The Happy Life of Small Officials in Northern Song Dynasty

Originally, they wanted to refine oil by local methods, but they accidentally picked up gold bumps. People in the Song Dynasty might not understand Su Jin's mood at this time, because people in this era still like to use charcoal made of wood for heating, and use firewood, straw, and bellflower to keep warm. As a fuel, although coal is mined, it is not fully accepted by people because it is raw coal that has not been washed and screened.

Moreover, logging and excavation are also quite difficult. It is not easy to excavate deep caves in the ground, in the crevices of rocks, and to carry out frames in small holes. Without the support of advanced technology, the price is quite high; an expensive and useless Things will naturally be regarded as tasteless, so although the imperial court mines minerals and the people occasionally buy them for use, they do not actually regard them as an extremely important energy source in the future.

The difficulty of mining the "open-air" carboniferous layer discovered by Su Jin is extremely simple. More importantly, the raw coal is of high quality, with few impurities, and the smell of smoke and dust is very slight when burned. It is a high-quality raw coal production area, which is even more Quite rare.

Su Jin suppressed his excitement and carefully considered what to do next. This place is located in a remote place. The first task is to be able to mine and transport the coal. The first task is to open a road into the mountain. Otherwise, these treasures will be difficult to use, and all these require a lot of manpower and material resources to complete.

However, manpower is exactly what Su Jin lacks the most. Whether it is Yanyan Huanqing or Jingyuan Qinfeng, after the war, there are a large number of manpower to do things, and the establishment of coal mining mines and fire oil refining mines to increase energy To solve the livelihood problems of the common people, in the words of later generations, these two enterprises will solve a large number of employment problems. [

In terms of funds, Su Jin is not worried. Although the money has been spent recently, half of the 300 million yuan embezzled by Yinzhuang has been spent on horse food and the construction of the horse farm. However, manpower is low these days, and the remaining more than 100 million yuan should be more than enough.

The only thing that gave Su Jin a headache was that he was a complete layman in mining coal. Once the surface coal seam was exhausted and he needed to dig underground, he knew nothing about mine tunnel construction, ventilation, safety and other issues. That is absolutely intolerable.

That night, Su Jin discussed these issues with Wang Chao Ma Han and others, and Wang Chao gave a good suggestion: "My lord, we won't, someone will, we can go to Shanxi, Henan and other places where there are many mines to ask for help. We, we are paying a higher price, and we are afraid that people will not come.”

Su Jin was awakened by a single sentence. It is indeed a good way to poach people and change jobs. He did not expect this. He went to other mines to dig a few skilled talents. Under his command, it would be easy to solve it

At that moment, Su Jin immediately made a division of labor, and ordered Chao Ma and Han to go to Shanxi, Henan and other places the next day. He must hire technicians with high salaries, while he rushed back to Jingyuan, Qinfeng Road, and immediately signaled to the people to come to build work sheds and open mountains. road.

Half a month later, a large number of idle peasants from Northwest Fourth Road, nearly [-] people, rushed to this barren mountain named Baoshan by Su Jin, and built rows of work sheds at the mountain pass, and began to build roads; Opening up mountains and opening up roads, the scene is extremely spectacular, quite like the Foolish Old Man moving mountains.

Su Jin requires the road to be three feet wide, at least to ensure that two large carriages can drive towards each other. In the words of later generations, this is a two-way, two-lane avenue. In this way, the difficulty of construction is greatly increased. It is guided according to the twists and turns of the mountain, but there are still many dangerous places to walk through.Not only to avoid steep and dangerous slopes that are prone to landslides, but also to fill the valley with a large amount of rocks and soil. The amount of work is astonishingly large.

In the first ten days of July, more than a dozen high-paying mining technicians from the two major mines in Tongji, Shanxi and Hebi, Henan, arrived in Baoshan. The deep-fried dough sticks couldn’t help but click their tongues in amazement, the quality and reserves of the charcoal here are both high-quality, and the master Su named this mountain Baoshan, which is indeed worthy of the name.

At the same time, the construction of the road has caused people's anxiety, and the progress is quite slow. Although tens of thousands of people have worked hard and sweated profusely, in the past month, the more than ten miles to the coal mine can only be reached at a rate of tens of miles per day. The speed of advancing at a speed of [-] meters has seriously slowed down the mining time. The roads are impassable, and the required wood, bricks and stones cannot be transported in at all, and it is impossible to start mining.

Su Jin was in a hurry. Looking at the tired and disheveled faces of the people every day, he also understood that everyone tried their best. Dog days in July are the hottest time. One can imagine the feeling of shooting for five or six hours; and Su Jin can only do it in a hurry besides giving them some extra wages and giving them some good food.

One evening, Su Jin went to the construction site to inspect, and when he reached the end of the front road, hundreds of civilians were worrying about a rock that was more than ten feet high in front of them. It took ten days, and a passage had to be dug out from the middle, and it was useless if there were too many people; all the peasants sighed and cursed endlessly.

An old man with white beard and hair was sitting on the rock shaking his head and said: "It's too difficult to cut through this rock wall. It would be great if some gods came and smashed it with a palm like the fairy method of cutting mountains and rocks. Alas!" , Mr. Su is running around in a hurry, we are not gods, so what should we do?"

Su Jin just walked up to them, and hearing this remark, he was immediately enlightened. He secretly scolded himself for being stupid, but at the same time he was overjoyed. The old man's words reminded Su Jin that the fastest way to open up a mountain road is to use explosives to blow up the rocks. Well, the power of gunpowder these days is not strong, but it is always stronger than human power.

Su Jin immediately took people to Yanzhou and Yinzhou to buy hundreds of barrels of gunpowder for firecrackers and fireworks in the folks and gunpowder in government warehouses. It was greatly accelerated. At the end of July, with the efforts of everyone, a wide winding mountain road that runs through the coal mine in the Petroleum Valley and directly to the outside of the mountain was finally completed.

The following small-scale leveling and repair work will be done by more than a thousand people. The other people will be divided into two parts. One part is responsible for transporting materials from the outside of the mountain, and the other part starts in the oil valley and the coal mine. Excavate and level the site, and use the excavated square boulders and imported materials to build various facilities such as houses, sheds, derricks and so on.

After nearly two months of preparation, the Baoshan Mine has begun to take shape, the roads are smooth, the grounds of the two mines are level, and the buildings have been built.

When Su Jin, who returned to Qinzhou to spend the Mid-Autumn Festival and deal with Qinzhou affairs, returned to the mine, everything in front of him had changed drastically. On the tenth day of September, the Baoshan Carboniferous Field started construction first, and ten coal mining faces started simultaneously. At the same time, three oil refining furnaces enlarged and manufactured according to the simple distillation device were also transported to the Petroleum Valley, where they stood on the bluestone platform on the west side of the Petroleum Valley.

On September [-]th, ten trucks of newly excavated coal were transported to Petroleum Valley. Su Jin gave an order, and the petroleum distiller was ignited for production. Two barrels of kerosene were produced on the same day, which can be said to be a good start.

As the mining of coal is getting faster and faster, the coal needed for oil refining has far exceeded. Su Jin ordered people to make a large amount of coal into briquette cakes, and designed a furnace for burning this coal cake, which was shipped to various places. For sales in big cities, the first thing to accept is several state capitals in the northwest. As winter is approaching, there is no need to hoard a large amount of charcoal and wood for heating. [

The use of briquettes made the people of the Song Dynasty experience the speed and convenience. A piece of briquette can be burned for half a day, and the price is much cheaper. The reputation of Baoshan briquettes was quickly known to the northern states. .

A group of smart wives and concubines of the Su family actually added spices to the briquettes ingeniously, and made a kind of incense cake that emits a fragrant fragrance and has a heating function when it burns. Humbled.

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In order to expand its influence, Su Jin deliberately traveled thousands of miles back to the stables, and gave several carts of fragrant cakes and hundreds of special stoves to the important officials of the imperial court to take them back to experience, which caused a sensation in the stables; Ouyang Xiu was chatting with friends When he was young, he admired this kind of fragrant cakes very much. In his diary "Return to Field Volume", he wrote a passage between himself and Cai Xiang, Cai Junmo, one of the four admonishers: "If someone gives me a box of fragrant cakes, the king Mo heard it, sighed and said: "Incense cakes came late, so I only have this good thing to moisten my pen. The incense cakes are also charcoal, which is used to burn incense, and the fire of one cake will never go out all day long."

Because Su Jin did not agree with Fan Zhongyan's reform, although Ouyang Xiu accepted Su Jin's gift, he still had a grudge in his heart, so he did not mention in his diary that it was a gift from Su Jin. It came out of Sujia Baoshan, which has to be said to be a regret of history.

High-quality coal relieved the fear of the severe winter cold in the stables suffering from fuel shortages. In the past, most of the winter heating for millions of people in the stables was firewood, because the raw coal produced in Shanxi, Henan and other places was too smokey, which choked the nose. , and since the Taizong Dynasty, the imperial court has repeatedly issued edicts to ban the cutting of mulberry jujubes as salary, and coal has been considered as a substitute for cooking and heating. No one dares to use it, and it can only be used as fuel for ironmaking and kilns.

And it wasn't until the high-quality coal mined by Su Jin was tested in the stables that Da Song faintly felt that the era of burning firewood would be gone forever, and that fuels like Su Ji Baoshan briquettes would gradually replace them in the future. Firewood has become an essential fuel.

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