1627 Rise of the South China Sea

Chapter 1930
Although it took a lot of trouble to inquire about this not-so-explosive insider information, it actually did not help Captain Xue's mission, because Qiao Zhiya had no intention of resettling the North Koreans in the county seat. After the welcome banquet, all of them were sent to Daling Private Manor.However, being able to confirm the whereabouts of the North Koreans somewhat relieved the pressure on Captain Xue. At least his previous judgment and the direction of the reconnaissance arranged were correct, and the target had not completely escaped his monitoring range.

Captain Xue is not very optimistic that the North Koreans will come back to activities in this dirty county again. After all, even he doesn't want to stay in this environment for a long time, let alone those pampered dignitaries.But if the North Koreans don't show up in public, how can the mob he leads have a chance to do something?
Captain Xue couldn't help but think of the manor that was said to be Qiao Zhiya's private property that he visited in the morning. The high-walled compound is no different from a fortress, and he doesn't know what's going on inside. .

Although when he received the order a few days ago, he had expected that this trip would be extremely dangerous, and it was very likely that he would be close to death, but after the actual operation in the past few days, Captain Xue felt even more desperate.He is not afraid of death, but if it is difficult to exchange his life for a chance to do it, then the chance of success in this mission is really very slim.Moreover, he can't confirm now, if the action he is responsible for here fails, whether it will affect the direction of the larger situation. This responsibility cannot be made up for by giving up his life.

How the changes in the relationship between North Korea and Haihan will affect the overall situation, Captain Xue is not clear, but he knows that if North Korea gradually becomes a powerful country because of Haihan's support, it will not be in line with the forces behind him. benefit.So no matter what the ultimate goal of this mission is, he can only try his best to complete the goal, and has no option to retreat or give up.

All he can do now is to lead people to keep an eye on the manor, and wait for the North Koreans to look for opportunities when they go out for activities.However, at this time, the Koreans were no longer in the manor, but had already arrived at the Shilu mining area, more than [-] miles east of Changhua.

After more than two hours of travel, Li Lu and his party arrived at Shilu Railway Station smoothly.This time, Li Lue's desire to take a good train ride was finally satisfied. After running for dozens of miles, he also had a more comprehensive experience of the real operation of the train as a means of transportation.Sitting on a soft sofa chair, drinking hot tea and eating fruit, looking at the constantly refreshing scenery outside the window, talking with Haihan officials about topics of interest to me, I moved dozens of miles away without knowing it This kind of feeling is really new to Li Wei.

But this is actually thanks to Qiao Zhiya's arrangement of a VIP carriage for him. If he is allowed to wander for dozens of miles in a stuffy tank wagon for passenger and cargo use, he can experience the daily commuting conditions of ordinary people on this railway. , he probably didn't feel so relaxed and happy.

After Li Lu got off the bus, he found that the platform of Shilu Railway Station was much larger than that of Changhua Railway Station. This was mainly because the platform was directly connected to the freight yard where the ore was stacked, and the other end of the freight yard was the road leading to the mining area. Secondary railway, so the terrain is very open.The ore that has been preliminarily screened and crushed in the mining area will be transported here by small freight locomotives, and then transferred to the train to Changhua.

Since the materials transported out are mainly ores, the amount of transshipment is really not small. After the train they took arrived at the station, the workers on the platform immediately began to unload the goods, and then used the belt conveyor to load them on the train. into the ore.

The working hours of these workers are generally divided into two shifts, one is from the arrival of the morning train to the departure of the evening train in the afternoon, and the other is from the arrival of the evening train from Changhua to the morning Sail to Changhua.During this period, the working hours are long and the labor intensity is quite high. It can be said that it is second only to those miners who work on the front line. Most of the people engaged in this industry are immigrants who have not obtained Haihan nationality or inland mountainous areas. Li Miao Shanmin, they need to accumulate enough labor points in this way before they can get the opportunity to apply for naturalization, and after naturalization, they can get relatively easier and higher-paying jobs.

These labors are relatively cheap for the government, so they have become a special employment system that has existed for a long time.Of course, there are actually more special laborers in the mining area, that is, prisoners sentenced to hard labor and prisoners of war.

At present, about [-]% of the people sentenced to hard labor on Hainan Island are sent to work in the Shilu mining area. This place is far away from populated areas, and there is only one railway leading to the civilized world. Over the years, many prisoners have tried to escape from here. But the success is almost close to zero.

However, what Li Mo was interested in was not Haihan's operation and management of the hard labor camp, but the steam power equipment that can be seen everywhere here.The belt conveyor for transporting ore and other dry bulk goods on the platform, the small freight locomotive pulling the dump mine car on the iron ore in the distance, and the steam excavator, hoist, crushing machine introduced by Qiao Zhiya and others on the train. Stone machines, etc., all show that the mining method in this mining area is very different from the traditional mines that Li Wei knows.

In Li Lu's view, the steam engine made by the Haihan people is indeed a very advanced equipment, but the main reason for using this kind of mechanical device in the production site is that Haihan's labor force is insufficient, and these machines can only be used to improve work efficiency. This obtains higher income than methods such as manpower, animal power, wind power, and water power.

However, what Qiao Zhiya said on the train earlier shook his mind a little: "The use of more advanced machinery and equipment is the direction of productivity development in the future. We can use machinery to complete many tasks that cannot be done by manpower at present. Your Majesty, Making and using these steel devices is not just to save manpower, this is our future. In the next 100 years, 200 years, 300 years and more, we will build more and more machines and use them to change the world."

Although Qiao Zhiya did not cite any practical examples to prove his argument, Li Wei believed that this theory was more credible, because he remembered that the Haihan people came from a highly developed overseas country, and the steam engine This kind of thing should not be invented by the Haihan people who came to the South China Sea, but a technology they brought from their homeland, and the popularity of steam engines and other mechanical devices in that mysterious country is likely to far exceed That's why Qiao Zhiya has such a very positive prediction.

The Haihan people mined iron ore here day after day, transported it outside the mountain to smelt it into steel, and then used the steel to make a steam engine with extremely high working efficiency, and sent it back to the mining area to extract more ore.In such a cyclical process, Haihan's steel output and productivity have been continuously improved——Li Lue understood Haihan's operation in the mining industry so simply and intuitively.

However, if the mining method here is really as boasted by senior Haihan officials, Li Wei feels that it will be difficult to replicate it in the mines that his country will cooperate with Haihan in the future. After all, steam engines are something that Haihan has long stated that it will not be exported. home baby.At that time, the mining methods that North Korea can adopt will probably only be filled by cheap manpower.

But when he followed Qiao Zhiya to the mountain and overlooked the excavation site from a high place, he found that he had actually overestimated the abilities of the Haihan people.There are indeed a lot of steam equipment roaring with black smoke inside and outside the mine, and Li Mo couldn't distinguish the specific function of each equipment for a while, but the work layer by layer in this huge open pit with a diameter of more than one mile On the surface, there are at least two to 3000 people working with various tools, and steam equipment is not responsible for most of the mining work as he thought.

Li Lu observed carefully for a while, and saw that the steam equipment in the mine that was actually engaged in the work of "mining" was actually only a huge bucket machine at the bottom of the pit.The shape of this kind of excavator is very similar to the front of the steam train. A device consisting of a steel long arm, a stick, a gear and a bucket is installed in front of the front. A technician sits on the digging arm to operate, a bucket Going down is a large pile of earth and rocks, and the efficiency is indeed much higher than manual work.However, this thing is bulky, and it is obviously extremely inconvenient to turn the direction at the bottom of the pit, and it also needs to continuously transport a large amount of coal and fresh water to the bottom of the pit for its consumption, so the cost of use is obviously not low.

The ores excavated from the bottom of the pit to the various working faces of the pit mouth are transported by manpower or animal-powered trolleys to the rail mine cars laid on the slope of the mine pit, and then pulled up by the steam hoist at the pit mouth, followed by screening and crushing. Then the ore that was initially processed was transported to the railway station at the foot of the mountain by freight locomotive.

Seeing this, Li Li already has a general understanding of why Haihan uses a large number of steam machines at all costs. This is not just a matter of saving manpower and improving mining efficiency. It took several days to mine a mountain-bound train, and the cost-effectiveness of building this special railway would be greatly reduced. It would be difficult for Changhua by the sea to become the steel smelting center of Haihan Kingdom.

"Master Qiao, I would like to take the liberty to ask, without these steam engines, how much would the mining efficiency of this mine drop by?" Li Wei boldly asked Qiao Zhiya a very sharp question.

Qiao Zhiya didn't take it seriously. It's actually not the first time he answered such a question. He said frankly: "Actually, the mining process is not bad, at most it will drop by [-] to [-]%, but if there is no steam equipment, the processing The link of transportation and ore transportation will be greatly affected, and it is estimated that the production capacity will be reduced to one-fifth of the current level or even lower.”

"This means that if you want to rely on manpower to maintain such a production scale, you may have to invest five times as much labor?" Li Lu continued to ask.

As soon as Qiao Zhiya heard this question, he knew what Li Luo was planning, and replied with a smile: "This cannot be simply calculated by the number of laborers. My son, although this mine is not small, it can't accommodate ten thousand miners." Working at the same time. And it is not enough to rely on manpower alone for ore processing and transportation, and a large number of livestock must be needed. This is a mountainous area, and there is not so much forage to maintain the rations required by a large number of livestock, so we have to transport forage into the mountains , A series of problems like this will also be caused, but fortunately, these problems are a thing of the past for us and will not cause major troubles anymore."

Of course, Haihan didn’t have so many steam equipment when it first started mining. It could only rely on manpower and animal power to complete all links from mining to ore processing to short-distance transportation. Later, it was gradually used in some key links according to the actual situation. Steam equipment was used to improve work efficiency, and it gradually reached the current production level.As for the mining method that Li Luo thinks of, it is difficult to achieve the desired effect even with Haihan's engineering management ability.

Li Luo is not stupid. After Qiao Zhiya explained it this way, he immediately realized that the method he thought was biased. If he applied it to domestic mines, there would definitely be various problems that Qiao Zhiya said in the future.At the moment, he is also sincerely convinced. After all, Qiao Zhiya has managed the mine here for many years. This kind of rich practical experience is indeed far beyond what he imagined.

Li Luo only hopes that the Haihan people will not hide their secrets, and can teach North Korea the problems and solutions they encountered in the mining process in the past, so that their country may avoid some detours in the operation of the mine.

After standing at the mouth of the pit and looking at it for about half an hour, Qiao Zhiya proposed to have dinner first, and then go to another open-pit mine in the afternoon.Actually, Li Lu didn't feel hungry, but he walked uphill for a while from the foot of the mountain all the way to the mouth of the pit, so he really wanted to find a shady place to sit down and rest for a while.

Of course, Qiao Zhiya would not arrange for this group of people to eat in the messy and dirty miners' canteen, but took them to the garrison barracks not far from the mine. Although the officer's canteen here is not big, the environment is not bad. That's right, it has always been the reception job for the big figures from all walks of life, and today is no exception.

Of course, the officer’s canteen had been notified in advance to make preparations, so the content of this lunch was much richer than Li Wei expected. Most of the ingredients were all kinds of wild game from the local forests in Shilu. Pots and bowls were full and a table was set up.

As a landlord, Qiao Zhiya naturally had to put on a show of politeness, saying that the local area is poor and bad, and there is nothing good to entertain everyone. Everyone, please eat something for this meal, please forgive me for not taking good care of the place.

(End of this chapter)