Li Jing asked for dozens of shopkeepers and stewards from his grandfather, and assigned them to Chongqing, Hankou, Tongling, and Ma'anshan to support the business in various places. These people will be sent to the place as soon as possible using Hurricane One. The Tan family and various craftsmen who wrote a letter to the second uncle before also recruited more than 500 people, and this time they all came to Jinling by sea boat.

During this time, the Li family's new loom had completed 100 units, and they all began to work. Li Jing's grandfather was making 400 looms, enough for 500 looms, and building a super large textile factory. 10,000 pieces of cloth can be produced in one day. A piece of cloth has at least a penny of silver, and this alone has a net profit of a thousand taels of silver a day. If the business is good, the net profit can reach 400,000 taels a year. The people of the Li family are going crazy. The clan is desperately trying to secretly build the Rumi Gun and recruit the Family Guard. Wang Laosan also took more than 100 Li family teenagers to study the captured six-pounder cannons and flintlock pistols. And Li Jing's position as the future head of the family is also increasingly consolidated.

Grey cloth can be wholesaled directly to intermediate smugglers in Chaozhou and handed over to the Francois at sea. During this period, the Ming Dynasty was the world's largest textile supplier, and the cloth from the Americas was trafficked from Guangdong. It's a global market with no end in sight. Don't worry about sales at all.

Li Jing's oil pressing workshop continues to expand, and at present, the number of oil presses has reached 30, and the shopkeeper Wu plans to expand to 100 units. The oil production reached one million catties a month. With such an output, the rapeseed in the upper reaches of the Hanjiang River is almost the same, and it will not continue to expand. In Chaozhou Prefecture, these oils can earn a net of five cents per catty, and the silver is wholesaled to the Guangzhou merchants. The net profit in January can reach 50,000 taels, which is more scary than the textile. However, due to the limited production of rapeseed, this workshop can only be so large. Textile factories can continue to expand.

The oil mill is owned by Li Jing, unlike the textile factory, which is invested by the public and belongs to the entire Li family. This year's 600,000 taels of silver is Li Jing's confidence to continue to invest in industry.

During this time, we have to wait for Qin Liangyu's army to arrive, and we will go north by boat together, and Li Jing will go to the Qinhuai River on the fifteenth day of the first month to relax and see the most expensive consumption method in this era.

Li Jing and some of his grandfather's children rented a painting boat, drank and admired the moon together, and listened to the singing of the Qing people at the same time. After the end of the night before midnight, Li Jing tasted it, it was really a healthy and green activity. There is no glamorous scene as expected.

After the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, Li Jing took these craftsmen and more than 500 Tan people who were ready to be workers, took the Wuyishan sailboat, came to the land bought by Li Jing in Ma'anshan, and began construction. Li Jing was anxious to build his steel base, so that he could gradually grow stronger, and he had the strength to wrestle with the Jin merchants and the Hui merchants.

The most important material for infrastructure construction is cement, and firing cement is on the agenda. This is not difficult for Li Jing. Polant cement was enough for him, that is, limestone and clay were calcined in proportion and then ground into powder.

Some of these materials were on the land that Li Jing bought, and Li Jing organized 50 people to be responsible for setting up a cement factory and firing Polan cement in a vertical kiln. The only trouble is grinding, which can be done with a donkey pulling a stone mill. Later, Li Jing planned to build a reservoir on a nearby river, and build a percussion tank downstream, using water power to drive some equipment.

Li Jing hired more than 1,300 peasants from the local area to burn bricks, dig coal, dig iron ore, level the land in the factory area, and build roads to the river. The wharf is also under construction, and at present it is mainly made of whole timber with a charred surface to prevent corrosion, sharpened one end, hoisted boulders with a block of pulleys and smashed into the underwater soil, and laid piles to lay wooden trestles. For mooring vessels.

These are complementary tasks, with the real focus being on the construction of blast furnaces for making pig iron and open hearth furnaces for steelmaking. The vast majority of the craftsmen and more than 400 workers came to do this work. Li Jing saw that the current conditions were too poor, so he first tried to build an earthen blast furnace in the era of large-scale iron and steel.

Usually, smelting 1 ton of pig iron requires 1.5-2.0 tons of iron ore, 0.4-0.6 tons of coke, 0.2-0.4 tons of flux, and a total of 2-3 tons of raw materials. In order to ensure the continuity of blast furnace production, a sufficient supply of raw materials is required. Blast furnace smelting is a continuous production process that reduces iron ore to pig iron.

Solid raw materials such as iron ore, coke and flux are fed into the blast furnace in batches by the furnace top charging device according to the specified batching ratio, and the material level of the furnace throat is kept at a certain height. Coke and ore form alternating layers in the furnace. The ore material is gradually reduced and melted into iron and slag during the descent process, which is gathered in the furnace cylinder and released from the iron mouth and slag mouth at regular intervals.

Many of the earthen blast furnaces designed in the era of great iron and steel were designed by metallurgical institutes, and they were not real earthen blast furnaces based on the local method. As a teacher at the University of Technology, Li Jing knows better, that is, refractory bricks are a little difficult, but you can get them by finding a kiln to burn porcelain. Li Jingxian designed a small blast furnace with 10 tons of iron per day. It took about ten days to basically build.

The iron ore mining group, with steel drills to drill holes, with black/gunpowder blasting, soon also mined from the mine in addition to a large amount of iron ore, is the ore processing trouble, need to be manually used sledgehammer smashing, and then use to pick out the stone, the rest can be used. During this time, coal was also mined from the coal mines on the other side of the river, and coking was a one-time success under the guidance of Li Jing. These are not troublesome to Li Jing, and the kiln mouth that can burn porcelain in this era can basically get these. Just find enough craftsmen.

A month flew by, and the blast furnace was successfully ignited on this day, and the first batch of pig iron and iron slag were discharged from different outlets on that day, marking the complete success of the blast furnace. At this time, with the continuous recruitment, there are already more than 3,000 people here. After all, too many people are needed to build infrastructure here.

Li Jing decided to build the first batch of 20 10-ton blast furnaces. The daily output is 200 tons of pig iron. The annual output is more than 70,000 tons of pig iron. Pig iron is very brittle, also called white iron, and if it continues to be smelted into steel, it is necessary to build an open hearth. Or converters, this is not something that can be made right away, but with pig iron, steel can be obtained by forging.

Pig iron is also available for direct sales in the market, Li Jing is about to go to Liaodong and Beijing, and Qin Liangyu's army is also coming, and it is too late to study crucible steelmaking or converter steelmaking. I had to use the hydraulic power of the Yangtze River to build more than a dozen huge wooden water conservancy forging hammers, and the workers burned the pig iron and put it on the forging hammer to beat it to make hundreds of steel.

The rest will be talked about when he is done, and the things over there in Beijing. Blacksmiths across the country used cast iron and even sponge iron forging to make steel weapons and tools. Pig iron is the most basic raw material, and it is not easy to sell.

At the end of next year, the annual steel output was only about 500,000 tons. The official figure is 90 million catties. Li Jing: More than 70,000 tons of pig iron can be digested in the provinces along the Yangtze River.

When Li Jing finished the affairs in the north, he was ready to live in Ma'anshan and build a steel town with an annual production of one million tons of steel.