The Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty was extremely rebellious

Chapter 251 Redistribution of Benefits
Wanli was ready to start cracking down on the vassal states.

His purpose was actually to redistribute all the interests of the Ming Dynasty.

How these benefits are distributed actually depends on how they are distributed to benefit the country in power.

Now that he is in power, the distribution of benefits must naturally be beneficial to the entire Ming Dynasty or to him as the emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

The problem is that the distribution of interests is not like this now. It can be said that more than 90% of the interests of the entire Ming Dynasty have been snatched away by the vested interest groups of the royal family and the civil service.

What use are these people to the Ming Dynasty?
The vassal states were like termites, who did nothing for the world and only corroded everything. They fattened themselves up but almost hollowed out the Ming Dynasty.

The vested interest groups among civil servants are like vampires, desperately sucking up the remaining profits so that they can live a life of luxury and extravagance, regardless of the lives of the common people.

These people distributed more than 90% of the profits of the entire Ming Dynasty, but they were not only useless to the Ming Dynasty or the emperor, but even had a counterproductive effect.

So why should they share more than 90% of the profits?
While the rich wine and meat smell, the road with frozen bone.

This is a sign of the country's demise.

If he wanted to save the Ming Dynasty or make it strong again, he had to redistribute the benefits and distribute them to people who were useful to the Ming Dynasty and him as emperor.

Military households and meritorious soldiers are the most useful to the Ming Dynasty. They can defend the country, expand the territory, maintain imperial power, and maintain the stability of the Ming Dynasty.

Therefore, he not only allocated enough farmland to the Beijing camp, border troops and even garrison troops, but also provided them with cattle, sheep, horses and grassland, allowing them to make money through animal husbandry, textile industry, medicinal herb planting and even iron and coal transportation.

There are also medical households, which are the basis for ensuring the health of the people of the Ming Dynasty.

Health is actually very important. The average life expectancy of the people in the Ming Dynasty is less than 40 years old. If the average life expectancy of all people can be raised to 60 years old, the Ming Dynasty will have 50% more labor force.

Therefore, he developed the medical industry to make money from the rich and allow medical patients to also share enough profits.

As for farmers, food is the basis of survival. If they have food in their hands, they will not be worried.

He pressured the vassal states and even took back the land they had annexed so that all farmers would have enough land to grow food.

As for the obedient dukes, marquises and nobles, they are his tools for redistributing benefits, which is also indispensable.

There are also artisans, who are the foundation of the development of the Ming Dynasty.

Now he is vigorously developing the navy and building ships frantically. In fact, he is also preparing to redistribute benefits to craftsmen.

He wanted all craftsmen to receive sufficient benefits from their labor and live a good life.

At this moment, he offered the craftsmen a monthly wage of two taels of silver and two stone of grain, and that was just the beginning.

The little he distributed could only allow the craftsmen to barely make ends meet. Once the navy developed and he regained control of overseas trade, the craftsmen's income would definitely increase.

However, the craftsmen were not as greedy as the princes and civil officials. Now, just the little bit of profit he distributed to them made the craftsmen feel like they were injected with chicken blood and full of energy.

The craftsmen had already started building ships before the Xinbao Shipyard in Longjiangzhou was completed.

Shipbuilding is not just about building in a dock, nor is it just about building on the water.

Many ship parts are actually made in various workshops and then transported to the dock for assembly.

For example, the keel and planks are first made in a special workshop, then soaked in oil to set the shape, air-dried, and then transported to the dock for assembly.

These days, shipbuilding is not done by simply draining the water from the pond and then building the ship there. Instead, the ship is built on the land slipway of the dock and then pushed into the pond for final construction after it is almost completed.

What the craftsmen are making now are the keels and boards.

Now with the hydraulic sawing machine, the speed of sawing wood blocks and boards is extremely fast. A few craftsmen can lift and push the wood blocks and boards together and they will come out. The efficiency has increased by dozens or even hundreds of times.

After the craftsmen were freed from this heavy and repetitive labor, the efficiency of shipbuilding increased many times.

In the past, they spent most of their time on sawing planks and timber when building ships, but now they spend most of their time making molds and shaping the keel and planks.

To put it simply, the mold is a solid hull, but it is made up of many pieces, each of which represents a keel component or a shipboard component.

The mold for a giant ship is indeed quite difficult to make because the structure of the giant ship is too complex and the hull is long and large, which makes the mold processing very troublesome. The mold for a clipper ship is different because it is narrow and simple in structure, so it requires few molds and can be made very quickly.

So, how fast can the Clippers mold be made?
Early in the morning at about noon, Wanli brought Xu Weizi, Wang Chengxun and others to the large shed between the windmill and the dock pond, and watched with great interest.

The octopus boat made of 400 materials is only about 50 to 60 feet long and a few feet wide, so it doesn't need many molds.

The craftsmen simply carried a dozen or so wooden planks, each about a foot square and five or six feet long, and placed them in a neat row on the platform. Then they nailed a few thick wooden boards on them to connect the planks tightly together.

Then turn the whole thing over and place it on a flat plate and start marking lines with the template that has been prepared in advance. After the lines are marked, just swing the axe and chop off 90% of the excess part, then use a chisel to roughly flatten the surface, and then use various planes to plane it.

This guy, with the cooperation of more than ten craftsmen, took less than an hour to complete an inverted hull!
The surface is polished and looks so exquisite.

However, this is only one side of the mold. The other side is a concave boat shape. Moreover, after the concave mold is processed, it needs to be separated and thick wooden boards are placed on both sides, and a special leak-proof glue is applied.

The other side seems to need to dry for a while, so those molds were made first and are now dry.

Next is the shaping of the ship planks. Pieces of planks about a foot wide are placed in the grooves, and then hot oil is poured on them. Then the convex mold is pressed on, and then several huge stones are pressed on the convex mold in turn. The planks will sink into the grooves as time goes by.

This is not the end yet. The pressed and formed board has to be taken out, tied tightly to another convex mold with hemp rope, and placed in a shed to dry slowly.

Ten or so layers of shaped wooden boards can be stacked on the convex mold used for air-drying and air-dried together.

That thing, when stacked together, looks just like the shock-absorbing steel plates of trucks in later generations. It is super huge and looks so spectacular.

Wanli watched with great interest for most of the day, and nodded repeatedly, saying, "Old Yang, you guys are making 400-ton octopus boats as fast as making dumplings."

Old Yang nodded repeatedly and said, "Yes, Your Majesty, I estimate that we can build a batch of 400-ton octopus boats in just two months.

Because we used to spend most of our time on sawing wood and boards. It would take more than a month for the wood and boards to be sawed, and then another month to finalize them. Finally, it would take about half a month to assemble the leak-proof parts, which would take three months in total.

Now we don’t need to saw wood blocks and boards anymore, we can just start from shaping, so it should be no problem to produce a batch in two months.

Your Majesty, do you need so many octopus boats made of 400 materials? If so, I will ask them to make ten sets of negative molds and forty sets of positive molds.

This way, we can finalize 300 sets of plates at a time, and it won’t take three months to produce a batch. There’s no problem producing 300 octopus boats in two months.”

The more octopus boats, the better.

He now needs a large number of octopus ships to transport coal and iron.

The canal boats were too slow. If he wanted to build up his business, the speed of the canal boats was simply not enough.

Upon hearing this, Wanli nodded slightly and said, "Just let them do it, the sooner the better.

Now most of the material costs have been saved. The wood was cut from the deep mountains and forests by them and the navy soldiers. I have to pay them for this.

Let's put it this way: from now on, for every 400-ton octopus boat we make, we'll give them an extra 40 taels; for every 800-ton centipede boat we make, we'll give them an extra 80 taels; for every 1,000-ton blessing boat we make, we'll give them an extra 100 taels, and so on."

Aren’t they going to get rich now?

Three hundred octopus boats of 400 taels each would cost 12,000 taels, and one hundred and thirty centipede boats would cost another 10,000 taels. In two months, they could earn more than 20,000 taels in wages.

With so many people, they can actually build more than just this many ships.

There are more than 100,000 craftsmen in Longjiang Island now. Even if they are building a thousand-ton Fu ship, they can build a thousand ships at the same time, which means two thousand ships a year. What's more, a fast ship of 400 or even 800 tons does not require hundreds of people to build at the same time.

What they lacked at the moment was not materials or manpower, but ponds and docks.

If there were more ponds and docks, they could build more ships.

Old Yang thought for a moment, then rubbed his hands excitedly and said, "Your Majesty, building such a small number of ships doesn't require so many craftsmen. Once this batch of shipyards is built, can we dig another twenty-four ponds and build twenty-four more shipyards to build octopus ships, centipede ships, and even blessing ships and treasure ships?"

If we give them a little more benefits, their enthusiasm will be even higher.

Wanli nodded without hesitation and said, "Just discuss this with Danyang. Anyway, the more ships you build, the better, and the faster you build them, the better. You don't have to worry about wages. The more ships you build, the more money we can make. Labor is not a problem at all."

(End of this chapter)