Li Yu instructed Di'er to take the guards of the Pingwang Mansion to clean the yamen, and clean up a few rooms that could be lived in the Yali in Danyang County, so that the county master could live.

She, the county lord of Danyang, and Chu Tianxiu, the little dusk marquis, were born princes and nobles, and they both grew up in the palace since childhood.

I am used to the brocade clothes and food in Jinling City, and I am used to living in the big mansions of the palace, and I am not used to the shabby and dilapidated Danyang County Ya at all.

But since you're here, let's stay for a few days.

self-proclaimed county lord of Danyang, she rarely comes to Danyang County.

It's time to inspect your own fiefdoms.

Waiting for the county order of the husband, taking advantage of the "rain" farming in the past two days, the Danyang County will be taken care of and rectified, and it will not be too late to return to Jinling City.

...

Li Kangnian, the county magistrate, and Li Fu, the old county commander, went to hand over and investigate various documents and accounts, and the money and grain in the treasury.

Chu Tianxiu was not at ease, so he went over to take a look in person.

I saw that in the treasury of the county government, there were piles of copper coins strung with straw ropes, and a thousand wen was equivalent to one or two pieces of silver, and the copper coins were very heavy and inconvenient to hold in their hands.

The account book of the county government is still bamboo slips and has not yet been replaced with paper books.

It records the household registration, the number of acres of cultivated land, and the income and expenditure of money and grain in the county.... Wait a minute.

In total, there were a total of 1,000 taels of silver and 100 stone of grain left in the county government's accounts. One stone and one hundred catties, that is, ten thousand catties of grain. On average, to the heads of 15,000 people in Danyang County, it is less than a pound of grain.

In addition to money and grain, the Danyang County Ya also had a small number of iron farming tools and hundreds of ploughing cattle, which were rented to some poor peasants in the county.

Chu Tianxiu looked at the treasury and just wanted to vomit blood.

This is all the start-up capital in Danyang County, and basically no project can be launched. Not to mention overhauling water conservancy, it is also difficult to repair a county government!

It seems that you have to figure it out on your own.

...

Next.

Morning.

Chu Tianxiu, the county magistrate, took Li Kangnian, as well as the county lieutenant Zhao Hu and the warden Jiang Gang, and went to Ma'anshan in Danyang County happily.

In the Nanshan Mine on Ma'anshan, a large group of miners are in full swing, wielding shovels and digging pits.

This is an open-pit surface mine, the veins are directly exposed in the mountain, or shallow burial, without digging holes, directly digging down the ground.

The most profitable thing in Ma'anshan is a copper mine on the mountain, and the copper ore dug out is money when it is smelted into copper coins.

The excavated copper ore is sent to the county town to be refined into copper, and then minted into copper coins.

Mining, refining, and casting all require a large number of workers. In order to speed up copper mining, hundreds of miners were employed in this copper mine alone, and many others were refined and poured.

The copper coin industry is also a big industry in Danyang County.

The supervisor of this mine is an old man of the Li family sent by the Pingwang Mansion, who is the old manager of the mining area to prevent theft.

"The villain has seen my uncle!"

When Mr. Li saw that Xiao Duhou was coming, he hurriedly bowed.

Chu Tianxiu asked, "How long can this copper mine be dug up?" ”

"It's hard to say, but I guess it could be decades! The small ones have already recruited a large number of masonry workers from the county seat to dig copper. ... That is, there are not enough iron tools, and the progress of copper mining is slow. ”

Mr. Li shook his head and said.

"Oh!"

Chu Tianxiu took it and looked at the miner's mining shovel.

To dig copper, first smelt iron.

It's a must-have production tool.

The iron ore in Ma'anshan is actually far more than the copper mine, and it is a huge iron ore area. The entire lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the largest iron ore mining area.

Moreover, it is also blessed with an open-pit mine.

It is also known from this that the iron ore reserves in Ma'anshan are terrifying. Even the amount of iron used to meet the "agriculture, armament, and industrial use" of the entire Great Chu Dynasty is more than enough.

There are also iron-making workshops in Danyang County, which can smelt iron and produce all kinds of iron farm tools and shovels.

It's just that the iron-smelting technology in Danyang County seems to be very weak, and the iron mining stones created are often easy to break and crack.

Is it pig iron?

Many broken shovels in the mining area had to be brought back to the county seat and forged again.

The quality is too inferior!

"What is the amount of iron smelting in Danyang County?"

Chu Tianxiu frowned and asked.

Mr. Li was very familiar with these things, and immediately said: "There is an iron-making workshop in the county, three iron-making furnaces, and the iron production is about 300 catties a day!" Then the blacksmiths will forge the pig iron into iron. Half is for farming, and half for mining areas. ”

Chu Tianxiu heard that he had a toothache.

Nissan 300... Catty?

Dozens of pieces of iron are made. Such a low output simply cannot meet the iron demand of a county.

Chu Tianxiu couldn't see at a glance what level the quality of these shovels had reached. But it is so easy to break and crack, and it is definitely not high.

It is far from the hard "steel".

Inferior ironware cannot be sold at a good price, and naturally there is no profit. The farmers and miners in the county will use it, and they can't sell it to other areas.

The focus of the Ma'anshan mining area is still on copper mining, and copper coins are directly minted, which is common to the world, which is faster than iron smelting and money.

Chu Tianxiu looked at the various ores they had dug up.

In addition to copper and iron ore, there is also a very good associated mineral, gray phosphate phosphate!

Chu Tianxiu's expression couldn't help but be pleasantly surprised.

That's a good thing!

Phosphate rock can be used to make phosphate fertilizer, which is a super killer of farmland production. It's just that people in this era are still far from realizing the usefulness of phosphate fertilizer and phosphate rock.

Danyang County, a small county of 3,000 households, is a place where poor birds don't. In the future, you will have to rely on iron ore and phosphate rock to make a fortune.

The current imperial court not only did not prohibit the casting of copper.

Even iron smelting is allowed to be smelted and crafted privately.

...

Chu Tianxiu went to the mining area, and returned to Danyang County in the afternoon and went to an iron-smelting workshop in the county seat.

The backwardness of the iron-smelting workshops and the shortage of iron tools seriously delayed the speed of copper mining.

Whether it was for the sake of minting copper coins or for the smelting of iron itself, it was necessary to immediately start building a huge iron-making workshop to smelt "steel" on a large scale.

Yes, directly smelting "steel".

He didn't want to waste time slowly.

He wanted to build the largest iron-smelting field of the Great Chu Dynasty and transform Danyang County into an iron-smelting industrial base.

Danyang County has a Ma'anshan, which is a huge advantage. If you don't make good use of it, it's a big waste.

As long as the technology is leading, the steel produced can be sold all over the country.

The profit of steel far exceeds that of agriculture.

Agriculture or something, put it aside and develop slowly.

Once the strong steel production capacity comes up, the sharp and strong steel plough is used in the field, and the cultivated land capacity is more than doubled, and there is not enough land to plant.

Chu Tianxiu gathered all the large and small workshops, iron-smelters, and blacksmiths in Danyang County, and there were not many, only dozens of people, many of whom were blacksmiths per family.

They themselves are the food and household registration of the county lord of Danyang, and they can be regarded as the people of the county lord of Danyang, and the people of this era have not been able to get out of the household registration for generations.

"This little marquis will first invest 10,000 taels of silver to build a new iron-smelting workshop."

"All the blacksmiths in the county have entered the iron smelting workshop of the little marquis and hired with high salaries. The master and the apprentices, the blacksmiths, will expand to a thousand people in a year! ”

"I saw your original iron-smelting workshop, the scale is too small, some people per household, more than three or five people, although there are blowers, but the wind is too weak!"

"Build a large iron-making furnace and change it to a water conservancy and horsepower blower! The wind is at least ten times stronger, which greatly increases the temperature of the iron-making furnace. ”

"Most of the iron you make is pig iron, very little wrought iron. Mature iron, or steel, should be smelted. ”

"Fry the pig iron to mature iron and fry it into steel!"

"And your forging is too weak. Build a water conservancy hammer weighing one or two tons to beat, hammer and temper, and make hundreds of steel, 'cut gold and jade, and cut iron like mud.' ’”

"You don't understand? It doesn't matter, I'll go back and write out "Water Conservancy and Wind Smelting Iron", "Fried Iron", and "Hundred Steels", draw them into an atlas, and teach you how to do it! If you still don't understand, I'll find a literate gentleman to teach you. ”

Chu Tianxiu said.

The blacksmiths were illiterate and could only read sketches slightly, and he also had some headaches. I can't keep up with the school education, and when I earn money in the future, I will have to spend a lot of money on education.

When the blacksmiths heard this, they were all stunned, and they only nodded desperately.

Water blower?

Frying steel?

Water hammer?

100 steel?

Almost all of them had never heard of it, and they were dizzy to hear it.

This improved iron-smelting technology seems to have greatly improved the smelting technology... Little Hou Ye's brain is too strong!