Damn it, I'm in the garbage book I wrote

Chapter 532 It's Not Difficult, But It's Impossible
In fact, many people here were unhappy about asking Xia Lin to come to the class. After all, a lot of people here are in their 40s and 50s. Wouldn't it be a laughing stock if the news got out that the senior figures came to listen to a young man in his twenties giving lectures?
But Xia Lin didn't care. He just began to tell his "strategy for saving the world" step by step.

This course is very long and cannot be finished in one day. The entire course will take about seven days to complete. It includes finance, geopolitics, industry, agriculture, etc., covering all aspects.

Xia Lin was very well prepared. At that time, he left a lot of his own manuscripts for Dugu Han and the princess to study, and these became ready-made teaching materials.

"Your Highness, gentlemen. In fact, you must be very curious about how Fuliang County, known as the miracle of Jiangnan, came into being, right? Well, it just happened to be created by me, so I will start from the beginning of Fuliang and tell you about it."

Fuliang is a legend, no one can deny that, and it is also the only place so far that has succeeded in a short period of time. After Fuliang became popular, in fact, various places have imitated it, but as the saying goes, those who learn from me will live, and those who imitate me will die, only one or two places can succeed, and they are far from being as big and complete as Fuliang, the authentic version.

Xia Lin now started talking from the time when he first arrived at the fishing village. There were many things involved here, including economy, manpower, resource operation, management, etc. Xia Lin basically broke it down and fed it to this group of people.

He did not hide anything, as he always did. His views were supported by facts. He even gave it a special name called "Theory of Movement Development". Of course, this was just a random name made up to make it easier for everyone to understand.

He tried his best to make what was said there clear, and used vernacular for a large part of the text.

Since Xia Lin came to this era, he actually discovered a problem, that is, although official language is indeed concise and to the point, it is actually just a way to build a knowledge barrier. It has little to do with formality. It is a knowledge barrier that the author deliberately created. It is set up to make people unable to understand. Without professional text training, it is not easy to read it completely.

Even educated people cannot guarantee that they can understand everything, let alone ordinary people who are familiar with writing.

Eventually, these articles, knowledge, and writing became the exclusive tools of the scholar-official class, and ordinary people could not even think about it. If we dig deeper, most of the technical books from the folk were based on easy-to-understand vernacular, the most famous of which is "Thousand Gold Prescriptions" written by Dr. Sun, which can still be seen at a glance after more than a thousand years.

Looking back at books like "Taiping Yulan", if you didn't study hard in high school, you basically won't be able to understand the content.

Therefore, all of Xia Lin's texts are described in vernacular form, with rare characters minimized, and some new words that cannot be replaced will be specially annotated below.

Things have come to this point, and if I continue to accuse him of being perfunctory, it would be a bit heartless.

After class on the first day, most people here had put aside their contempt for Xia Lin, and many of them would stand up and salute him with their fists when he left.

"Oh my goodness, there is really no false reputation. The best in the world is the best in the world. Your Highness, tomorrow I want to ask... my useless son to come and listen."

"Yes, Your Highness, after listening to what I heard today, I feel that I have suddenly become enlightened. Many things that I didn't understand before are now clear to me. I'm sure Xia Daosheng will become a sensation in the future."

"Isn't he amazing enough?" Li Jiancheng asked curiously, "How much more amazing can he be?"

"I made a mistake..."

Xia Lin actually still follows the same methodology, which is to simply build roads through mountains and bridges across rivers. However, many of the coping methods here are very novel and even unorthodox, but the effects are quite good, and they can even be formed into a set of formulas for application.

Everyone who came to class today is very talented and intelligent. They all understand things very quickly and have truly gained a lot.

"Did he even tell you this?"

Li Yuan was quite surprised after hearing Li Jiancheng's report, because Xia Lin's course today included a lot of business methods and ways to make people rich. It was these things that developed a barren land into an important town in the south of the Yangtze River. This is knowledge that is urgently needed in the northwest and even the entire Tang Dynasty.

This cannot be said to be particularly rare knowledge, but this bunch of stinky intellectuals look down on businessmen and never learn relevant content. Businessmen will not take the initiative to teach because they look down on them. So even if there is collusion between officials and businessmen, it is just like the prostitutes and pimps in a brothel, one smugly asking whether his father's authority is powerful, and the other nonchalantly saying a few words, "The adults are so strong."

Arrogance is always the biggest obstacle to survival.

Du Ruhui's economics can indeed alleviate Li Tang's crisis for a long time, but this is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Although Xia Lin did not oppose it openly, the content of today's lecture refuted Du Ruhui's plan and made it useless.

And this is just the beginning of today. Xia Lin said that in the next few days he would go from the shallow to the deep and gradually lay out all the fundamental problems on the table. This sentence actually moved Li Yuan, and he really wanted to hear what other insights Xia Lin had.

So by the next day, the number of people coming to class doubled, and the small courtyard was filled with people. If someone surrounded the courtyard with a chain and set it on fire, Li Tang would have declared the country destroyed on the spot.

"Oh, His Majesty the Emperor of Tang is here today too?" Xia Lin clasped his fists and saluted when he saw Li Yuan: "I'm sorry for not welcoming you from afar."

"I just came to see Pingyang, you don't need to be polite."

"Okay." Xia Lin stood up and walked to the blackboard: "The people are almost all here, let's start today's content."

Today Xia Lin mainly talked about the development models of industry and commerce and their impact on agriculture. Most of the data were boring, but the problem is that these data are particularly critical.

The Minister of Revenue and the Minister of War, who were absent yesterday, are now here. It is obvious that the Ministry of Revenue is particularly concerned about today's content, and there are even people taking notes.

The course was almost over. When it was time for the intermission, Li Yuan did not move and no one dared to move. But now Li Yuan spoke: "I want to ask you, if you come, can you replicate a Fuliang in Chang'an City?"

"I can't do it." Xia Lin denied it decisively: "It's impossible to replicate it."

"Why? Is my Chang'an not as good as your remote fishing village?"

Xia Lin took a sip from the water cup, wiped the writing on the blackboard with a rag, and said jokingly, "Well, I will pick out a word for your majesty. This word is called system."

Xia Lin drew a circle on the blackboard: "The establishment of a system is often accompanied by a huge operating model. I won't go into details here, otherwise it will take me three years to finish. I will start with the simplest one. I would like to ask your majesty and the other gentlemen a question: how much does a most common ox cart in Chang'an cost?"

Li Yuan turned his head to look at the Minister of Revenue, who immediately looked at his subordinate next to him. The man stood up and replied, "One ox and one cart, each 20 taels of silver..."

"Yes." Xia Lin nodded: "Fuliang Baliang, but don't worry, I will tell you slowly."

He coughed and said, "You may think that the eight taels of silver from Fuliang are good value for money, but in fact, the cart worth eight taels of silver cannot even travel on the roads of Chang'an. We can see that such a cheap cart uses the kind of packhorses or mules that people no longer need. It is cheap and easy to use. The cart is just a simple frame that can carry goods."

"Why can't it be used in Chang'an?"

Xia Lin smiled when he heard Li Yuan's question, then stamped his feet: "This is due to the road under our feet. The roads in Chang'an are made of stone slabs and bluestones, with large gaps and slippery roads. Slow horses cannot pass through, and wheels also need hard and wide wood wrapped with iron to move forward. The roads outside the city are made of rammed earth. When it is dry, it is dusty and when it rains, it is very muddy. Donkeys and mules cannot pass through. Therefore, the most popular vehicles in Chang'an are ox carts and high-quality horse carts, which increases the cost. And has anyone here been to the road to Fuliang?"

At this time, someone raised his hand quietly: "I went there once last year to watch Dream of the Red Chamber..."

Li Yuan turned around and glared at him, but he didn't say anything at this moment. Xia Lin continued to ask: "So what do you think of the road to Fuliang?"

"It's smooth and comfortable, without any bumps, it's very good. At that time, my colleagues and I even discussed what kind of stone was used to make the road in Fuliang so smooth."

Xia Lin smiled and said, "Cement. Fuliang is paved with cement, which is smooth and non-slip. Even a weak and cheap mule or donkey can easily pull a thousand-pound cart. It is stable and fast."

Then Li Yuan continued to ask: "Then Chang'an also uses cement to pave the road! Chang'an has money."

"Okay, but there is no place to burn cement in Chang'an. Cement has to be transported from Fuliang. The freight along the way is 60% of the payment, which is even higher than the cost of the cement itself."

"Then you can burn the cement here!"

"Okay, but your majesty, to make cement you need a mine and a chemical plant, you need to select and refine the ore, and you need to constantly adjust the ratio and formula."

"Then build a mine and a chemical plant!"

"Okay, but your majesty, the mine has to purify more than 300,000 catties of ore every day to ensure that it does not lose money and can support so many workers, and the main business of the chemical plant is to produce fertilizers and pesticides for farmland. Of course, there are also coke plants, smelters, steel mills, foundries, glass factories, textile mills, etc., a total of 347 small categories, and in order to support the circulation of resources, there must be support from forestry, breeding, animal husbandry and other resources. Of course, in order to mobilize the enthusiasm of farmers, the extremely exaggerated agricultural tax reduction and exemption policies and the commercial tax bill that makes merchants convinced are also needed. Fuliang invested about 240 million taels of silver in these infrastructure projects in the past ten years. And this is why Fuliang's ox cart only costs eight taels of silver, and Fuliang's super thick winter quilt only costs one tael or even less, and I have only said less than one-third of this, because there are also transportation and logistics, talent education, etc. Then your majesty, let me ask you, can you move the mountains on the top of Chang'an City?"

(End of this chapter)