1627 Rise of the South China Sea

Chapter 977
After Van Diemen succeeded the governor of the East India Company in Batavia, the number of banquets he held and participated in far exceeded the number of banquets he took with his fleet between the colonial points of the Java Sea and the Banda Sea in the early years. time, but definitely not up to the frequency of attending banquets during this visit to Hainan Island.The intensity of the banquets arranged by the Haihan people has already made him quite overwhelmed.So when Qiao Zhiya mentioned the reception banquet when they met for the first time, the expression on his face was inevitably a little strange.

After listening to Ning Qi's explanation, Qiao Zhiya could guess about seven or eight points, and said with a smile: "Your Excellency, don't worry, we don't have as many rules as Sanya's welcome banquet here, just drink freely. The Yacheng you went to earlier, Sanya is a place where wine is produced, how can it show local characteristics if you don’t drink it to your stomach?”

Fan Dimen can only express his helplessness for this "local characteristic". Although he personally likes to drink, he really can't stand Haihan's wine table culture, and he fainted for two and a half of the three meals.It's fine if you let go of drinking when you have nothing to do, but this inspection is of great significance to the East India Company, and Van Diemen doesn't want to waste this precious time in a muddle.He could only keep this loss in his heart, and when he had the opportunity to deal with the Haihan people next time, he would also bring a group of men who could drink to the battle, so that these Easterners could experience the drinking capacity of the Nordics.

Qiao Zhiya kept his word, and sure enough, no one attacked Fan Dimen at the reception banquet, and the toasts were all ordered, unlike the rule of "three circles to the left and three circles to the right" on the wine table in Sanya. After these six rounds of toasting, I have to return six rounds of toasting. Most people can't hold it anymore during the toasting stage.

Without frequent offensive toasts, Fan Diemen was finally able to taste Haihan delicacies with peace of mind.He had to admit that even with the same ingredients and spices, Haihan's cooking method was indeed much better than that of Batavia's cooks, and this method seemed to be different from the Han people's cuisine. The understanding of this way of eating can't list the details of one, two, three, but I just think that the method is more refined.Although he didn't know the Chinese sayings of never getting tired of food, fine food and fine food, but after thinking about it carefully, Fan Dimen felt that this was in line with the Haihan people's style of focusing on material comfort.

Fan Dimen also noticed a detail during the meeting. Qiao Zhiya, a local official, was responsible for much more public affairs than the two places he visited before. solving issues.This level of busyness can only be achieved by a few high-ranking officials in the Haihan executive committee when they were in Sanya.

"He is in charge of local administration and production alone, so he will be very busy." Ning Qi explained on behalf of Qiao Zhiya who left the meeting again: "Mr. Fan Dimen must have been in the same state when he was in Batavia, right? "

Fan Dimen wryly smiled deeply and said, "That's true. This visit to your country for inspection is the longest period since I took office."

At the beginning of his tenure, Van Diemen encountered the Mata blue army attacking Batavia. He finally survived until the end of the war and continued to face the heavy post-war reconstruction project. During this period, the Haihan people also took advantage of the vacancy to penetrate deeper South China Sea suppressed the scope of activities of the East India Company step by step. It can be said that there was not even a single day of relaxation during his tenure.Although he came to Hainan Island with a mission this time, it is a rare enjoyment for him to be able to escape from the original working environment for a period of time.Although Van Diemen also had various concerns before coming here, the facts have proved that the Haihan people acted fairly generously, and the inspection itinerary arranged was much better than he expected. For example, Changhua, which produces steel, did not expect Van Diemen. Got permission to visit here.

The next morning, Qiao Zhiya led Ning Qi and Fan Dimen to visit the local smelting workshop as scheduled.Not surprisingly, Fan Dimen saw the steam engine here again. The blower used in the furnace here is driven by the steam engine. The kinetic energy output by one steam engine can drive several blowers of the blast furnace to do work at the same time, and the efficiency is far higher. Beyond manpower.The materials consumed by the steam engine are only cheap coal and fresh water.

Fan Dimen also noticed that the iron and steelmaking furnaces used by Haihan were different from what he had seen and known, but Qiao Zhiya's explanation did not involve the relevant design principles and usage methods, while he The understanding of smelting is only superficial, so I can only take a few more glances, keep the shape in my heart, and plan to draw it later and hand it over to professional technicians to figure out the mystery.

Van Diemen thought that since this stove was of an unprecedented style, with Haihan's usual style, this thing must be the most advanced technology, and imitating one might have the same effect.However, his idea was too simple. Haihan’s design of the smelting furnace took into account its own technological conditions, and there were matching plans for furnace materials, fuel, smelting process and temperature control, not just The whole set of smelting methods can be copied by imitating the shape of the furnace.The steam-powered blower used to raise the temperature of the furnace cannot be manufactured elsewhere.

However, Fan Dimen guessed right. Haihan's smelting technology is indeed the best in the world, but due to the current conditions, there is no way to build oxygen converters, electric arc furnaces, electroslag furnaces, etc. For high-end equipment, blast furnace ironmaking and open hearth furnace steelmaking can only be built according to local conditions.Of course, even if the principles are the same, the technological advancement of the iron-making and steel-making furnaces built and designed by Haihan far surpasses the contemporary level, and both production efficiency and product quality do have relatively large advantages.In addition, Shanghai Han manages and arranges the smelting workshop according to the mode of modern industry, so the operation of the entire smelting system is closer to the state of the industrial age, rather than the common workshop mode of operation in this era.

"Most of the coke used in our smelting furnace comes from Heitu Port. After the coal excavated there is prepared, the finished coke is directly transported here for use." Qiao Zhiya explained to Fan Dimen: "From In terms of steel production capacity, the smelting workshops here already exceed the sum of the two provinces of Daming, Fuzhou and Guangxi.”

Fan Diemen couldn't help being moved when he heard this number. He had collected some information about Daming in the early years, and the information related to steel production was naturally an extremely important part.

Daming found and mined iron mines in as many as 230 counties across the country, including 28 in Fujian, 23 in Guangdong, and two in Guangxi. There are as many as 53 iron mines in these three places.As for private smelting workshops, it can be found everywhere. For example, the iron smelting factory in Nanhai County, Guangdong Province, had reached the scale of employing 3000 people during the reign of Chongzhen.According to statistics during the Jiajing period, the annual output of pig iron in the country has exceeded [-] tons, far exceeding the production level of European countries in the same period. Among these figures, the production capacity of Fuguang and Guangxi That's about half of it.With the production capacity of one smelter in Changhua, Haihan can equal to the sum of the two major iron-producing provinces of Daming, which shows its high production efficiency.

However, what Fan Dimen didn't know was that Haihan's smelting base was able to start so quickly, in fact, it still relied on the many craftsmen trained by various official and private smelting institutions in Daming.The private iron smelting industry in Guangdong is particularly developed. For the iron mines in Shaozhou and Huizhou, every year during the autumn harvest, people gather people and horses, and hundreds of thousands of people come across the border to open mines and build furnaces by themselves, inciting iron for profit.Of course, in addition to this kind of "wild" operation, there are more legal smelting workshops and mines that have obtained official licenses and paid taxes on time.

For example, the scale of the cast iron workshop in Foshan, Guangdong is quite large. There are thousands of practitioners in iron frying alone, and it is subdivided into firemen, casters, fitters, hammerers, etc., and there is already a more detailed division of labor.However, these handicraftsmen are still limited by the conditions of the times, and basically obey the guild arrangements, rather than free wage laborers of a capitalist nature.

In the early years, Haihan imported a large number of refugees from Guangdong caused by wars and famines. Many of them were artisans engaged in this industry. Later, most of them were concentrated in Changhua.And the Civil Affairs Department, through the contacts of these people, successively recruited many craftsmen in the smelting industry from Daming.

The Chief Secretary of Guangdong has relatively clear regulations on the management structure of private iron mines. The owner of the mine is the head of the furnace, and the head of the furnace is the general armor. Every ten people below have a small armor. They must fill in their personal information and then submit it to the county. Ya to get a business license.And Haihan directly obtained these lists through the people in the government, and then recruited people according to the lists, and pulled them to Changhua batch by batch for resettlement.This method of poaching people was later even used in government-run ironworks, where all the craftsmen were poached with high salaries.

At that time, the income of these craftsmen serving the government was about "ten stones and eight buckets of grain for each sub-branch, two pieces of winter and summer clothes, and two catties of cotton." Compared with the basic level, Haihan has always been very generous to craftsmen with professional skills. As long as the salary of the third-level labor is shown, it is enough to make most craftsmen tempted, and there are colleagues who voted for Haihan in the early days to persuade them. , This poaching operation went very smoothly.The officials in charge of this field have long been fed by Haihan's sugar-coated shells, and they turn a blind eye to such behaviors. As long as they don't make things too big, it doesn't matter how many people Haihan poached. Negative impact.

Among the thousands of smelters currently working for Haihan in the Changhua area, at least four to five hundred craftsmen were dug from Daming.Most of these people are already serving as the heads and foremen of various production links, and they have also trained more employees for Haihan.Recently, it has even begun to accept students from Annan to train workers for the ironworks that will be jointly built by the two parties in Annan within this year.

For the scale of the smelting industry here in Changhua, Fan Dimen can only observe it with envy and hatred.There is no such large-scale smelting factory in Batavia, and there are only more than 30 professional blacksmiths in the city. It is not bad for making agricultural tools, weapons and armor, but if you want to carry out large-scale smelting operations like Haihan It is indeed a bit difficult.Of course, the absence of large iron mines near Java Island is the most fatal shortcoming.While Batavia still had to worry about the source of pig iron, Haihan's production capacity was already large enough to lay long-distance rail transit lines, which really made Van Diemen a little bit stuck.

Before Fan Dimen came to Changhua, he heard that there is the longest railway line on Hainan Island, and the unique advantages of this railway line in transportation, Fan Dimen has also experienced it briefly during his stay in Sanya.For this invention of Haihan, he can only express his admiration from the bottom of his heart, but this thing is the same as many Haihan's characteristics, and there is no way to copy it to other places. First, because only Haihan can make steam locomotives, and second. It is because there are too many rails required to lay the railway, which is several times more expensive than the construction of ordinary roads, and it is impossible for other companies to afford this money.

After visiting the smelting and production site in Changhua, Qiao Zhiya really invited Fan Dimen to take the train from Changhua Port to the inland Shilu Mine.And Fan Dimen naturally readily agreed, besides taking the car, he really wanted to see what the conditions of the mines mined by the Haihan people were like.

In the afternoon of that day, the group boarded a specially added VIP carriage at the port railway station. The main feature of this carriage is the use of relatively fine interior decoration, soft sofa seats and glass windows.Considering that the interior and exterior of the carriage will be contaminated with a large amount of soot after each use, it is usually sealed in the garage next to the port station, and even Qiao Zhiya himself rarely calls it out for use.Only on occasions like today can this luxury car have a chance to see the light of day.

With the sound of the whistle, the train slowly left the station.The VIP carriage is hung at the very end of the whole train to keep as far away as possible from the coal ash and water vapor from the boiler of the locomotive.The whole journey of this train takes more than an hour, and during this period, it will not stop except for the wrong train with the opposite train.

Fan Dimen also took the train once when he was in Sanya, but the journey between Sanya and Shengli Fort was too short, so it was not enjoyable to take such a trip. This time in Changhua, he had another opportunity to take the train, which also made Fan Dimen Very excited.From time to time, he observed the scene of the continuous retreat outside through the window, so as to judge the speed of the train.

"Mr. Van Diemen, what do you think of our train?" Qiao Zhiya couldn't help asking him when he saw his curious appearance.

"Very powerful!" Fan Dimen thought for a while, and added: "It's just that the cost of this kind of railway should be high, and the construction will be more complicated. It may be difficult to promote it."

(End of this chapter)