Daming Yinghua

Chapter 449: New Goods Sold to Russian Merchants and New Firearms for Exploding the Tartars

After safely delivering 50,000 taels of silver to Daning Town, Zheng Haizhu stayed in Daning for a month to investigate three matters.

The first one is vinegar.

“This is made from sweet potatoes?”

In the brewery in the west of Daning City, Zheng Haizhu tasted the vinegar in the spoon and asked Zhu Tinghua in surprise.

Zhu Tinghua read the approval in Shangguan's eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

This royal family descendant who grew up in Dai County, ate the best rice vinegar in Datong City when his family was well off as a child.

The steps of steaming, fermenting, smoking, soaking and aging of Shanxi old vinegar are no longer a secret recipe, but to have a mellow taste, the raw materials must be either sorghum or yellow glutinous rice.

Last year, Zheng Haizhu brought Zhu Tinghua from Man Gui's team to Daning Prefecture and transferred him from an artillery team leader to a more suitable research and development position. However, the order he gave him was not to use the grain and rice for marching and fighting, but to use the sweet potatoes that had been successfully introduced in the bitter and cold land outside the Great Wall to make vinegar.

The principle of making vinegar is almost the same no matter what grain is used in the fermentation stage, but Zhu Tinghua discovered that the "smoking" process that originally made rice vinegar more fragrant made the finished sweet potato vinegar taste bitter.

He had no choice but to give up this step. The sweet potato vinegar he obtained was not so astringent anymore, but it tasted light and sweet to him.

Zheng Haizhu saw the deep meaning in Zhu Tinghua's expression and encouraged him, "It's really good, Mr. Zhu, I'm not lying to you, Luosha people will like this kind of jealousy."

"Well, what's the reason? Shouldn't vinegar be like wine, the more mellow and fragrant it is, the better?"

Zheng Haizhu smiled and scooped another spoonful of sweet potato vinegar, walked to the door, faced the sunlight, and admired the red liquid that looked more like agate.

She explained to Zhu Tinghua: "The last time I came back to the frontier, I brought back the specialties of the Ming Dynasty. In addition to tea, silk, cloth and porcelain, I also brought Shanxi vinegar and Zhejiang vinegar from our Suzhou and Songjiang areas. I found that the Luosha envoys prefer black tea to green tea, because they need the richness of black tea to relieve the greasiness of meat. But for vinegar, they prefer light and sweet, because they want to dip it in bread."

"Bread?" It was the first time Zhu Tinghua heard the name of this food.

"Yes, bread, a kind of dry food fermented from wheat, is softer than our steamed buns. Those Russians drip olive oil into Zhejiang vinegar and praise it highly. But Zhejiang vinegar is made from rice from Suzhou and Hangzhou, and like black tea, it has to be transported thousands of miles to Chahanhot. The cost is too high. The Russians think it is too expensive, and we can't make much money. It's better to use local materials and make vinegar with the sweet potatoes that are growing more and more here. It tastes very similar to Zhejiang vinegar, and the gross profit per liter is higher."

Zhu Tinghua understood, and after his doubts were resolved, his heart was filled with a real sense of accomplishment.

In Datong, he suffered poverty, humiliation, frame-up, and the subsequent physical disability. Only after arriving at this important military town outside the Great Wall did he feel that his human dignity had returned.

Although the foreign female general, He Zhuo, whom he had a secret crush on, did not seem to have any affection for him, but after being resettled in Daning City, Zhu Tinghua gradually forgot about the beauty in his busy work. He later thought that it was because he did not really love her deeply.

At this moment, having received sincere recognition, Zhu Tinghua became more positive.

"Mrs. Zheng, sweet potatoes can be used to make wine. However, compared with sorghum wine, sweet potato wine is not as good and tastes a bit bitter."

Zheng Haizhu asked with great interest: "So, is this sweet potato wine spicy? I mean, does it burn you after drinking it?" Zhu Tinghua nodded: "It burns, as if there is a ball of fire in my stomach."

"That's fine, the Luosha people will like it too," Zheng Haizhu said confidently, "They live further north and are colder, so they need this kind of wine that burns like a knife to give them the illusion of warmth, and they will buy it. You can also brew some wine. If you don't have enough manpower, I will ask Mr. Huang to find you some civilians. I will also tell Mr. Huang that in addition to setting up a new financial department in Daning Town to manage the bank of your fellow Shanxi native Chang Gongzi, a new commercial department will also be set up, with tea, horse, silk and cloth, wine and vinegar and other departments. Naturally, you will be the head of the wine and vinegar department."

Zhu Tinghua was even happier and asked boldly, "Then, can a commoner hold an official position?"

Zhu Tinghua had no idea that this was the prototype of state-owned light industry. The first thing he thought of was to ask for an official robe with a patch on the chest.

Zheng Haizhu said seriously: "Of course, just like the Armory Bureau under the Ministry of Works, the person in charge also has a rank."

After encouraging Zhu Tinghua, Zheng Haizhu changed the venue and, led by Ma Xianglin, went to inspect the results of Song Yingxing's grenade making.

Song Yingxing seems to be more ambitious than Zhu Tinghua.

"Madam, this whale oil is really a good thing. In the dead of winter in the northern part of the Great Wall, even the breath turns into ice, but this oil will not freeze. It can be refined with caustic soda."

"Well, the red stuff is expensive for a reason. Well, before I left last time, I was worried that the strong water oil would explode like a cannon. Did you test it and it worked?"

Song Yingxing showed a lingering fear: "Thanks to my wife's reminder, I took the gunpowder maker and followed Xu Hanlin's "Method of Making Strong Water". After making strong water, I mixed it with refined oil and tried a few drops on pottery shards. I used a long pole to pick up a stone and smashed it. The first two times, nothing happened. The third time, the pottery shard was suddenly blown to pieces like a porcelain thunder."

"Then how do you solve it? Do you mix it with the soil and ash I mentioned?"

"Madam, use rice bran or rotten cotton wool," Song Yingxing took a hollow iron ball from the craftsman and demonstrated, "soak the rice bran or cotton wool in strong water and oil, add a little bit of saltpeter powder, fill the bottom of the iron ball, compact the loess on top, but leave a hole in the middle, and insert a salt bran wooden pole. We tried it, and it wouldn't explode after throwing it several times, unless we lit the salt bran wooden pole and threw it out."

As he spoke, Song Yingxing personally went to pick up two "grenades", threw one onto the empty slope first, then lit the salt bran wood of the other one and threw it out again.

Sure enough, the former was like an ordinary lump of iron, while the latter exploded violently as it landed on the ground.

Zheng Haizhu went over to take a closer look and saw that the iron pieces could explode as far as two meters away, which is about six or seven meters in modern terms.

She thought for a moment and said to Ma Xianglin, "Xianglin, this kind of hand grenade is more powerful than a porcelain mine. In field battles, we mainly deal with cavalry and infantry that have rushed past the range of artillery and matchlock guns. Infantry is slow and close to each other, so it is easier for soldiers throwing hand grenades to calculate the timing. Cavalry is more difficult. You have fought head-on with Huang Taiji's Plain White Banner, and you are familiar with the formation and speed of the Tartar cavalry. Therefore, you have to estimate the speed of the cavalry and the distance between them when they charge, so that Mr. Song can make the grenade more accurate."

Ma Xianglin had practical experience, and Song Yingxing had the mindset of a science and engineering guy, so both of them understood it as soon as they heard it.

What Zheng Haizhu was talking about was actually the "delay time" and "killing radius" factors in the grenade principle.

At present, the hand grenades made by Song Yingxing have taken safety and primitive detonators into consideration. What needs to be improved is the timing of the explosion. It cannot explode when thrown in mid-air, or it cannot explode after a while after being thrown into the enemy camp.

Also, when exploding, the effective killing distance of the iron piece must find a balance between the farthest possible distance and the weight of the grenade itself. If the iron lump is too big, the soldiers will definitely not be able to carry much.