People in the Ming Dynasty are lawless

Chapter 712 Chen Han's management method! Old Zhu was shocked!

Chen Han's mouth twitched. This loudspeaker was clearly the latest experimental product of the Institute of Physics, but he didn't expect that it was used by the Urban Management Bureau first.

Just as he was in a daze, Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly pulled his sleeve. The old man's eyes widened, as if he had seen a ghost - beside the stone railing of the river bank, three scholars were stuffing paper balls into a carved iron cabinet, and the cabinet door was painted with four big characters "Waste Paper Recycling".

"They... are burning night incense?" Zhu Yuanzhang's dialect came out in shock.

Zhu Youwei smiled so hard that her pearl strings trembled: "That's the garbage sorting box designed by my husband!" She pointed to the small mechanism on the side of the iron cabinet, "Ten pieces of waste paper can be exchanged for a candle, and twenty pieces can be exchanged for bamboo paper..."

Before he finished speaking, the youngest scholar suddenly cheered.

He took out a piece of paper with a red seal from the secret compartment of the iron cabinet. The words "Five cents for tea" were shining under the lantern.

Zhu Yuanzhang's bamboo stick fell to the ground with a clang. When the old man bent down to pick it up, he heard more sounds of wooden wheels coming from the alley.

The old craftsman pushing the sugar figures has a "Health Permit" hanging on his cart, and the woman selling wontons has a "Health Card" around her waist.

The most amazing thing was an old man selling roasted sweet potatoes. He actually had an ash tray with an iron mesh under the stove, so not a single spark could leak onto the bluestone slabs.

"This...this..." Zhu Yuanzhang's Adam's apple rolled up and down, and he suddenly grabbed Chen Han's collar, "You brought all the rules from two hundred years ago here?"

Just as Chen Han was about to explain, the sound of stringed instruments suddenly drifted over the river.

A pleasure boat with a lantern with the words "Qinhuai Patrol" hanging on it slowly approached the shore. An officer in black boots jumped ashore, holding a "List of Stall Owners" in his hand: "Wang's Wonton Shop - Are the bamboo sticks you received today enough?"

The woman selling wontons nodded hurriedly and took out a piece of bamboo with a number engraved on it from her bosom.

When the officer was checking with the lantern, Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly discovered that he had a strange iron box on his waist.

"That's called a fire stick." Chen Han leaned over to the old man's ear to explain, "It's actually a simple lighter. The Physics Institute uses saltpeter and sulfur..."

Zhu Yuanzhang could no longer listen.

The old man's eyes were fixed on a stall selling clay figurines - the stall owner was pressing waste clay into a wooden box marked "recyclable", and there was a layer of fine gauze filter at the bottom of the box.

What’s even more amazing is the glass-covered oil lamp hanging above the stall, on which the inscription “Kerosene lamps are strictly prohibited, rapeseed oil must be used” is clearly visible.

"Chen kid..." Zhu Yuanzhang's voice suddenly became vague, "Tell me the truth, people in the future will call this... call it..."

"Creating a civilized city." Chen Han was hit with a bamboo stick as soon as he finished speaking.

The old man suddenly laughed, startling the cormorants on the patrolling pleasure boat and causing them to flutter into the air.

He snatched Chen Han's purse and poured all the remaining copper coins into the tin can of the old man selling sugar paintings: "Draw us a... draw us a..." He waved the bamboo stick in the air for a long time and finally pointed it at Chen Han, "Draw this nosy boy!"

By the time the syrup solidified on the bluestone slabs, the night market was already as lively as a boiling pot.

Zhu Yuanzhang was chewing on sesame candy while watching a few old men wearing "Street Cleaning Officer" armbands going from stall to stall to check on the garbage sorting.

What surprised him most was the stall selling lotus root powder - the stall owner actually used fine linen to filter the residue and poured all the filtered juice into a wooden barrel with iron hoops.

“This bucket…” Zhu Yuanzhang’s sugar residue was stuck to his beard.

"There's a secret compartment at the bottom of the barrel." Chen Han pointed to the teahouse that was closing up, "Look over there—"

Dr. Tea is pouring tea leaves into the green bucket and coal ash into the ash bucket.

What's even more amazing is the rag he used to wipe the table - all the black water wrung out flowed into a ceramic jar with a mesh.

Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly discovered that the drainage ditches on the entire street had been changed to a sloped type, and the copper nets embedded in the bottom of the ditches were glowing under the lanterns.

"The copper net is replaced every three days." The patrol officer happened to pass by and explained casually, "It can filter out a lot of treasures - that's how we found the jade ring of Shopkeeper Li from East Street last month!"

Zhu Youwei suddenly cried out softly. Following her gaze, Chen Han saw a little girl wearing the uniform of the "Charity Bureau" leading even younger children to collect swill from stall to stall.

The children have a "food waste recycling points card" hanging around their waists, and a red stamp is placed on the card every time a bucket is full.

"Ten points for the Three Character Classic, twenty points for the simplified version of The Exploitation of the Works of Nature..." Zhu Yuanzhang read the words on the back of the score card, and suddenly turned his head to glare at Chen Han, "You even ordered the baby around?"

Before Chen Han could reply, the leading girl had already bowed: "Grandpa, we are not servants—" She proudly held up the words embroidered on her chest, "We are the 'Jinling Little Urban Management'! Last month, we helped the Street Cleaning Division catch a guy who dumped stale water into the river!"

Zhu Yuanzhang's sesame candy fell to the ground.

When the old man bent down to pick it up, he found that there were thin copper wires embedded in the cracks of the bluestone slabs - this was the "road temperature monitoring system" proposed by Chen Han last month. The copper wires were connected to the mercury column in the cellar, and before it froze, servants would come to lay straw mats.

Suddenly, cheers were heard at the end of the night market.

It turned out that a storyteller had set up a stall, and the wake-up stick was filming a new chapter of "Chen Gong'an" - it was about how Chen Han designed a public toilet with a sachet.

Zhu Yuanzhang's beard stood on end as he listened, because the storyteller made the joke of "sweeping the streets as punishment for not flushing the toilet" more exciting than the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

"This book..." Zhu Yuanzhang poked the blue cloth sign hanging behind the storyteller with his bamboo stick. The red seal of "Produced by the Imperial Press" on it glowed blood-red under the lamplight.

"It was my granddaughter's idea." Zhu Youwei smiled as she handed her grandfather a cup of lotus seed soup. "My husband's new policies were too difficult to understand, so I asked the Imperial Academy to turn them into a storybook." She pointed to the "degradable" mark on the bottom of the bowl, "Look, even the lotus leaf bowl..."

Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly put the empty bowl on Chen Han's head.

The old man laughed so hard that he fell backwards, because the words "Start garbage classification from me" were clearly printed on the bottom of the bowl.

Amid laughter, the night watchman rang the gong to signal the midnight hour, and the stall owners immediately took action - in just half a cup of tea, the whole street was as clean as if it had been washed with water, with only the garbage sorting trucks collecting the last round of slop.

Zhu Yuanzhang's bamboo stick tapped out a crisp rhythm on the bluestone slabs, and the old man's nostrils suddenly flared - a sweet fragrance mixed with sesame, maltose and osmanthus honey wafted in the air.

Following the smell, he saw a Hu merchant wearing a David hat turning over baked naan with an iron shovel. The sparks from the naan pit were caught tightly by a copper net.

“This is…” When the old man got closer, the naan was being picked out by an iron hook, and its golden surface was sprinkled with cumin seeds from the Western Regions.

"Rose naan from Kashgar!" Hu Shang shouted in stiff official language. Suddenly, he saw the mud spots on Zhu Yuanzhang's collar and broke off a piece of hot naan and stuffed it in his hand. "Try it, old man! It's made with glutinous rice flour from Jiangnan and rose sauce from the Western Regions!"

The hot naan somersaulted in his palm.

The moment Zhu Yuanzhang bit into it, the crispy outer skin fell off, while the soft and tender inside gushed out.

The old man's eyes widened: "This filling..."

"The special spice supply certificate approved by the Yingtian government!" The Hu merchant proudly slapped the blue paper document on the side of the naan pit. "Three catties of Western spices are equivalent to one cent of tax. It's much better than smuggling!"

Chen Han was suddenly choked by the white smoke that came from the side and started coughing.

Turning around, I saw a woman dressed in southern Yunnan style pouring milky white sauce into an iron pot.

The iron pot placed on the bluestone slab actually had spiral grooves, and the boiling liquid flowed along the grooves into a snow-white cloud shape.

"Dali Milk Fan!" The woman used a long bamboo stick to pick up the solidified milk skin, "Use milk from Weigang, Jinling, and match it with Cangshan green plum sauce--"

Zhu Yuanzhang's bamboo stick had already poked the edge of the pot.

The old man asked using a new word he had learned: "Is this pot...recyclable?"

"You have a sharp eye!" The woman pulled out a scaled iron box from the bottom of the stall, "All the waste oil is here! If you collect ten kilograms, you can exchange it for a new government-made pot!" She suddenly lowered her voice, "Actually..." pointing to the brightly lit three-story building in the distance, "The owner of Juxianlou collects this to make lamp oil, it burns more durable than vegetable oil!"

Cheers suddenly broke out in the center of the night market.

It turned out to be a Shandong man performing the "Fire-Line Noodle Pulling" show. When the dough was swung into golden threads in his hands, onlookers threw coins into a clay pot marked "For Rewards Only".

Zhu Yuanzhang squinted his eyes and saw that the pottery jar was actually connected to a delicate copper scale. Every time the weight increased by one penny, a mint candy would automatically pop out of the scale. "A little trick from the Physics Department." Zhu Youwei explained with a smile, "My husband said this is called... an instant feedback mechanism."

The most amazing thing is the beverage cart next to the noodle stall.

Six glass jars were filled with Lingnan lychees, Yanshan hawthorns, and even Liaodong frozen pears. A vendor wearing a "health inspector" sleeve was using a copper spoon to dispense the drinks, with dissolvable rice paper under each cup.

"This ice..." Zhu Yuanzhang licked the water drops on the glass jar.

"Stored in the Xuanwu Lake ice cellar!" The vendor slapped the iron stamp on the body of the car that said "Specially licensed to harvest ice". "According to the new rules of the young master, if you take one zhang of ice, you have to plant ten saplings--"

He suddenly pointed at the newly transplanted camphor trees behind the beverage cart and said, "Look, they have grown into a forest this year!"

When they turned the corner, the three of them stopped at the same time.

More than twenty stall owners wearing headdresses of different ethnic groups formed a circle, with a bronze pot with a diameter of more than one meter in the middle.

Floating in the boiling soup are Sichuan peppercorns, Fujian scallops, and even a few rare Siamese lemongrass.

"Five Lakes and Four Seas Pot!" An old man wearing a "General Dispatcher" badge came forward, "Ten cents per person, help yourself with your chopsticks!"

The moment he lifted the lid of the pot, a "Food Traceability List" floated out of the steam, densely covered with red seals of various states and prefectures.

Zhu Yuanzhang's bamboo stick suddenly began to tremble.

The old man picked up a slice of Xuanwei ham as thin as a cicada's wing with the tip of his walking stick and looked at it carefully against the lantern: "When we fought Zhang Shicheng..."

Before he could finish his words, he was choked by the ham he stuffed into his mouth - the salty and fresh taste had a hint of pine wood fragrance unique to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

"Grandpa, try this!" A young man in a ramie shorts came over, holding a lotus leaf bag with three crystal cakes in it. "It's made with lotus root powder from Dongting Lake, and the mold is based on the one in The Exploitation of the Works of Nature!"

Chen Han noticed that there was a small piece of paper embedded in the bottom of the pastries.

When I took a look in the light of a lantern, I saw that it was a miniature summary of the Food Hygiene Law, with red words "Report dirt and disorder and receive a reward of five cents" printed at the bottom.

Suddenly, the sound of bells was heard at the end of the night market.

A dozen vendors wearing "Food Car Guarantee" armbands came pushing uniform red-painted carts. The bronze plaque hanging on the front of the carts was clearly visible in the moonlight: "Three quarters past ten at night, special promotion."

"This is..." Zhu Yuanzhang had just opened his mouth when Zhu Youwei pulled him to a roast duck cart with wheels.

Each of the shiny ducks was priced at only twenty cents, and the stall owner was using tweezers to stuff Suzhou's pickled mustard greens into the duck's chest.

"Yingtian Prefecture gives subsidies!" The stall owner's knife for chopping duck suddenly stopped in mid-air. The marks of "sharpening three times a month" on the back of the knife were clearly visible. "Since opening the affordable meat stall, those black-hearted restaurants no longer dare to raise the price!"

What shocked Zhu Yuanzhang the most was the dessert area.

Three girls in "girls' school" uniforms were guarding a strange machine. When the handle was turned, snowflake-shaped cheese was squeezed out of the iron tube.

The bottoms of the ceramic bowls used to hold ice cream have air holes, so when stacked they can fit tightly into a tower shape.

"This is called an 'energy-saving ice machine'." The leading girl pointed at the interlaced copper plates inside the machine. "The Physics Department said that the principle is the same as the 'refrigeration machine' in my husband's notes..."

The old man suddenly snatched Chen Han's purse and slapped the last few Hongwu Tongbao coins on the chopping board: "Give us a portion with... with that thing..." He pointed to the small can of "Cochin Coconut Flakes" on the ingredient table, "something with a foreign flavor!"

When the bangzi sounded at midnight, Zhu Yuanzhang was squatting by the drainage ditch, studying something.

Chen Han took a closer look and found that the old man was observing the reflective copper net at the bottom of the ditch - there were a few sesame seeds stuck on the net that had not been washed away, and the newly poured mortar on the edge of the ditch was mixed with crushed clam shell powder.

"It's to prevent moss." The night watchman happened to pass by and kicked the ceramic drain on the edge of the ditch with his iron-toed boots. "The young master said this is called... called..."

"Material modification technology." When Chen Han blurted out, Zhu Yuanzhang's bamboo stick was already pointing to the night sky.

Looking along the tip of the stick, the sky in the direction of the imperial city was actually glowing with orange-red light - that was the light from the Royal Printing House which was printing "Illustrated Explanation of Garbage Classification" all night long.

The old man suddenly stuffed the remaining coconut cake to the night watchman and said, "This is a reward for you."

As he turned around, he muttered, "The night market in Kaifeng City... doesn't have these tricks."

When the last wisp of smoke dissipated, Chen Han saw Zhu Yuanzhang secretly put a piece of date paste cake marked "degradable" into his sleeve pocket.

The moonlight shone on the old man's back. The sound of the bamboo stick scratching across the bluestone slabs mixed with the rumbling sound of three hundred food carts closing their stalls, forming a strange nocturne.

Zhu Yuanzhang was holding a string of freshly fried sugar-coated fruits, the golden sugar coating glowing amber under the lantern.

He took a bite, the crispy crust cracked, and the hot sesame filling flowed out, burning him so much that he gasped.

"I have only been in the palace for half a year. How come Jinling City has changed so much?" The old man asked vaguely while chewing a candied fruit.

He pointed to the vendors who were packing up their stalls in the distance. They skillfully sorted and packed the garbage, and even wiped the oil stains on the ground clean with wood ash.

Chen Han smiled, took out a piece of glutinous rice cake from his sleeve and handed it to Zhu Yuanzhang: "Old man, do you think I did all these things alone?"

Zhu Yuanzhang took the glutinous rice cake, broke it open and saw that it was filled with red bean paste and osmanthus honey, with a sweet fragrance.

He narrowed his eyes. "Who else could it be if not you? Those weird things, such as garbage sorting, drainage system, night market management... Aren't they all ideas you brought from the future?"

Chen Han shook his head: "The idea is an idea, but the ones who implement it are the officials of Yingtian Prefecture, the runners of the Street Cleaning Division, the people in the neighborhood, and even the small vendors." He pointed to the old man who was cleaning the swill bucket, "You see, he knows how to deal with kitchen waste better than I do, because this is his job every day."

Zhu Yuanzhang chewed the glutinous rice cake thoughtfully, his eyes sweeping over the orderly scene at the night market.

The vendors reminded each other of the closing time, the night watchmen banged their clappers to urge them on, the children helped pick up scraps of paper on the ground, and even the patrolling officers were no longer ferocious, but instead chatted and laughed with the stall owners.

"Then how did you make them so concerned?" Zhu Yuanzhang asked.

"It's very simple." Chen Han smiled, "Give them a goal, such as 'make Jinling City cleaner', and give them enough salary and respect, so that they feel that this job is worth doing well. As for the rest, they will figure out how to improve it themselves."

Zhu Yuanzhang snorted: "That's easy to say! When I was the emperor, my subordinates were not so diligent."

"That's because you're always afraid that they'll be lazy, so you have to personally monitor everything." Chen Han pointed to the officers who were registering the vendors' information in the distance, "You see, not only are they not lazy now, but they're even more meticulous than you thought - because they know that if they do a good job, they'll be rewarded, but if they don't, they'll lose their jobs."

The old man was silent for a moment, then suddenly burst into laughter and patted Chen Han on the shoulder: "Good boy! You have changed our 'severe punishments and strict laws' into 'high salaries to maintain integrity'!"

As he was talking, a vendor selling candied haws came over and handed over a bunch of hawthorn berries with a smile: "Grandpa, try the freshly made ones! The candied haws are crispy and won't stick to your teeth!"

Zhu Yuanzhang took the candied haws and took a bite. It was indeed sweet but not greasy. He narrowed his eyes and asked, "You make good candies. Where did you set up your stall before?"

"To answer your question, old man, I used to sell secretly in the alleys in the east of the city, but was always chased away by the police." The vendor scratched his head, "Later, the government said that as long as I abide by the rules, pay taxes, and keep clean, I will be issued a 'night market license'. Only then did I dare to come out openly."

Zhu Yuanzhang raised his eyebrows and looked at Chen Han: "Even a vendor like this is willing to abide by the rules?"

Chen Han smiled but said nothing.

The old man chewed a candied haws, looked at the brightly lit night market, and suddenly sighed: "I finally understand - you are not managing them, you are letting them manage themselves."

Chen Han nodded: "That's right. Rules are dead, but people are alive. As long as you give them enough trust and benefits, they will naturally be more attentive than you think."

Zhu Yuanzhang was silent for a long time. Suddenly, he slammed his bamboo stick on the ground and laughed loudly: "Okay! Then let's see what they can do to the city of Jinling!"

The night wind blew, the lanterns swayed, and the vendors on the whole street were still busy, but no one was making any noise.

The old man stood in the middle of the street, looking at this orderly scene, and suddenly felt that the country he had conquered in the past might really become better than what was recorded in history books...

(End of this chapter)