Forty-eight years of Qianlong

Chapter 430 From Beets to Sugar
Zhu Dagui returned to Xingkaihu No. [-] Village on the tenth day of August. Apart from his wife and ten fellow villagers, he was accompanied by a squad of Northern Navy soldiers and two officers.On the first carriage in the procession, there were two white spirit-calling flags, with the word "Dian" written on them.

That night in Xiaobai Mountain, eight people in Xingkai Lake No. [-] Village were killed and fifteen were seriously injured.Now the wounded are recuperating in the temporary medical station in Ningguta, and most of them will not be able to return until September.

"Alas!" Zhu Dagui sighed when he saw the words "five kilometers away from the second village of Xingkai Lake" written on the sign beside the main road.Getting closer and closer to home, thinking of the scene of crying loudly, Zhu Dagui couldn't help cursing the court in the south again in his heart.

He turned his head to look at the carriage behind him, the two "Hezhe people" Qi Bukadai and the seriously injured Zhu Nise were also drooping and listless.

The wheat fields on both sides of the road are shining golden, and you can't see the side at a glance.Zhu Dagui's mood improved slightly after estimating the harvest of his family's [-] acres of land this year.

Yes, the harvest season is here again in Beihai Town.

From the southernmost Shila River and Furjaha River, to the vast plains on the north and south sides of Xingkai Lake, and then to the middle reaches of Heilongjiang thousands of miles away; from the south of Kuye Island to the plain city of Ezo, all the way to From the west to the distant shore of Lake Baikal, as long as there is a village cultivated by Beihai Town, the eighth month of the lunar calendar will become a festival for all villagers.

Chai Rugui, Gao Liugeng, and Li Qingwen sat on the ground like idiots, watching the huge red monster cruising back and forth in the field, and quickly harvested a row of wheat, leaving only one or two inches of wheat in the field. The shock and horror in my heart are beyond words.

"This, this is the end?" Gao Liugeng had the status of a student supervisor. He studied in private schools for several years when he was a child, and he was the most knowledgeable among the three brothers.He recalled the words of the sages in the books he had read, but he couldn't find any words to explain such a scene.

It took a while for Chai Rugui and Li Qingwen, who had fallen into a stupid and demented state, to wake up, and murmured: "What the hell! They can still harvest crops like this."

The villagers passing by smiled slightly when they saw the appearance of the three of them.They have seen this kind of scene a lot in the past two years. Every time a new assignment comes to the wheat harvest season, they almost always have this expression, and there are many people who are scared and shout.

Li Qingwen stared intently at the big red monster that kept harvesting and spitting out wheat grains, and said to Chai Rugui: "Brother, you said that this machine has already done the work of harvesting wheat, so why should we do it? That's all." Look? Isn’t this like waiting for the pancakes to drop from the sky!”

Not far away, an old farmer who was drinking water laughed and said: "Young students, don't dare to say that. Although we have machines here to help farm land save a lot of work, but weeding, fertilization, and watering, we still need someone to win the prize." .Besides, drying the wheat is also a laborious effort, and people must take care of it.”

Seeing that Li Qingwen and the others were engrossed in listening, the old farmer leaned over and squatted next to the three of them, and said, "We are close to the big lake here, and there is a lot of rain, so I told the child's face to change as soon as he said it. This side just got sunburnt, then When the sky is coming up, you have to put it in the warehouse quickly. When the weather clears up, you have to dry it quickly. It’s going to kill me.”

Chai Rugui said: "Uncle Liu, how was the harvest here last year? Okay?"

The old farmer said: "What's wrong? It's good! If nothing else, our village harvested more than 300 catties of grain per mu last year! The civil affairs clerk said that the land in our village has only been cultivated for two years. Insufficient, if in a few years, one mu can yield up to five hundred catties!"

After hearing this, Chai Rugui turned his head to look at Li Wenqing and Gao Liugeng, with expressions of disbelief on their faces.

The three of them were about to chat with the old farmer again, when the old farmer stood up suddenly, built a tent with his hands, squinted and frowned, and looked into the distance.Chai Rugui and the others also got up and looked back, and saw a carriage team with white flags at the head approaching the entrance of the village on the road in the distance.

Li Wenqing hurriedly asked, "Uncle Liu, what's the matter?"

The old farmer's face became more and more serious, and even showed a trace of sadness.Before he had time to explain, he strode down the field ridge, crossed the harvested wheat field, and rushed towards the carriage.

Chai Rugui and the other three felt that something was wrong, so they also got up and followed.Although they are currently undercover agents, and they are planning to sneak into Beihai Town or Fuldan City to make troubles; but since they are assigned to this village, they have to put on a show.

By the time the three of them were 200 meters away from the convoy, many villagers had already run over, some even wailing loudly in the middle of the road, kneeling on the ground and shouting to death, surrounded by a circle of comforters .

"What's the matter?" Chai Rugui asked a villager in a low voice when he saw the two spirit-calling flags on the leading carriage.

While wiping away tears, the villager said bitterly: "It's not the good deeds of those officers and soldiers!"

As soon as Gao Liugeng heard it, his eyes showed such an expression. He thought the other party was talking about Beihai soldiers, and thought that rebels are rebels, and it would be strange if they didn't bully the people.But what the villager said afterwards made him feel as if he had knocked over the oil and salt shop, with mixed feelings.

"It's just that they said they couldn't beat our Beihai Town, but they even killed the people in front of the branch! Bah! The court of the gods!"

"We have no way to live in our hometown in Henan. We have hid so far away, so we still won't let us go!"

"If you want me to say, Prince Zhao should lead his troops into the city of Beijing and take that dog emperor off his throne!"

The villagers surrounding the road talked a lot, and they all scolded the imperial court in the south.At this time, a tall man in his 30s broke through the crowd and walked into the circle. He first sighed, and said to the woman kneeling and howling on the ground: "Zhuzi belongs to his family. The officers and soldiers attacked at night. Our village is not only from the Ye family, but from other villages." A lot of people died too. To say ten thousand, I, Zhu Dagui, did not take good care of him, and I apologized to you!"

After all, Zhu Dagui knelt on the ground with a "plop", kowtowing to the woman to apologize.Zhu Dagui's wife wanted to pull her man up, but thinking of the miserable scene that night, she covered her mouth and started crying too.

Seeing Zhu Dagui like this, the woman sitting on the ground quickly stopped howling, and sobbed: "Village Chief, I know, it's not my fault, they are all bad officers and soldiers, my men are lucky, they are all fate!"

A group of people were crying, when Chai Rugui and the three saw a Beihai soldier wearing a big dark green hat also approaching.The hat was different from all the hats he had seen before. The top of the hat was wide and upturned. There was a metal badge pinned to the wall of the hat. There was a crescent-like black brim sticking out from the top of the forehead, which matched the other person's body. The two sections of the dark green military uniform made people feel an indescribable majesty.

I saw that the Beihai soldier first stood at attention and saluted the woman on the ground, then bent down and whispered a few words of comfort, the woman stopped crying and was helped by Zhu Dagui's wife.

Only then did Zhu Dagui stand up and said to the crowd: "Okay, we're all gone, let's talk about it when we go back to the village."

Only then did he notice Chai Rugui and the other three standing outside the crowd, and he stepped forward and asked, "The three of you are newly assigned? What's your name?"

Gao Liugeng knew that the village head of Beihai Town was almost the same as Lizheng in the countryside of the Qing Dynasty. The power could be said to be big or small, so he bowed and said, "My name is Gao Liu. This is my elder brother Chai Dazhuang, and my younger brother Li Zheng." arts."

Chai Rugui and Li Qingwen quickly bowed and said, "I've met Village Chief Zhu."

Zhu Dagui waved his hand and said, "What are you being polite about? From now on, we will be neighbors, so we should support each other. Listen to your accent, from Kaifeng, your hometown? How did you get together?"

Chai Ruguixin said that he started to talk about it as soon as he came up, and the surname Zhu is not easy to fool.He hurriedly apologized and said with a smile: "There was a disaster at home, and there was really no way out, so I took two brothers from the same village out to find a living. When I arrived in Xuzhou, I heard that Sheyang Lake was recruiting people, so I came here."

Zhu Dagui asked a few more people where they lived now, and saw that although Chai Rugui was not tall, he looked very capable, so he reached out and patted the other person on the shoulder and said, "Okay, work hard first, and go to my house for a drink after you've been busy for a while. Tell a woman, the good days are long!"

After he finished talking to Chai Rugui and the others, he turned to another old farmer and said, "Liu Laoshuan, how are the dozens of acres of beets growing in the village during the time I'm away?"

Liu Laoshuan was the "Uncle Liu" that Chai Rugui and the other three had just mentioned. He grinned and said, "It's all right! I'll close it soon. The people from the sugar factory have come to look at it a few days ago. The beets in our village are growing well."

Zhu Dagui said: "Go, take a look."

The sugar beet field in the second village is located in the east of the village. This year, dozens of acres of sugar beets have been planted. If the civil affairs department had not assigned tasks from top to bottom, the people would not have paid attention to it.

When Zhu Dagui arrived at the east end of the village with Chai Rugui and the others who were looking at rare things, they saw that the beet leaves in the field had changed from dark green to light green, and more leaves had turned yellow. Some of them had withered and were lying on the ground, and immediately said anxiously: "Liu Laoshuan, what, what's going on?! Why are all the good leaves withered? If you don't tell me clearly today, this matter will never end! "

Liu Laoshuan hurriedly said, "Your highness."

"Don't do this! Call me the village chief!" Zhu Dagui jumped on his feet and shouted: "The leaf stems were still in good condition when I left, why are they all withered?!"

Liu Laoshuan's complexion changed, and he raised his hand and hit Zhu Dagui on the head with the pipe stick, and said dissatisfied: "What are you talking about? The civil affairs officer said that it's like this when the beet is ripe! What you eat is the roots in the field, pigs I just ate the pole!"

Zhu Dagui rubbed his head when he heard this way, he quickly apologized and said with a smile: "Old Uncle Shuan, it's okay if I made a mistake? Then when will this thing be closed?"

Liu Laoshuan angrily lit a bag of cigarettes for himself, and then said: "The people in the sugar factory said that there is an accumulation period, but I didn't understand it. It's not sweet enough if it's harvested early, and it's not sweet enough if it's late." Frozen damage, almost in the past few days."

Two days later, the four-wheeled carriage from the sugar factory really came.Because there are only tens of acres, no large-scale machinery was used. A small beet harvester came, and it was harvested in half a day.

These farmers from the Central Plains have never seen what sugar beets look like, and they always come to see them when they are harvested.The people in the sugar factory didn't care too much. They picked more than a dozen good-looking rhizomes, peeled them and cut them into small pieces for everyone to taste.

Everyone looked at the carrot-like tuber after it was cut open, and tried to pinch a small piece into their mouths, then narrowed their eyes, with a satisfied look on their faces.

"It's so sweet! His father, bring me another piece."

"Mmm~~" Liu Laoshuan pouted, nodded and said, "This is much tastier than radish, it's juicier and sweeter."

Zhu Dagui also nodded and said: "Not bad! Next year, we will make more varieties and get a hundred acres."

The technician of the sugar factory laughed, and then told everyone about Boli Town on the north side of Xingkai Lake.When the villagers heard that Boli had planted thousands of mu of sugar beets this year, and that it would grow to five thousand mu next year, they all clicked their tongues.

Taking advantage of the time of harvesting, the technicians of the sugar factory taught the villagers how to silage the stems and leaves of sugar beets and how to preserve them.The so-called "silage" is to put the beet stems and leaves in the silo, and use the action of microorganisms to ferment the beet stems and leaves.Pigs and cattle like to eat the fermented feed. It has more nutrition than fresh stems and leaves, and it can also increase appetite and prevent diarrhea in livestock.

The key to silage stems and leaves is to choose a cellar.Generally, it is necessary to choose a place with high and dry terrain, low groundwater level, deep soil layer, and good drainage. At the same time, it must be close to the livestock shed for easy access to feed.

Chai Rugui and the others had no family to burden them, and wanted to impress the villagers, so they took the initiative to dig seven or eight cellars in one day, all of which were two meters square, and each cellar could store three acres of food on average. Beet stems and leaves.

After the sugar beets were harvested, the sugar factory's carriage returned to the factory on the south bank of Xingkai Lake with a cart full of rhizomes.Sugar refining is a light industry, so there is no need to combine it with heavy industry, and because of the relationship between Xingkai Lake, the sugar beets produced in Boli Town can be directly transported through the Ussuri River.

The sugar factory in Beihai Town is currently using half-manual and half-mechanical methods to allow more housewives to leave their homes to participate in labor.The sugar beet collected from each village is first put into a rectangular beet cellar made of cement, with a drainage port and a screen for removing earth and stones at the bottom.

The female workers first wash the beets with a lot of water, and the mechanized harvested beets usually have to be washed twice because they contain too many impurities. times used.

The washed beets are sent directly to the hopper of the shredding machine through the belt conveyor, and the shredded beets are heated with water as a solvent to extract sugar.

First of all, each batch of shredded vegetables will be weighed, and then sent to the vegetable feeding hopper of the exudator. Under the promotion of the double helix, the shredded vegetables will generally advance slowly along the double helix. The seepage water with a pH value of 5.5-6.5 enters from the tail end of the seepage device, and flows countercurrently with the shredded cabbage depending on the head height difference.The water vapor from the evaporating tank is passed through the steam jacket on the bottom and side to heat the vegetable-water mixture to the required temperature.The water temperature in this step is very critical, and the most suitable temperature for fresh beets is 70-75°C.

The next step is to purify the exudate, which aims to remove impurities and neutralize the pH.For the sake of convenience, Beihai Town directly adopts the lime method at present, and will consider using the carbonic acid method in the future.

The clarified exudate is then boiled to obtain white sugar.As for the remaining waste beet dregs, it will not be wasted. It still contains a certain amount of sugar. After recycling, it can be sent to livestock farms as feed, and mixed with silage stems and leaves for feeding.

Turn your gaze back to Xingkai Lake No. [-] Village.After a busy day, the three of Chai Rugui returned home and had a hasty dinner before going back to their rooms to rest.The courtyard where they live is composed of three wooden rooms, one for each person.

Over there, Chai Rugui and Li Wenqing quickly fell asleep, but Gao Liugeng who was lying on the bed was still tossing and turning.His mind was in a mess at the moment, thinking of the scene of eating beets during the day, and then thinking of the order of the court officials.

It has been more than half a month since I came to Xingkai Lake No. [-] Village. Everything in front of me is so peaceful, rich, and peaceful, which is completely different from what the court officials described.If it was a fake or a deceit, it should have been exposed long ago.

How can a person who can let the people live such a life be a traitor?That should be something a saint can do!
But when he thought that he was going to attack the "sage", Gao Liugeng's heart became more and more heavy, and he didn't know what to do.

(End of this chapter)