Salt production must be a money-making project, which can be seen from the wealth of salt merchants in Lianghuai Salt Farm and Changlu Salt Farm, which should have been an undisputed issue, but the salt farm in Liaodong is about to be discounted, which is worth studying.

Of course, Gao Pragmatic has no time to study deeply, because in his opinion, salt production can be made to the point of losing money, which is nothing more than two reasons: one is that the management system is too flawed, and the other is that the salt production technology is outdated and backward.

Everyone is a Han person with the same root and species, so you can't say that this Liaodong person is extra lazy, right? You must know that Liaodong's living environment is a little worse, how can it be lazier? Apparently not.

Therefore, the difficulty of opening the new salt field in southern Liaoning is not where to open it - not to mention the whole of southern Liaoning, just one Yingkou is already a "hundred miles of silver beach", as long as there are money and people, where can a big salt field be opened?

The difficulty is still the management system and technical system.

In terms of management system, although Jinghua has no experience in opening salt farms, the general direction of enterprise operation is similar, and most of them can be copied, at most some relevant technical changes can be made, so there is no need to be pragmatic and too bothered in this aspect.

However, the technical system needs to be upgraded.

After asking Zhang Siwei and Zhang Sijiao's two uncles to help provide several salt-making masters in Changlu Salt Farm, Gao Shishi confirmed that there is a lot of room for improvement in Daming's salt-making technology after exchanges and understanding.

China's salt technology developed to the Ming Dynasty, the raw materials are mainly seawater, pool brine, well brine and mineral salt, the raw materials are different, the salt making method is of course different, specific to seawater salt, there are two main methods: sun-dried salt and boiling salt.

At the beginning, Gao Pragmatic did not consider the option of boiling salt at all, because boiling salt requires fuel.

In the past, it was popular to burn charcoal to boil salt, which is obviously a very expensive salt making method, although boiling salt does not need to be burned urgently, and relatively speaking, energy consumption can not be said to be particularly high, but after all, the price of charcoal is not low, or it is not cost-effective.

Later, there was coal burning and salt, and the cost began to decrease, which is good news for Gao Pragmatic, because he really has no shortage of coal.

Jinghua's current coal mining capacity is almost explosive relative to the amount - mainly mines, Hebei, Henan and Shanxi, a famous coal province in later generations, these three are Jinghua's main sphere of influence, Jinghua in addition to the Kailuan Coal Mine and Mentougou Coal Mine (Yanjing suburbs) that have long been occupied in advance, in the pragmatic Henan hometown, Shanxi "uncle's family" have a number of large mines, as long as he is pragmatic under an order, production capacity is not a problem at all.

Even if the transportation cost is large in these years, Yingkou can at most use the coal shipped from Kaiping, and it can afford it, but Jinghua, as a business group, must have the lower the cost, the better, so at the beginning, Gao Pragmatic did not plan to use his brains on boiling salt.

The first thing he considered upgrading was the tobacco drying technology.

According to the master craftsman of Changlu Salt Farm, there are currently four kinds of tobacco drying techniques in Daming, namely the salt production method of furrowing, the salt drying method of Tanchi, the salt drying method of Kanjing and the salt drying method of wooden plates. [I don't go into details, but if you are interested, I will introduce you to a paper: "The Development of Salt Production Technology in China and Europe in the 15th and 19th Centuries", by Xu Baozheng and Wang Liandi. ]

At this time, Europe had no technical exchanges with East Asia, especially the Ming Dynasty, in terms of salt making technology (there is no evidence in the historical circles at present), but there was a strong convergence, and the differences were only in some small issues, but there was one item, Europe was much ahead of the Ming Dynasty and even further in the Taqing Dynasty, that is, the brine extraction equipment.

As early as 1437, the Europeans developed the "brine extractor" (Erhard Han of France), and in 1507 it was replaced by the Heinz water extractor, and then the development became faster and faster, and finally the steam brine extraction equipment was naturally developed in the era of the steam engine.

In addition, the long-distance brine pipeline is also an advantageous project in Europe, but this project is related to the division of Europe (especially the Holy Roman Empire), and it is not very relevant because of the environment in which Gao Shishi is located.

The first technology to be upgraded is the brine equipment, which can significantly improve the efficiency of salt production, especially after the adoption of this technology, boiling salt can also be included in the upgrading category - refers to the final stage of salt production for boiling processing, in order to speed up the speed of salt production, the key is that the amount of coal required to do so is not large, and the requirements for the coal itself are also very low, and some of the coal types that are of little use can be used (there are many kinds of coal).

For Jinghua, to a certain extent, it is close to waste utilization.

In addition to spending a little money to manufacture brine extraction equipment at the beginning, the rest only needs to pay some transportation costs for coal shipping, but it can increase the efficiency of salt production by two to three times, and Gao Pragmatic feels that it is worth doing.

These two things, Gao Pragmatic were all thrown to Kaiping, and handed over to Gao Rui's Jinghua Craftsman School, which was responsible for contacting the Beijing Division, to work together, and the Beiyang Fleet was simply responsible for transportation.

Then Gao pragmatic went to learn from a certain great man in later generations, and went to the seaside in Yingkou to "draw a circle".

The "institutional advantage" of feudalism is undoubtedly reflected at this moment, Gao Bingxian first went to the top of the line, and without even waiting for approval, he personally went to Yingkou to take a look, and changed the nature of some of the Yantian guards that had long been abandoned with a stroke of a pen.

The guards did not have any special reaction to this, but asked Gao Pragmatic to play the imperial court, saying that since they no longer dried salt, should they be exempted from salt.

Gao was very courageous, so he directly agreed and sent away the suspicious representatives of the guards.

In fact, he had talked to Zhu Yijun about this problem before, the original 25 Wei of Liaodong and the 2 Zizai Prefectures of 2 million catties of salt per year will be borne by the future Jinghua Salt Farm, and the quality and quantity will be provided to all Wei and Prefecture, and the Jinghua Salt Farm will increase by one percent on the basis of this amount, that is, it will actually pay 2.2 million catties of fine salt.

This is also the reason why Gao Pragmatic is not afraid of being scolded: in the past, it was said that Liaodong had two million catties of salt, but in fact, how much it could be, even the gods couldn't say it, and now after Jinghua took over, it was not only increased from two million catties to two million catties, but also from the coarse salt standard to the refined salt standard, which has a lot of premium.

In fact, his hand is like a "contract system", all the "amount of salt" in Liaodong in the past have been personally contracted, and in the future, the imperial court will not need to check and urge one guard and one guard when the output of salt in Liaodong is insufficient, but only need to find a person who is highly pragmatic, and in terms of administrative efficiency, it has increased by at least 25 times.

If you still want to be scolded, it can only show that the other party is doing this at all, and it is completely to people.

Gao pragmatic performance was sent to Jingshi, which really caused some controversy.

However, the focus of the controversy is not the "contracting system" of high pragmatism - the salt industry of the Ming Dynasty is actually a contract system now, but in other areas it is contracted through the form of "salt introduction", just like the Zhang family mastered most of the salt introduction of the Changlu salt field, and almost monopolized the salt field.

And Gao Pragmatic's current approach is just a contract system that does not want salt, and the main reason for not wanting salt is because he has eaten the entire amount of salt in Liaodong - anyway, it is his family, it doesn't matter how much it is, as long as he can hand over the 2.2 million catties of fine salt he promised, everything else is easy to say.

Because for the imperial court, sitting like this allows them to get rid of a bad debt and dead debt.

The real controversial issue lies in the resettlement of the salts who were dismissed from the guard by Gao Pragmatic.

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