stubborn thief

Chapter 324 Mountain God Princess
Back in the north, Liu Chengzong’s bedside readings were replaced with new ones, “Zi Zhi Tong Jian” was finished, and “Illustrations of Qi Qi Qi Shuo in the Far West” was also turned upside down, and now I have a set of “Tai Zu Bao Xun” at hand , is a collection of books obtained from Han Wangfu.

In fact, it is Zhu Yuanzhang's quotations.

After reading Zizhi Tongjian, Liu Chengzong was able to watch and study from a high perspective of a later person, and he didn't have any empathy. However, when he read the teachings of Taizu, he was full of emotion.

Jurwan will soon usher in the first snow, this year is still very cold, but not so much, the temperature is not so cold.

Liu Chengzong felt that this was related to the popularity of Juerwan. The Marshal's Mansion planned three vertical and three horizontal streets outside the new city, sixteen squares, and four porridge factories to accommodate tens of thousands of people who moved from the sea. .

What made Liu Chengzong feel depressed was that their training system always seemed to be lagging behind. The academy in Juerwan managed to teach more than 400 students who could understand Han and Fan languages. Suddenly, Mongolian language became the biggest language talent gap in the Marshal’s Mansion.

Plans don't always keep up with changes.

Fortunately, the Mongolian language is not a terrific skill in the army of the Marshal's Mansion. Many officers in service know how to speak, especially his guards. Except for Fan Sanlang, everyone has mastered this skill.

For Liu Chengzong, this can't be said to be a good thing. The guards are all low-level officers waiting for promotion, and they are only transferred to the guards because they have not established a complete wartime promotion mechanism.

These people all master the Mongolian language, which means that even now, promotion in the army is still dominated by the frontier army, and it is difficult for generals and soldiers from the peasant army to gain an advantage in the competition for military merit.

It is even possible that this person was a peasant army when he joined Liu Chengzong, but was a frontier army before becoming a peasant army.

This is like the survivor bias. The generals and soldiers who stand out in the peasant army are often extremely eager to learn, and because of their eagerness to learn, they are entrusted with work outside the military.

For example, Shangtian Monkey, Liu Jiusi, the Shangtian Monkey, is no longer a military commander. Instead, he was sent by his father Liu Xiangyu to Riyue Mountain to cooperate with Fan Chief Gonpo Dorji in charge of the Seven Departments and became a marshal because he learned the Western language and knew military affairs. The military training officer stationed in Riyue Mountain.

But this does not mean that Shangtian Monkey, the earliest joint venture, has been marginalized. On the contrary, Riyue Mountain is very important to the Marshal's Mansion, because it is the only Iron Mountain and Coal Mountain that has been developed and is under their control in Xining Mansion. where.

There are three main sources of iron ore in Xining Prefecture.

One is produced by the Beishan Iron Works in Xiningwei. It was originally affiliated with the imperial court and later turned into a private operation. It has two blast furnaces, furnace officials, iron masters, apprentices, ore dressing workers, blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, iron transporters, firewood pickers, and charcoal burners. There are more than [-] craftsmen, such as workers and bellows workers, who tap iron four times a month and start smelting for five months a year, producing [-] catties of wrought iron annually.

Second, merchants who purchase furs transport them from Lintao, Gongchang, Hanzhong and other places, regardless of the amount at a time. Last year, more than 2 catties were transported, but this year the road has been cut off.

The third is the newly built mine in Riyue Mountain. However, no blast furnace has been built in the local area. Since Liu Jiusi, the Monkey King, has been hired to dig and transport it to Xining for refining. Moreover, the number of employees is very small. Yu Jin.

When Liu Chengzong heard about this situation, he couldn't help but calculate in his heart. It was only [-] miles from Riyueshan Iron Works to Juerwan, but it took three round trips to transport the ore from there to Beishan Iron Works and back. Baili Road.

Not to mention that the production capacity of Beishan Iron Works itself is close to saturation. Even if it is not saturated, the cost of hiring labor alone will add five coins to the cost of a hundred catties of wrought iron.

"Isn't this nonsense? You can buy a hundred catties of wrought iron for only two taels of silver, and the food for hired workers is five cents more. Adding in the cost of iron mining and iron smelting, the cost of self-produced kilos is at most two thousand catties."

In the front hall of the Marshal's Mansion, Liu Chengzong sat at the head and clapped his hands and asked, "What's going on?"

It is not Liu Chengzong's ingenuity to make bar iron in the place of production. Everyone knows this truth. All the iron factories of the imperial court are built directly next to the iron mountain. How come they lost this wisdom when they came to their marshal's mansion?

"It can't be repaired, and there is no one."

Liu Jiusi shook his head and said, "Fanmin shouldn't hire miners to build a craftsman's workshop for iron-making blast furnaces and iron-melting furnaces. I have discussed this with my grandfather. The cost is high and the output is low. Why don't you wait for you to come back and collect all the waste from Hehuang? Fill in Beishan Iron Works Expansion."

Liu Chengzong shook his head and said: "Juerwan is more suitable than other places. We not only need the iron from Xining, but also the iron and copper in the area around the lake. We have Tongshan in the north and Tongshan and Tieshan in the Qilian Mountains in the north of the sea. More, just right in this place...how much money and manpower is needed, do you have a budget?"

In fact, to put it bluntly, Liu Chengzong's liking here is not only related to ironmaking and mining, but the deeper reason is that he does not want to give up the opportunity of external expansion.

There is the largest arsenal of the Marshal's Mansion here, and troops will be stationed in the surrounding area to form a large market town, and further completely control Qinghai Lake, with the possibility of westward expansion.

If there is no place here, they come and go, and the construction of water conservancy and land reclamation will gradually give up over time.

In places where Han, Fan and Mongolia lived together, the army was a necessary condition to encourage the people to settle and cultivate; and the relatively sufficient water source irrigation conditions in the entire Hehuang Valley could also leave them with a chance of survival in the extreme environment of severe drought.

Just a trace.

Even here, thinking of the cracked land in northern Shaanxi, Liu Chengzong was still worried.

Hearing Liu Chengzong's support, Liu Jiusi said with a sigh of relief: "I asked the master, I need a kiln, three iron furnaces, a coke oven, and a large mirror furnace. At most, I need six hundred civilians, four hundred soldiers, There are 150 craftsmen and 920 apprentices on shifts. To build an iron factory, you need [-] four taels of silver. After that, depending on the number of craftsmen and apprentices, you need a maximum of [-] shi for food and rations every year."

Liu Chengzong nodded slowly. The scale exceeded his expectation, but the cost was within his expectation. He asked, "How much iron can it produce?"

The Heavenly Monkey shook his head and said: "The number cannot be determined yet. I only know that there is a huge amount of iron hidden in the mountain. Iron mines are buried for more than [-] miles around the iron seedlings. If there are enough craftsmen, we can check more in the next year to know the number."

After all, he said relaxedly: "If only the furnace is calculated, the annual production of iron is [-] jin, and wrought iron is [-] jin. If it is not enough, more large furnaces can be built."

Liu Chengzong shook his head and said: "We can build an iron factory in this way first, but it's not enough to make new furnaces."

Cost is a very important issue, and when it comes to mining, it is not just cost that needs to be considered.

In the Ming Dynasty, various uprisings emerged one after another, and miners were the main force among them.

It's not that ordinary people who mine mines like to rebel, but that ordinary people who mine mines privately in this era have a high probability of breaking the law.

And mining has the convenience of weapons, so it can easily turn into a mass rebellion.

Throughout the dynasties, minerals such as salt, iron, gold, silver, and copper were banned by the imperial court most of the time. People were not allowed to mine privately. Those who dug privately were called miners, just like there were official salt, and those who sold salt were called saltmen.

Liu Chengzong recently read Zhu Yuanzhang's quotations, which mentioned Zhu Yuanzhang's views on opening silver mines.

As early as the 20th year of Hongwu, Ding Cheng, an avant-garde veteran of the government army, told Zhu Yuanzhang that there were silver mines in Shanzhou, Henan, which were often mined in the Yuan Dynasty.

And Zhu Yuanzhang said that a gentleman loves righteousness, a villain loves profit, those who love righteousness have their heart in benefiting the people, and those who love profit have their mission to harm the people.

He knew that in the Yuan Dynasty, Fengcheng, Jiangxi Province opened a mine, and the government set a quota for mining, but later it caused the people of a state to suffer greatly.

Because the land is limited and the upper-layer minerals are easy to mine, but there is a fixed amount of tax that the people pay each year. When the easy-to-mine mines are exhausted and the local officials are greedy for merit and do not write a letter for the people, this part of the tax must be paid from other places. Even if the imperial court has a heart to sympathize with the people, it has no way of knowing.

Therefore, we must take it as a warning, anyone who speaks profit is a thief who harms the people.

With this guiding ideology, since Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, the emperors after that were very cautious about opening mines, thinking that the benefits to the government were not great, and the damage to the people was too great, so they could not be opened.

However, there have always been opponents in the DPRK and China. Every generation has officials who advocate mining, and there has always been a phenomenon of private mining in various places. Usually, the main body is guard officers controlling prisoners, barbarians mining, and gradually evolving into rebels.

This situation continued until the Wanli Dynasty, when the mining tax and mine supervision were opened. From the 24th to the 32nd year of Wanli, it took eight years, costing 10,000+ taels, and levying 11 taels into the internal treasury, which disrupted the whole country.

Liu Chengzong is very concerned about mining, and it is essentially a story of "Yuan people have no time to mourn for themselves, but Zhu Yuanzhang mourns; Zhu Yuanzhang's mourning descendants do not learn from it, which also makes Liu Chengzong mourn Zhu Yuanzhang's descendants again".

Mining may seem like a 100% profitable business, but it is not.

Even in the era in his memory, roads, transportation, and mining were very developed, and mining may still lose money, not to mention that the production technology of his era was relatively low. The factory is also a real loss-making business.

Pig iron and wrought iron are 12 catties, and the market price is only around 4000 to [-] taels, but the cost required far exceeds this amount.

But the cost of minerals cannot be calculated so simply, especially when it comes to the military. If an arsenal is built in Jurwan to form supporting industries, the value of raw materials will be greatly increased.

Not to mention selling guns and heavy artillery, of course, if he is willing, he can sell as many taels of a cast iron cannon as he weighs. Presumably the Mongolian and Taiwanese in Wala will be willing to come and buy it.

Even if it's just made into a big iron pot, it can still sell for sky-high prices.

However, when it comes to expanding production, Liu Chengzong really considers the cost issue.

He asked: "Can the people of the Seven Divisions of Riyue Mountain recruit them as apprentices?"

Heavenly Monkey shook his head like a rattle: "Impossible. They believe in mountain gods, and they are especially opposed to mining. Don't let them dig. Even if our people dig, they will be attacked. Gonpo Dorji can't control it. It’s not something that money and food can solve.”

Liu Chengzong frowned: "Do they dare to attack my soldiers?"

Seeing him getting angry, Liu Jiusi shook his head quickly: "It's not that they gathered a crowd to attack, and they were not ordered by Gonpo Dorji. It's just that the people personally felt that they couldn't open mines. They secretly shot arrows in the mountains and forests. One craftsman and four southern captives died successively."

After all, Liu Jiusi explained: "Every time something happens, Gonpo Dorji will search the seven departments, and the murderer will go to the Xining Yamen to lead him to death... My grandfather doesn't want to make things too serious, so he only asks Gonpo Dorji to restrain the various departments , expelled the monks, and set the rules that we are not allowed to make trouble in mining and Qibu.”

"What do you mean it's too stiff? Everyone is dead, isn't it still stiff?" Liu Chengzong frowned when he heard that his father had expelled the monks, and said: "They don't mine, how did the Fanbu help the court before they didn't mine?" Where did the weapons come from when fighting pirates? If you say that there is no monk bewitching you, I won’t believe it. I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot in the south.”

He waved his hands and said: "The monks and wizards told the people to respect the mountain gods, and no one is allowed to mine, and they let slaves and young monks seal the mountain to dig gold."

This is a combination of upper-level interests and lower-level ideas.

Liu Jiusi didn't experience the Southern Expedition War, so he didn't know about these twists and turns. With a puzzled face, he waved his hand and explained: "Commander, I don't know what's going on in the south, but it's really not here. Those iron soldiers they used to , It was picked up from the iron cap, we dug the mountain along the iron cap, it is really different.”

The iron cap is the part of the iron mountain that protrudes from the ground. This is the simplest method of prospecting.

As early as in the Warring States period, Guanzi concluded that there is ocher on the mountain and iron below it; lead on the mountain and silver below it; .

"I don't care about those things. They have registered Qimin, and such a thing happened. If something like this happened in the south, their heads would be fertilized, but Gonpo Dorji was the first leader to belong to me. I don't have to. Follow up."

Liu Chengzong had just finished speaking, and before Liu Jiusi's smile appeared halfway, he continued: "Since they were driven to Riyue Mountain by pirates, now Razun has left and the pirates have been eliminated, let's go home. "

Liu Chengzong got up and ordered the guards to find the map, found a place on the map, and said to Liu Jiusi: "Tell Gongbu Dorji to lead his troops down the mountain and return to Daotanghe where our ancestors lived for generations. After that, it will be under the management of Haixi County. Give them the grassland at the foot of the mountain on the south bank of the Tang River, where the water and grass are luxuriant, enough for them to live on."

"This... Marshal." The smile on Liu Jiusi's face froze, and he reminded: "They have reclaimed more than [-] mu of mountain brain fields in Riyue Mountain, so let them go down the mountain like this?"

"More than 2 mu, isn't it [-] mu?"

Liu Chengzong remembered this: "Their ancestors have lived in Daotanghe for generations. They went to Riyue Mountain to worship some mountain god. I don't want to anger the tribe because of this. Let them go to the south to herd horses and sheep. There are also Mongolians there. The cultivated land is no less than the land on the mountain."

Anyway, before planting next year, Liu Chengzong waved his hand and said: "Go back and calculate the grain production of the [-] mu of land, recruit how many peasants are busy farming and helping workers in slack, and take a new budget from the iron factory, by the way... Recruit craftsmen to build me a huge stone statue on the mountain."

After Liu Chengzong finished speaking, he sneered: "That is Grandma's mountain. Qinghai Lake is the sun and moon mirror thrown down by Princess Wencheng. Even if there is a mountain god, it is Princess Wencheng. How could the grandma of the princess of Datang not let me mine?"

　good morning!

　　
　
(End of this chapter)