1848 Great Qing Charcoal Burners

Chapter 80 The Situation is Excellent

After seeing Luo Dagang and Su Sanniang off, Peng Gang began to count and distribute the imported goods.

The clock was placed in the classroom. Each group leader was given a copper-cased pocket watch and three silver-cased pocket watches. They kept one for themselves and gave the other two to their younger brothers and sisters.

With clocks, students can finally develop a sense of time and more accurately plan their daily schedules.

The team leaders were overjoyed to receive the pocket watches, and they played with them with great delight.

All the watches that Luo Da just bought are new.

Wristwatches have always been a key industrial product that the West dumped into China. However, people in an agricultural society had little demand for watches, and they were also quite expensive. In Guangzhou, an ordinary copper-cased pocket watch would cost at least thirty taels of silver. Apart from wealthy landowners with spare money, no one would be willing to spend money on a pocket watch that was of little use to them.

In the mid-19th century, high-end mechanical watches typically had a daily error of two to three minutes, while mid- to low-end mechanical pocket watches commonly had an error of eight to nine minutes per day.

Peng Gang patiently taught these group leaders how to tell time and told them to come to him at noon the next day so he could teach them how to calibrate their watches.

Then, Peng Gang gave each person a bronze whistle.

The group leaders weren't as excited about the bronze whistle as they were about the pocket watch.

Peng Gang told them very seriously that these copper-cased pocket watches were issued to the team leaders. If one day a team leader failed to perform his duties and was dismissed, the copper-cased pocket watches, copper whistles, and other equipment and gear specifically issued to the team leaders would all be taken back.

At the same time, Peng Gang did not forget to promise them a big reward: whoever had the best combined score in the cultural studies and marching assessments after the new year would be awarded the silver pocket watch he always wore.

When the deputy team leaders and ordinary team members heard that they also had a chance to win rewards, their eyes lit up, and they all put in their best efforts, determined to work hard and win the assessment during the New Year.

The team leaders also felt a sense of crisis. Peng Gang had made it very clear that their positions as team leaders were not permanent, and if they did not perform well, they would be removed from their positions.

Before the meeting ended, Peng Gang took out a stack of homemade playing cards with Arabic numerals written on them and taught them how to play Dou Dizhu (a popular Chinese card game) so that they could familiarize themselves with the Arabic numerals in advance.

Having been issued pocket watches and brass whistles, Peng Gang began to arrange the use of the fifteen uniformly styled second-hand brown basses he had on hand.

Of the fifteen brown basses, only four were equipped with bayonets.

Peng Gang picked out the best-condition brown bass with a bayonet, along with the blueprints he had drawn from disassembling the brown bass and a set of firing mechanism parts that were missing only the spring plate, and handed them to Tang Zheng.

Tang Zheng was instructed to lead the craftsmen to replicate the product according to the standards of the brown bass.

In the past, even with ready-made blueprints and sample guns, Tang Zheng wouldn't have dared to accept the offer.

However, now that Peng Gang has acquired two kinds of high-quality steel from foreigners and has prepared everything he could, Tang Zheng feels that it is not impossible to successfully replicate it.

Even when Imperial Envoy Lin ordered the master craftsmen at the Guangdong Arsenal to copy the foreign self-propelled muskets, they didn't have such good conditions.

Mr. Peng is technically skilled, respects and treats craftsmen well, and does everything himself.

He'd only encountered one such good employer, both from the Ordnance Bureau and among civilians; Mr. Feng was a rare find. However, compared to Peng Gang, Mr. Feng knew very little about technical matters.

Putting everything else aside, Tang Zheng was determined to prove himself by building the self-propelled musket that Mr. Peng had been longing for, fulfilling his wish and repaying his kindness.

Peng Gang instructed Lu Qin to gather a group of students, have them change into brown basses for training, and gain experience in using flintlock muskets.

One group of muskets that were freed up were given to the fourth group, which originally consisted of pikemen, and another group of musketeers were trained.

"This is a real gun! It's so comfortable to use, and you can even fire it from your shoulder!"

"No more hanging those smelly, stinky, and cumbersome fire ropes!"

"This gun barrel is clean and sturdy, without a single crack or pinhole. It gives me peace of mind just looking at it! Even if it were loaded with 50% more powder, I would still dare to fire it!"

"It's a pity there are only three gunswords! If every musket could be equipped with a gunsword, that would be great! Enemies could just use the muskets as guns when they get close!" "Unfortunately, they're a bit too short to be used as guns, but they'll do."

"These bags of foreign gunpowder are just as good and powerful as the gunpowder you mixed yourself!"

The group that traded their muskets for flintlock pistols were full of praise for the flintlock pistols and loved them dearly.

Replacing the rifle with a flintlock musket improved more than just firepower density and accuracy.

Without the tangled fire ropes, movement became much easier and freer.

Most of the shotguns used by the Green Camp only had grips for holding the weapon, without stocks, completely disregarding user comfort and having extremely poor ergonomics.

The Brown Bess features a stock that can be used for shoulder and cheek-rest shooting, which not only improves shooting stability and comfort but also allows for striking with the stock in close combat.

Good gunpowder should naturally be used in good guns.

The gunpowder that Peng Gang distributed to the group of brown beakers was homemade gunpowder formulated according to the classic recipe of 75% potassium nitrate, 10% sulfur, and 15% charcoal.

The gunpowder that Luo Dagang obtained from Guangzhou and Hong Kong Island was basically equivalent in performance to the gunpowder.

It can be said that preparing gunpowder was the easiest and smoothest thing Peng Gang did.

Peng Gang recorded a group of team members' experiences and insights on using flintlock muskets.

At the same time, high-carbon steel was allocated to the blacksmith, who simplified the design of the bayonet based on his own conditions, eliminated the spring catch that was difficult to make himself, and used iron hoops to fix the sleeve instead, sacrificing convenience for structural stability.

In order to mass-produce the much-needed bayonets as soon as possible, so that all the flintlock musketeers in a group could be equipped with bayonets and conduct live bayonet fighting training.

After the Battle of Mengchong, Hong Xiuquan finally returned to Guangxi.

Under Feng Yunshan's persuasion, Hong Xiuquan acknowledged the identities of Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui as the incarnations of the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Brother, and the four reached a compromise.

Thus, the God Society's top leadership formed a dual-structure four-person decision-making core.

Despite significant changes at the top of the God Society, the Society's development in 1848 was very promising.

By the end of 1848, the God Society had reached a new level of development.

The God-Gods Church's charitable act of donating food to relieve disaster victims has made it famous, and many disaster victims have chosen to join the God-Gods Church after being influenced by its propaganda.

The affairs of the Zijingshan base are now fully managed by Xiao Chaogui and Yang Xiuqing.

With the addition of Wei Changhui, a major financial backer, and the acquisition of the assets of Wang Zuoxin, the wealthiest household in Zijing Mountain, the God Worshippers' shortage of funds and provisions was alleviated.

With Wei Changhui's help, Xiao Chaogui became even more energetic and motivated. Even the boils he developed could not stop his missionary work or extinguish his passion for it.

Despite his illness, Xiao Chaogui traveled around preaching and recruiting new believers.

Xiao Chaogui and Yang Xiuqing's efforts have yielded remarkable results. In just four months, the number of followers at the Zijingshan base has more than doubled, reaching nearly 10,000.

The scope of the Zijingshan base is now no longer limited to the Zijingshan mountain area.

Using Jintian Village as a springboard, Xiao Chaogui and Yang Xiuqing have now infiltrated the God Worshippers' influence into the prosperous Xinwei and Jiangkouwei plains.

Even Huang Tizheng, the first gentry of Xunzhou Prefecture who originally lived in Xinwei and was the top scholar in the Guangxi provincial examination in the third year of Jiaqing (1798), and whose family had controlled the Guiping County military headquarters since the beginning of Jiaqing, had to temporarily avoid the sharp edge of the God Society and move to Jiangkouwei.

In an attempt to salvage the crisis, Huang Tizheng wrote letters to Yang Xun, the magistrate of Guiping County, and the prefect of Xunzhou Prefecture, vehemently arguing the dire situation and stating with great distress that the God God Society was not a good religion and was no different from the Heaven and Earth Society. He claimed that the leaders of the God God Society were even more adept at bewitching people and were far more dangerous than the Heaven and Earth Society bandits.

(End of this chapter)