A small soldier of the frontier army in the late Ming Dynasty

Chapter 47
Since the busy farming season is approaching, the soldiers will not be able to train for long, so the performance evaluation of military skills can only be discussed after the busy farming season.

Moreover, Wang Dou has not stipulated death. Although the skill assessment is held every two months, if a sergeant thinks that his level is capable, or a soldier thinks that he has the ability to be promoted to a soldier, he can report to the captain of the team at any time. The captain then reported to Wang Dou, and Wang Dou personally assessed their ability levels.

For all military households, although the training is hard, everyone likes the place of competition.Here, everyone can drink a lot of water. Wang Dou will provide them with seven liters of water every day. Every meal can be full of rice and noodles, and there are two taels of meat every day. This is really enjoyable.At home, even if they are all strong laborers in the family, with the rice and grain borrowed from the fort, they can only calculate and calculate the daily food and drink expenses of the family.

Regarding the issue of eating meat, this was something Wang Dou had considered for a long time.

Only by providing enough meat can the sergeants be physically strong, allowing them to have the physical strength to endure high-intensity military training, so that they can become elite troops in the future.Eating meat can also reduce the night blindness of soldiers, giving Wang Dou a powerful attack method for night attack in the future.

After Wang Dou thought about it, he decided to slightly adjust the martial arts level treatment of future sergeants. In the future, the martial arts assessment will be superior to sergeants, and they can eat four taels of meat every day.A sergeant with average martial arts can eat two and a half meat every day.Sergeants with inferior martial arts can eat one or two halves of meat every day.The soldiers can eat one or two pieces of meat every day.

In the Ming Dynasty, a catty was 16 taels, which is about 150 grams in later generations.Martial art is a top-notch sergeant, and he eats four taels of meat a day, nearly [-] grams, which is equivalent to the Japanese army's food standard in the sixth year of Showa.

But even so, Wang Dou's five teams of warriors, including one team of soldiers, and one team of the Han Dynasty did not accept them at night, and they ate a lot of meat this year, not counting the other meat in the fort. .And with the expansion of Wang Dou's influence, this meat will become more and more a prominent problem.

Right now, the meat food in Daming is relatively monotonous, except for pigs and sheep, it is chicken, duck and fish.Moreover, the disaster in Daming is getting more and more serious now, and the price of goods is soaring. Last year, the price of a pig in Baoanzhou was equivalent to a cow.

In order to avoid putting all eggs in the same basket, Wang Dou decided to raise meat from a variety of sources.

In addition to pigs and sheep, chickens, ducks and fish must be raised.However, the environment in Baoan Prefecture obviously cannot raise sheep on a large scale, so they raised some casually.The cost of chickens is low, and you can go out to find food by yourself. You don't have to worry about it, and chickens can also lay eggs.The same is true for ducks, which can be put in the river to eat fish, and ducks can also lay eggs.If there is a plague of locusts, you can also drive those chickens and ducks to the fields to eat locusts.

It's a pity that there are too many infectious diseases in chickens and ducks. If a chicken plague comes over, not a single chicken will die.

The cost of fish is also low, and it can also be built under the pigpen, and pig manure, chicken manure, and duck manure are all good feed, which can greatly reduce the fish's demand for feed and other food.It is a pity that fish farming requires a lot of water, which is the disadvantage of Daming Beidi.

In the end, according to the meat yield, Wang Dou decided to focus on raising pigs, supplemented by others.

However, it was not easy to raise pigs at this time. At this time, the pigs in the Ming Dynasty could only be raised for a year at 130 or 140 catties, and the meat yield of live pigs was about 200 to [-] catties. It takes about two years to raise a fat pig weighing more than [-] kilograms. At this time, there is no such thing as leftovers. There are not enough people to eat, so the pigs still have to eat?They have to eat pigweed and add some bran, which also requires a lot of manpower to go out to beg for pigweed.

Moreover, in large-scale pig raising, it is difficult to find sows that can give birth and many piglets. Wang Dou decided to raise a hundred pigs first.

……

After the news of Wang Dou's decision to raise pigs came out, it became a hot topic in Jingbian Fort at that time.

Qi Tianliang accepted Wang Dou's request to buy piglets, chickens, ducklings, fish fry, lambs, etc. He brought money, and some experienced old military households, etc., and traveled all over Bao'an Prefecture, even as far as Huai'an Prefecture. Waiting for the place, and finally bought the number of livestock seedlings that Wang Dou needed.

While Qi Tianliang took people to buy livestock, Wang Dou also transferred a group of Jingbianbao military households to build a livestock farm in the area of ​​Baihu Canal.

Of course, pigs, sheep, etc. cannot be kept inside the fort, and have to be built outside the fort.At the end of the Baihu Canal, this place has been silted up and abandoned. Due to the diversion of water by a large water truck to irrigate the fields, the water flows here and becomes a puddle of water.

Wang Dou ordered several fish ponds to be dug here, padded with soil above the fish ponds, and several pigpens were built here.Next to the pigsty, some duck pens and chicken pens were built.

In the future, pigs will eat pig grass and bran, and chickens and ducks will either eat pig manure or go out to find food by themselves.The fish below can eat pig manure, chicken manure and duck manure.The manure that can't be eaten up can also be used to fertilize the fields.Form a circular feeding method.

In addition, not far from the livestock farm, separated by a depression and a ditch, more than ten mu of vegetable fields were planted to feed the military households in Jingbianbao.The fertilizer for the vegetable field can be obtained from various chicken, duck and pig manure.

Wang Dou's plan not only surprised the military households of Jingbian Fort, but also the soldiers and civilians of Xinzhuang, Dongjiazhuang and Shunxiang Fort heard about it, and came over curiously to watch the excitement.

In fact, Wang Dou's method is not new. This kind of circular breeding method was done by a family named Tan Xiao in Changshu, Suzhou during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty.

At the beginning of June in the eighth year of Chongzhen, Qi Tianliang brought back those military households in a mighty manner, and bought everything Wang Dou wanted.

He traveled to many places on this trip, and the farthest was Huailai City. When he reported his trip experience to Wang Dou, he only murmured that the price of goods in Daming was so expensive now. many.In the past, an old sow that could give birth only needed ten taels of silver, but now it has risen to 13 taels.In addition to buying fish fry, chicken and duck fry, etc., the money he brought out this time was spent again.

However, after the piglets and fish fry are bought, the Baihuqu livestock farm will start to operate officially.

Wang Dou asked Dow to select a group of women from Jingbian Fort, some old and weak men, and some children with working ability to herd ducks, sheep, pigs and vegetables.

Their monthly food wages are also paid by the fort, which makes these Jingbian Fort military households who got jobs very happy, and they have another way to subsidize their families, so that their families can live better.

……

In the current Jingbianbao city, there are rows of barracks of military households, separated by several streets and alleys.

Obviously, the military households in the fort do not have the ability to buy land and build houses on their own.Moreover, there is not much free land in the fort, so every household lives in the barracks.The current Jingbian Fort is also strictly forbidden for outsiders to enter casually.If any military household in the fort wants to bring outsiders in, it must be reported in advance, and it needs to be carefully inspected afterwards.

While building a livestock farm outside the fort, Wang Dou also decided to build a public bathhouse inside the fort, which Wang Dou had planned for a long time.

Water in the North has always been inconvenient, especially now that the climate in Daming is getting drier, it is even more difficult to use water in various places.Even in Baoanzhou, a relatively good place, many people have difficulty taking a bath, especially women. Except for the New Year, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival, they usually don't take a bath and wipe their bodies very much.This can easily lead to the prevalence of various diseases.

From the middle of the Ming Dynasty, public bathhouses emerged in many places in Ming Dynasty, but these were limited to some big cities, and most of the people who went to the bathhouse were men, and most of the women bathed or wiped their bodies at home.

So while the livestock farm was being built, Wang Dou decided to mobilize manpower to build a public bathhouse in the fort.

This is obviously very popular with the military households in the castle. No one doesn't like to take a bath, but building a bathhouse requires a lot of water and coal, and the cost is not small.

However, Wang Dou was still built, and the address was chosen on West Street, not far from a well on the corner of the street.At the same time, another well was drilled in the bathhouse.

At present, bathhouses in Daming usually have two types of facilities: pool hall and official hall.The former is a large bath, and many people can bathe at the same time, while the latter is a single room, which can only accommodate one person, or only a few people, and there are people who fetch water or take a bath for the guests.Of course, there is no official hall in the bathhouse of Jingbian Fort. Here, no matter whether it is a soldier or an official, everyone is honest with each other.

Women were not allowed to bathe in the bathhouses of the Ming Dynasty, but Wang Dou decided to build a female guest area, so that women from military households in the fort could enjoy bathing in the bathhouse as well.

Wang Dou's decision made the military households in the fort discuss endlessly in private, although the women were all happy when they heard about it.

Several military officers in the fort, such as Han Chao, Yang Tong, Qi Tianliang, Zhong Tiaoyang, and Zhong Rong also thought it was too shocking and would be a hindrance to Wang Dou's reputation.They couldn't talk to Wang Dou face to face, so they publicly pushed Han Zhong and Gao Shiyin to persuade Wang Dou.

After listening to the two people's eloquent persuasion, Wang Dou was silent for a while, and he said: "I heard that Xuanzhen, even in the capital, has been plagued by epidemics in recent years, causing countless deaths and injuries to the people. Do you two know why?"

The two naturally shook their heads, how did they know what was going on in the capital?

Wang Doudao: "It's just messy. Because the streets have not been cleaned up, flies, ants, rats and insects are everywhere, and the people have no water to wash their bodies, so they are more likely to be infected with diseases. Those women are also residents of our castle. If they get sick, we can't do it either." I was spared, so wash your body frequently as the first priority to prevent the epidemic."

Both of them were stunned for a while, and Han Zhong said again: "It's just that men and women take a bath together, will this be...too that?"

"Mixed bathing for men and women?"

Wang Dou couldn't laugh or cry, he didn't expect the rumors to turn out like this, he said: "Where is the mixed bathing of men and women? Those women, they have their own pools, and men are not allowed to enter."

"Oh."

The two nodded together.Gao Shiyin exhaled, and the expression on his face didn't know whether it was happiness or disappointment.

……

While building the bathhouse, Wang Dou also asked people to build several public toilets in the fort to prevent the military households in the fort from dumping toilets and pollute the environment, and at the same time collect a large amount of high-quality fertilizer.

After the bathhouse and public toilets in the fort were built, the military households in Jingbian Fort would start preparing for the harvest of grain.

This day Wang Dou was discussing with Qi Tianliang in the official hall about the grain harvest situation at that time, at this time a military household came to report with a strange face, saying that there was another woman outside the fort who came to seek refuge, and hoped that the General Banner would take him in.

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Old Bainiu: Go back to @路客@书友, in the book, Han Chao asked several subordinates to eat tadpoles raw. That was already in May of the eighth year of Chongzhen, and tadpoles were everywhere at that time.

(End of this chapter)