japan, gradually turned his hatred toward the corrupt and backward Manchu Qing. Mao Ping's family education was very good; after reading *Tianyanlun*, Mao Ping established the concept of "natural selection, survival of the fittest." In the Sino-Japanese War, Japan was also fighting for its own country's interests. If the Manchu Qing could defeat Japan, Taiwan naturally wouldn't have been lost. Nor would the *Treaty of Shimonoseki* have been signed. What decided everything was strength. Instead of hating Japan's invasion, it was better to hate the cowardly and incompetent Manchu Qing. Mao Ping couldn't change Japan, but he felt he should be able to change the Manchu Qing.

Unknowingly, Mao Ping changed from a youth who simply hated Japan because of hatred for Japan into a quite radical anti-Qing element. Whenever there was a revolutionary activity among international students, Mao Ping would attend as long as he had time. And his relatively idealistic attitude also received the support of many international students. He even made quite a few Japanese friends.

Mao Ping had read Chen Tianhua's book and agreed very much with the fierce anti-Qing attitude in it. Later, when Chen Tianhua arrived in Japan, Mao Ping went to pay a visit immediately upon learning of it. The two had a very happy meeting. Mao Ping and his small group became a "small revolutionary party" that firmly supported Chen Tianhua personally.

When Chen Tianhua returned to Japan from Shanghai again, bringing back the book written together with Chen Ke, Mao Ping read it and truly regarded it as a masterpiece. The book *The Inheritance of Chinese Culture and the Rise of Materialism* thoroughly pointed out the relationship between the development of productive forces and social development, and clearly explained the connection between the industrial revolution and national development. Mao Ping felt that the doubts plaguing him for years had all been resolved. "If a man hears the Way in the morning, he may die in the evening without regret!" Mao Ping uttered such a sigh. Mao Ping, who had always been serious in his studies, began to skip classes for the first time; he poured all his energy into organizing the "Reading Society."

Under Mao Ping's efforts, the Reading Society expanded again and again, reaching a scale of over a hundred people. Learning that Chen Tianhua was going back to Shanghai to join that "Mr. Chen Ke," Mao Ping firmly requested to go along. In the end, more than twenty Chinese and Japanese youths from the Reading Society followed Chen Tianhua back to Shanghai.

Chen Ke didn't disappoint Mao Ping; his level of explaining the courses was much higher than Chen Tianhua's. Mao Ping felt Chen Ke was simply some kind of incredible existence; no matter the question, he could give a reasonable answer based on the theories in the book. When revolutionaries encountered problems, they would only shout, "The Manchu Qing is the source of all evil." But what exactly the evils of the Manchu Qing were, they couldn't explain clearly. Chen Ke never said who was evil; he only analyzed how participants acted in social phenomena, and out of what class characteristics they did so. Or even were forced to do so.

This gentle and rational attitude was even more effective than the fiercest opposition. Mao Ping was already very dissatisfied with the Manchu Qing, but before meeting Chen Ke, Mao Ping was also a constitutionalist in a sense. After listening to Chen Ke's explanation, Mao Ping thoroughly changed from a constitutionalist to a revolutionary.

Chen Ke thought highly of Mao Ping, not only because his thinking was quite progressive. Moreover, Mao Ping's performance on the construction site was also very outstanding. When the number of people in the Huangpu Book Society expanded rapidly, Chen Ke set a rule requiring members of the Huangpu Book Society to help on the construction site. Half the time used for listening to lectures, half the time for work. Chen Ke also paid wages based on everyone's workload.

According to Chen Ke's statement, this rule was "strongly recommended, but not forced." These words were very polite, but everyone was somewhat educated and could naturally hear the overtones. At first, everyone participated in labor with a mentality of "helping out." Less than a week later, one-third of the students refused to go to the construction site no matter what. The other two-thirds were still persisting. Mao Ping and the students who returned with him were in the ranks of that two-thirds. And they worked well.

Passing through the commercial district, they entered the residential area. Shanghai was currently in a stage of emerging expansion; residential areas were all inside *lilong* (lanes) and couldn't be seen very clearly from the outside. Except for a few carts transporting firewood seen occasionally, basically no one could be seen; presumably, everyone had gone to work.

Chen Ke didn't have the idea of going in to look either; when conducting social investigations later, it would be soon enough to visit these places then.

The location of the school was relatively far. For Englishmen running schools, the local Shanghai government neither supported nor opposed it. The core area of Shanghai was over by the Bund. The British Consulate in Shanghai was earliest located in a large mansion belonging to a family named Gu within the Shanghai county seat. After Shanghai opened as a treaty port, Britain used the excuse that "mixed living of Chinese and foreigners is inconvenient," and citing the clause in the *Treaty of the Bogue* permitting British people to rent land and houses at treaty ports, forced the Qing government to sign the *Land Regulations of Shanghai*. On November 29, 1845, two years after Shanghai opened as a port, the Shanghai Daotai of the Qing government issued a proclamation: "Having observed the sentiments of the people and considered the local circumstances of Shanghai, the land north of Yangjingbang and south of Lijiazhuang is designated for rent to British merchants for the purpose of building houses and residence." This settlement area was 830 *mu*, which was the later British Concession.

In 1846, Balfour took a fancy to the land of Lijiazhuang and planned to build a new British Consulate. Lijiazhuang was located on the southwest side of the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek. The Qing army had once set up forts here to guard the river defense. During the Opium War, after British gunboats captured the first line of defense at Wusongkou, they attacked and destroyed the second line of defense at Donggou. The confluence of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu River was the third line of defense. In June 1842, the British gunboat *Nemesis* bombarded the Lijiazhuang fort fiercely. Although the defenders resisted tenaciously, the intense artillery fire still destroyed the fort. This land not only had a superior geographical location but also this historical story. Balfour inspected this abandoned fort multiple times and, disregarding the British law at the time forbidding the construction of embassies abroad, negotiated with the land owner Shi Bingrong and others to purchase the real estate. After Balfour advanced the deposit, he had to delay because there were no special funds for this, until the second consul Alcock took over and applied continuously, finally obtaining approval from the British government.

After hastily building the consulate houses, on July 21, 1849, the British Consulate moved from the old city to the new office at Lijiazhuang on the Bund. After only two years, problems appeared in the building, and it was forced to be demolished. In 1852, the consulate rebuilt the houses. Eighteen years later, at midnight on December 24, 1870, the British Consulate caught fire. Because the path for fetching water was winding and the fire hoses were insufficient, time was delayed, and the fire was fierce, burning the houses and documents/archives to ashes. Therefore, it is difficult to see documents and photos of the early British Consulate today.

But now the concession centered on the Bund had long been overcrowded; it was absolutely impossible to get any land. Chen Ke wasn't that concerned about this medical college originally. He would go to the countryside within a year anyway; this school inevitably wouldn't produce any results. If the revolution didn't succeed, the investment in this school would be in vain anyway; if the revolution succeeded, he could build schools however he wanted then. So Chen Ke simply chose a location close to the residential areas of ordinary people. This was the suburbs; land was cheap, and residents were few. Moreover, Wu Xingchen took those few tall and robust Shandong heroes to visit personally with money to "persuade and educate," and finally bought this piece of land.

After walking for more than half an hour, the school was already visible in the distance. After a month of construction, the main six buildings—two teaching buildings, one laboratory building, one library, and two dormitory buildings—already had some shape. Tall scaffolding and hoisting equipment constructed from various pulley blocks were attached to each building, and quite a few people were working on them.

Seeing that the destination was near, the young people all showed joy. Walking a bit further, they saw quite a few people waving in front of the crude gate of the school; these were the youths who had arrived early. Everyone quickened their pace to join these students. Chen Ke and Mao Ping soon fell behind. Chen Ke looked back and saw a few students following behind him and Mao Ping in a well-behaved manner. These were all Japanese students.

"Let's also hurry up; don't let everyone wait too long," Chen Ke laughed.

"Hai!" the Japanese students responded in unison.

The crowd gathered on the sports field, which was built according to the standards of later generations' sports fields. It could be seen that this place had been cleared; the track was piled with various construction materials, and half of the field had traces of hasty moving. In the center of the sports field, four wooden obstacles more than three meters high, like door planks, were erected. There were also some baffling things; the young people didn't understand these simple gadgets very well. Everyone had heard Chen Ke explain the significance of "outward bound training," probably something about cultivating team spirit and exerting imagination. Regarding such mysterious wording, everyone felt there should be very different places, but this simple venue didn't have anything that could be associated with Chen Ke's explanation.

Hua Xiongmao came up to welcome them. "Wenqing, it's ready." Looking at the surrounding young people curiously eyeing the simple equipment around them, he asked somewhat worriedly, "Wenqing, will this work?"

"We'll see as we go. It has to work whether it does or not," Chen Ke laughed. After speaking, he stood on a stool and shouted loudly, "Classmates, our outward bound training today is just the first step. I now require that ten people form a row and start lining up."

Such a simple request could probably be easily completed by fourth-grade students in the 21st century. But this group of young people in 1905 stood there blankly after hearing it, actually not knowing what to do.

Chen Ke pointed at Mao Ping. "You walk forward five steps. Then stand there."

Mao Ping obeyed Chen Ke's order.

Pointing at Mao Ping's position, Chen Ke shouted to everyone again, "Using him as the origin, everyone stand to the north and back of Mao Ping."

This order was executed. Everyone began to stand randomly with Mao Ping as the center. Some stood to the south of Mao Ping, some stood in front of Mao Ping. Others watched everyone running in a swarm and were at a loss instead, standing still on the spot.

Chen Ke called the students' names one by one and ordered them to adjust their positions. It took ten minutes for the students to finally divide into five rows standing to the north and back of Mao Ping.

"How many people did I say stand in a row?" Chen Ke shouted.

"Ten," responses came scatteredly from the ranks.

"First row, count off!" Chen Ke ordered. This time he not only let everyone count off but also taught them how to count off personally.

Hua Xiongmao watched the chaotic appearance of everyone and Chen Ke skillfully teaching the crowd. His original worry immediately flew to the nine heavens. Just organizing such a large pile of people and teaching them basic things was so laborious. It seemed there absolutely wouldn't be nothing to do. After confirming such a fact, Hua Xiongmao turned and left. There was still a pile of things to do on the construction site.