The Study On Railway Rail Production In Late Qing Dynasty(1889-1911)

Along with the rise of railway enterprise in late Qing Dynasty, China’s railwayindustry had gradually formed and developed. In order to realize self-produced self-sale ofrailway materials and preserve China’s economic interests, Zhang Zhidong established theHanyang Iron Works in1889. As a particular period, it was very difficult for China toproduct railway rail independently in late Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, there were manyproblems of Hanyang Iron Works, such as lack of funds and mismanagement. As a result,the rail output of early-stage was less, and the quality of products was constantly belowstandard. On the other hand, at the beginning stage, HanyangIron Works was confrontedwith the challenge of the western Iron and steel enterprises, those who had realizedlarge-scale production. However, as the only rail manufacturing enterprise in modernChina，Hanyang Iron Works provided with a large number of Iron and Steel materials forthe railway construction. This indicated that independent production of rail had broken themonopoly of Western Powers in the rail market. To some extent, it was conducive toprotecting China’s economic rights.In this paper, I try to reveal the correlation between rail production and railwayconstruction. First of all, the appearance and development of railway construction hasexpanded the market for rail production. On the contrary, rail production can not only offera great quantity of materials for railway construction, but also promote unification oftechnical standards. Meanwhile, loss of some railway rights is the important factor ofrestricting the rail production.