1635 Han style rises again

On August 1663, 8, Xiangjiang (now Rockhampton, Australia).

A three-masted galleon belonging to the Hanzhou No. [-] Shipping Company sailed into the Xiangjiang Port Wharf. Driven by the port staff, several Hanzhou natives immediately tied the cables thrown by the sailors tightly to the berth of the pier. .

"What kind of cargo is this ship pulling?" A dock clerk looked up at the docked three-masted sailing ship, took out an entry register and handed it to the boatswain in front of him.

"Except for some cotton cloth and a large number of coal mining tools, they are all native coolies." The boatswain took the register and replied with a smile: "A total of 520 Javanese natives and Gowa people were pulled.  … However, at this time, there may not be more than 500 people who can stand up whole."

"Bastards, you should be transporting livestock!" The wharf clerk spat, "The full load of your ship is no more than 400 tons, and it is a cargo ship, and it can hold 500 people, which is already a lot. How are you guys, you actually installed [-] people! On the way, a lot of people must die!"

"When we set off from Guangning, there were only about 200 people on board." The bosun said with a wry smile, "But when we passed through Baoan (now Kubang City, Timor Island, Indonesia), we encountered a merchant ship from the Nanyang Trading Company. , and pulled more than [-] Gewa people. Seeing that there was still a little space on our ship, they packed them all in one go. They said it was a lot of coolies that your Xiangjiang Coal Mine needed, so let us pull them here by the way.”

"Xiangjiang Coal Mine requires a lot of coolies, but it's not the dead people who are suffocated on the boat!...What the hell are you doing, why don't you hurry up and get a few carts and drag those corpses away!"

At this time, the three-masted sailing ship had already begun to "unload its cargo", and the skinny natives helped each other with a tired expression, and got off the ship one after another.From time to time, I saw the sailors on the ship driving the natives to drag the corpses out from the bottom of the cabin, and then randomly discarded them on the side of the pier.

Seeing this, a dock official yelled angrily at several nearby Hanzhou natives.These damned sailors didn't know that before entering Xiangjiang (now the Fitzroy River in Australia), they should check the "cargo" on board in advance and throw these "dead things" into the sea first!It's a good thing now, I got it all on the dock for you.In case of any infectious disease, more than [-] people near Xiangjiang will be unlucky.

Since the discovery of huge coal mines in Xiangjiang 20 years ago, the Ministry of Industry and Yunyang Prefecture have embarked on large-scale development and mining.Today, this coal mine has become the largest coal supply base in Hanzhou itself.

Correspondingly, around the Xiangjiang Coal Mine, a series of coal chemical industry, coking coal plant, retort plant, coal tar refining plant, coal tar pitch plant, briquette production plant and more than [-] heavy industrial enterprises have been built in succession.

The coking coal field can provide a steady stream of coke for several domestic steel factories; the coal tar refining field can stably extract coal tar from coal dry distillation, and can synthesize more than a dozen dyes for the cotton textile industry; the coal tar processing process , the residue after distillation to remove the liquid fraction is coal tar pitch, asphalt supplemented with crushed stone and slag, is the best paving material, which is more stable and flexible than cement pavement; while the briquette production field provides many domestic urban residents with Necessary fuel and heating supplies.

Because there are a large number of coal chemical enterprises gathered here, the demand for coal is very huge, which makes the Xiangjiang Coal Mine have an extremely urgent demand for mining coolies.After more than 20 years of continuous consumption, almost all the Hanzhou aborigines around Yunyang Prefecture and hundreds of kilometers inland have been filled in coal mines.However, the ever-increasing demand for coal still forces Xiangjiang Coal Mine to continue to expand its production capacity, and the required manpower seems to be endless.

During this period, the usual methods of mining coal were picks, crowbars, and blasting with dynamite.Excavators dig a groove about 1 meter deep under the coal seam close to the ground, and then use picks, crowbars or iron bars to break the coal into pieces.For harder coals, a fist-sized hole is drilled with a hand-operated rotary drill, filled with a certain amount of loose black powder, and blasted on a small scale.

Manual mining of coal is an extremely arduous and slow work. Several local coal mines in Hanzhou have tried to develop some mechanical operation modes to replace this labor-intensive, inefficient and extremely low-efficiency manual mining work, but 20 Many years have passed, and there is still no coal mine that is fully mechanized, and it continues to rely on countless coolies for manual mining.

However, the steam engine, which has made a lot of contributions to the mechanization of other industrial sectors, was quickly and widely applied to the ground machinery of coal mines, including pumping water, rail transporting coal out of the mine, and lifting operations up and down.

You must know that during the same period, whether it was in Daming or in distant Europe, after coal was mined, it was initially loaded out of the ore through wicker baskets or other containers with ropes.Later, someone invented the wooden skid for transportation, and dragged along the mine roadway.Even, in some places, ponies or donkeys are used to pull baskets of coal out of the mining area.

The earliest Heishan mine in Qi State began to use wrought iron light rails and small mine cars to transport coal to the outside of the mine 20 years ago, which greatly reduced the heavy physical labor of the coolies in the mine.

As the steam locomotive was put into use in Jianyefu three years ago, the Ministry of Industry and several major mines began to introduce steam engines into the mine to improve the transportation efficiency of coal out of the mine.

As of June this year, all the coal in the coal mines in Heishan, Xiangjiang, Nandu (now Melbourne, Australia), Daxing (now Brisbane, Australia) and other regions were loaded on wheeled mine carts and transported out of the mining area.

Two years ago, according to rough statistics, Hanzhou's local coal production had reached more than 40 tons, which was nearly a hundred times higher than that of 20 years ago.However, this output is still much lower than the coal production in the UK during the same period.In the middle of the 16th century when Elizabeth I just took over, Britain produced 20 tons of coal. By the 17s, this figure had reached 50 million tons, three times the sum of other European countries!
In later generations, someone summed up the three primary driving forces of the first industrial revolution, coal, railways, and iron bridges.In addition to the fact that the iron bridge has not yet been built, Qi’s coal output is also less than that of the United Kingdom, but the iron and steel that is the embodiment of the country’s hard power is far more than that of the United Kingdom. In 1660, Montenegro, Linhai (now Port Hedland, Australia) and The total amount of steel produced by the three major iron and steel bases in Nandu has exceeded 15 tons, an increase of 8 times compared with ten years ago.Not to mention, Qi State currently has a steam locomotive (train) that is more than 100 years ahead of the world.Now, the only key condition that restricts Qi's external expansion and ocean hegemony is the slightly insufficient population size.
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September 9, Nandu.

In the entire Hanzhou Continent, after more than [-] years of continuous exploration and development, although it is not possible to grasp the situation on all land, judging from the areas currently developed and colonized by Qi State, it basically has almost everything needed for domestic industrial development. All mineral resources.Bauxite, iron ore, coal mine, manganese ore, zinc ore, gold mine, silver mine... and other minerals, and the reserves are extremely rich.

As the most important iron ore, coal mine, bauxite and other industrial blood, the richness makes everyone amazed.What is particularly gratifying is that a large part of these minerals are distributed in the coastal areas. The coal mines in the east, the iron mines in the west, and the bauxite mines in the north are all within a range of no more than [-] kilometers from the coast.This is the best location for transportation.

But it is a little regrettable that the two minerals, coal and iron, are divided into the east and west sides of the Hanzhou Continent, and they are not aggregated together, requiring a lot of transport capacity to transport them back and forth.As for the integrated coal and iron industry established in Heishan, Jianye Prefecture, it is difficult to continue large-scale sustainable development due to insufficient reserves.Moreover, after more than 20 years of continuous mining and excavation, the mining difficulty of the two coal and iron mines in Heishan and Kaiyuan has become increasingly difficult.Although Qi can continue to be maintained by continuously replenishing manpower, the efficiency will show a slow decline after all.

On the contrary, the distribution of iron ore in the western region is extremely wide, and most of them are open-pit mines, and the grade is so high that there is no need for ore sorting, and they are directly put into ironmaking blast furnaces for smelting.Similarly, several coal mines located in Xiangjiang, Daxing, and Nandu are also extremely rich in reserves, and the mining difficulty is relatively low.For Qi, which is extremely short of manpower, it can only choose to adapt to the situation and make corresponding adjustments and rearrangements.

It was in this situation that Nandu Iron and Steel Works was established seven years ago (1656). Every year, several specially-made large transport ships of the thousand-ton class were used to continuously transport iron ore from the west for large-scale smelting. .

Although the Nandu Iron and Steel Works was established the latest, it has concentrated all the most advanced refining technology and smelting technology in the country by virtue of its latecomer advantage. In a short period of time, more than [-] immigrants gathered to fully guarantee the human resources needed by the steel industry in the area.

A type of remelting furnace known as a "cupola" was built five years ago at Nandu Iron and Steel Works, and it soon took off in the country's steel foundry industry.A remelter is a modified reverberatory furnace in which the iron is not in direct contact with the coal used as fuel so that impurities in the coal do not adversely affect the metal.

The invention of this improved reverberatory furnace is attributed to Liu Jihe, a blacksmith immigrant from Foshan.He had used this method when refining lead in Foshan before, and achieved good results.With the attitude of giving it a try, the master craftsmen of Nandu Iron and Steel Works built an experimental reverberatory furnace.But I never thought that this kind of smelting furnace also played an unexpected role in improving the casting of iron ore.

Coked iron obtained from the blast furnace is remelted with much improved homogeneity and purity.This improvement is of great significance to the entire Qi country.Because the use of this cast iron allowed for the casting of higher quality guns, especially for heavy guns on naval ships.For the past five years, the Navy and Marine Corps have not had a single blast of any type of gun due to the casting furnace.

With the widespread use of steam engines in Hanzhou, some blast furnaces began to replace the previous waterwheels with steam engines during the iron and steel smelting process, which effectively increased the output of iron and steel.

At the same time, the blast furnace equipped with a steam engine also has the ability to develop a rolling mill and a slitting circular saw.The improved rolling wrought iron plate technology also had a positive and beneficial impact on the production of tinplate.

More than ten years ago, through the butler of Ludwild, the former senior commercial counselor of the Dutch East India Company, Qi State introduced several skilled blacksmiths from the Bohemia region of Europe (in today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia), and initially explored and established a Hanzhou's local tinplate production process.After years of development, tinplate, a cheap metal material, began to replace clay pots and glass on a large scale, and became the most important source of materials in Qi's food packaging industry.

During this period, Qi’s iron and steel industry was not only second only to Daming in terms of scale (during the Jiajing period, the iron output was estimated to be around 16 tons, reaching the highest level in our country’s history), and ranked second in the world. Technically, it is crushing all countries in the world.You must know that whether it is Ming Dynasty or Europe, when making steel, they are still accustomed to using charcoal instead of coal (coal contains a lot of sulfur, which will reduce the strength of metal).In later generations, the British used coke to smelt iron ore, and it was delayed until 1709, when Abraham Darby completed this work in his factory in Colebrookdale, Shropshire.

On the other hand, the increasing scarcity of forest resources in Britain not only resulted in an extreme shortage of wood for shipbuilding, but also caused the lack of necessary charcoal fuel for British iron and steel smelting. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Britain had to import a large amount of high-quality pig iron from Sweden. .

As a fuel for smelting steel, coke is clearly superior to charcoal.First, coke, obtained from mineral coal, is plentiful; charcoal is the complete opposite in this regard, the demand for which can quickly deplete forests.Thus, coke will be supplied at a relatively lower price than charcoal.Second, the coke is less prone to brittle cracking, so more can be charged to the furnace without the risk of being crushed and clogging the airflow.Therefore, it is also possible to use larger furnaces to increase production.

At the same time, the increased height of the furnace allowed the ore to remain in contact with the hot fuel for a longer period of time.The coke can receive stronger blasts without damage to the furnace, which increases the reduction, so that the molten iron becomes more fluid during the smelting process than that produced from charcoal.Because of the increased fluidity, it is possible for the metal to flow into narrower channels in the mold, resulting in lighter, more ingeniously designed castings.

As the big shopkeeper of Nandu Iron and Steel Plant, Qiu Hongsheng is very confident that within five years, the annual output of Nandu Iron and Steel Plant will increase from the current 15 tons to [-] tons, making it the largest steel base in Qi.

Because, compared to Linhai in the west, Nandu has huge coal resources and abundant water resources, and there is also a vast fertile farmland around, which means that more people can be gathered.Compared with Montenegro in the north, this place has a temperate oceanic climate, neither hot in summer nor cold in winter, and the living environment is much better than that of Jianye Mansion.

More importantly, Nandu is less than 20 days away from the main population centers of Hanzhou - the southeast and southwest regions. This is a huge market space for the sales of Nandu Iron and Steel Plant's products.

You know, since the first Jian (Ye) Xin (Huai'an) railway was completed and opened to traffic three years ago, the Ministry of Communications has formulated an ambitious railway construction plan, planning to build a [-]-kilometer railway in ten years. To communicate the transportation of materials between the coast and the inland.In addition, several shipyards will need to build tens of hundreds of iron-ribbed wood-hull ships in the future, as well as the booming domestic machinery manufacturing industry, and the consumption of steel will be incalculable.

In the future, the continuous development and growth of heavy industries such as coal chemical industry and iron and steel will lay a solid material foundation for Qi State to gain a foothold in the Hanzhou Continent and strive for ocean hegemony.