teacher at the institution, lecturing Finance Sciences and Public Accounting. The institution formally began to function on 2 January 1893; a federal decree of 21 February 1893 granted it the status of "free faculty", equating it to official federal institutions. Three students completed the course as early as 1893: Antônio Gomes de Lima, Augusto Cesar Pedreira and Rodolfo Jacob. On 13 December 1893, the state's legislature met in Barbacena and approved the law that created the city of Belo Horizonte in what was then the old colonial village of Curral d'el Rey, replacing Ouro Preto as the state's capital; the law had been proposed by Afonso Pena. Ouro Preto's geographic features were considered an obstacle to the development of Minas Gerais. As president of Minas Gerais Afonso Pena also sought to improve the state's economy by solving some of its most immediate issues; these included the loss of income in coffee exports due to the fact that, by being a landlocked state, Minas Gerais' production had to be exported by the port of Rio de Janeiro, which kept the tax revenues. To tackle this issue, Pena created a dry port in the municipality of Juiz de Fora, where most of the state's coffee production was located, and made an agreement with president Floriano Peixoto in which each coffee producing state would keep its production's revenue, thus greatly reducing Minas Gerais' dependency on Rio de Janeiro. At that time, Pena also defended the taxation of imported goods as a way to promote local production. Ever since his tenure at executive positions in the 1880s, he began to deviate towards a more protectionist stance, in contrast to his early liberal and laissez-faire ideas; in his own words, his position became a "moderate protectionism". He also began to envision the state as a modernizing actor, with the role of promoting economic growth. He later declared that: Pena also adopted a more proactive state action by promoting immigration to Minas Gerais, in particular , whose immigrants were perceived as skilled labors, necessary for the development of the state; this was in line with the ideas, common at the time, of social darwinisn and racial determinism. The government actions aimed at bringing entire families in order to make their establishment permanent. During the imperial era, Pena had argued against the proposed Chinese immigration, as he deemed it "the introduction of another deleterious element to the