Established a thousand-year family from the end of Qin Dynasty

Chapter 393 Great Construction ([-])

Taohuagang

ceramic workshop
"Burning again! Refining again!"

The newly appointed craftsman Shangshu Ma Jun is directing a group of craftsmen to refine "Liu Li".

A few months ago, some craftsmen discovered that silica sand can reduce the temperature of ceramic refining, and then used silica sand to assist in refining ceramics on a large scale.

In the process, they added materials such as plant ash to protect the furnace.

In the end... they did not refine better ceramics, but instead refined a kind of "glazed glass" with relatively high transparency.

This kind of colored glaze is clearer and more transparent than ordinary colored glaze, but also more fragile and fragile.

This discovery made Ma Jun, who had just become a craftsman minister by building sugarcane plank roads, attach great importance to it.

He immediately mobilized a large number of craftsmen to refine them every day and night for several months. Although most of them failed, some could be refined occasionally.

He wants to explore the specific refining materials and methods of this new type of colored glaze through continuous refining.

Many of his whimsical ideas have received strong support from the Wang family, such as [Cableway], which has already built one on the east and west hills of Sugarcane Island.

Not only that, he also built cableways on the east and west sides of Magpie Bridge Island (Honshu Island, Japan), so that some daily items can be transported directly from the cableway instead of having to detour around half a circle from the sea.

Ma Jun's version of "Wooden Niu Liuma" is also popular in Gancane Island and Magpie Bridge Islands, and is loved by many people.

With the promotion of wooden cattle and horses, some inaccessible deep mountains and old forests on these islands have also begun to be reclaimed, and a large number of small plantations have sprung up in the mountains and valleys.

Many retired sailors, security guards, and citizens of Taohuagang who failed to obtain the qualifications of the council, all cultivated plantations in the unowned mountains and forests.

This led to a greater increase in the demand for slaves in overseas regions, and every small plantation owner desperately needed slaves to work on their plantations.

Some Japanese people who hid in deep mountains and old forests on Queqiao Island were gradually found out and were completely exterminated since then.

For the Shu Han, wooden oxen and horses were just a simple means of transporting soldiers and food, but for the Wang family, they greatly increased the speed of productivity development in mountainous forest areas.

Technology is not achieved overnight, and it does not mean that it suddenly changes from backward to advanced.

It is accumulated over time. In the past ten years, a wooden ox and a horse appeared. Ten years later, a new type of colored glaze appeared. After another ten years, a new type of ceramic appeared. After another ten years, a better ironmaking technology appeared, which increased the forging temperature, and ten years later. Years later, a certain genius discovered the principle of a certain technology, and decades later, another genius perfected the technical theory on the basis of the previous genius, and so on.

This kind of accumulation will not see any change in more than ten years, even if it is in one or two hundred years, it will not be able to bring about any change.

But quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes. As long as there are many such small changes, after hundreds of years of accumulation, you will find that your technical level has undergone such a big change unconsciously.

Just like the annexation of the Wang family's land, it doesn't make much sense in a year or two. Isn't it just adding a few thousand acres of land?

However, quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes. Thousands of acres of land were constantly added. Hundreds of thousands of years later, the Wang family has annexed the entire Liaodong and became the family with the most acres of land in the world.

Walking from Luoyang to Chang'an, every step you take seems meaningless, just a little bit forward, which is really insignificant for the whole journey.

But when you really come to Chang'an, when you look back, you will find that you have walked a long way, and every step is accumulated over time.

A drop of water can wear a stone, and an iron rod can be ground into a needle. This is the truth!
Finally, another furnace of colored glaze was fired.

At first, Ma Jun just used molds made in advance to change the shape of the glaze just fired, just like making ceramics and ironware.

But after more than a year, the time came to the summer of the 45th year of Yanhou (255).

After firing batch after batch of low-quality colored glaze, Yuan Yi, another famous craftsman, discovered that bubbles would appear in the fired colored glaze, and then after the colored glaze cooled, the colored glaze would be shaped according to the shape of the bubbles.

So he wondered, why can't artificially create air bubbles to change the internal shape of colored glaze?

For example, it can be changed into a hollow shape in the middle, which can hold water like a pottery bottle.

Therefore, under his whimsical idea, the "blowing glass method" was born.

This Yuan Yi is Yuan Shu's grandson. After Yuan Shu's princess was kidnapped by the Wang family, she married a craftsman in Taohuagang. After the craftsman died, Princess Yuan remarried and gave her son her surname.

Yuan Yi is 50 years old this year, and is the second-ranked craftsman in Taohuagang. As for the first, it is naturally the craftsman Shangshu Ma Jun.

Both Ma Jun and Yuan Yi received heavy rewards for creating the new colored glaze. Ma Jun received 1000 million renminbi, Yuan Yi received 300 million renminbi, and the rest of the craftsmen who participated in the production were each rewarded [-] renminbi.

This move naturally aroused the dissatisfaction of some Confucianized family members in the family. As the inheritors of the way of Confucius and Mencius, it is unbearable for their family to pay so much attention to a group of Mohist craftsmen.

Confucian scholars have repeatedly proposed to cancel the preferential treatment for craftsmen and doctors, and to prohibit the teaching of navigation, craftsman, medicine, etc. in schools. Everyone should wholeheartedly study the principles of Confucius and Mencius.

However, these suggestions were ignored by Shang Shu Ling Wang Ba.

So they found the Patriarch Lu Lingqi again, and wanted Lu Lingqi to revive Confucianism, but Lu Lingqi was also perfunctory. As the patriarch with a different surname, she didn't want to make too much trouble, and everything was subject to the arrangement of the family council, very honest and responsible.

For the time being, this little episode did not affect the Wang family's emphasis on medicine and craftsman technology. After Ma Jun and other craftsmen developed new types of colored glaze, they continued to develop various siege and defense equipment. These inventions can also be rewarded a lot.

Just relying on various inventions and engineering constructions, Ma Jun has accumulated an asset of [-] million baht.

This is already a terrifyingly huge amount of property. After all, Yuan Zhao's annual financial income is only 30 billion five baht.

Of the 30 baht, 28 were used to pay the [Liao Salary] to the royal family of the Marquis of Yan, and the remaining 20 Li would need to consume [-] for military and official salaries, and the last remaining [-], All are used to maintain the extravagant enjoyment of the imperial relatives and harem concubines.

Originally [Liao Pay] was worth one billion yuan, but Yuan Zhao did not unify the world after all, nor did he have enough population, so after decades of payment, he almost went bankrupt because of [Liao Pay], so Sima Yi resumed [Liao Pay]. Afterwards, he negotiated with Yanhou Wang's family, that is, "pay the salary of Liao with the population".

In the past, Yuan Zhao paid Liao's salary of one billion yuan every year. Since three years ago, Yuan Zhao only paid Liao's salary of [-] million yuan a year, plus an annual payment of [-] young and middle-aged people.

That is to say, 8 million Liao pay was repaid with [-] people.

Considering that the empire is indeed financially tight, and that most of the sugarcane island has been reclaimed, only those places in the valleys are too expensive to open up wasteland, so they have no interest in those valleys for the time being. Now the Wang family has opened up more distant fruit The land reclamation of the island requires a huge population, so the Wang family also approved Sima Yi's new Liao salary.

The imperial court sold its yeoman to its vassals in order to pay off its debts.

The court saved money, which can be reserved for the princes and nobles to enjoy. The royal family also gained population, which can be transported to "fruit island (Luzon Island) to open up wasteland."

(End of this chapter)