January 20, 1648, Qing, Tieling Fort.

On a wasteland in the suburbs, a few barbed wire fences are sparsely pulled, and all kinds of equipment and tools are piled up in the barbed wire. The top is covered with a tarpaulin to protect it from rain, and the bottom is also raised to prevent rain from soaking. Three or four worker-like men in uniform sat idly together, communicating slowly in half-baked standard Chinese.

It was part of the Northwest Special Steel Mill, which was originally planned to be completed by the end of 1647 and is still a half-drawn project - because of the lack of building materials and manpower - not to mention the fact that the foundation of the planned iron-making blast furnace has only been laid so far.

Shen Gang, the director of the factory, had already taken a few entourages to Dongfang County a month ago after being called over by Ma Jia, director of the Northwest Reclamation Bureau, and now he is a frequent visitor to various departments of the central government, especially the Ministry of Industry and Commerce and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and he has to ask for supplies and personnel almost every day. After begging for something, he went to the Ministry of Communications and the State Railway Administration to quarrel with a group of other department heads who also came to ask for wagons. No way, capacity is too tight. Even if it is a national key project such as the Northwest Special Steel Plant, if you don't fight or grab, you can't expect to be able to smoothly transport back all kinds of materials and personnel you urgently need.

Now Ma Jia and Shen Gang have basically given up the hope of completing the construction of the blast furnace and starting to debug production before the first half of the year, and they have now lowered their expectations, and only want to complete the construction of the plant before the end of this year, and at the same time carry out several batches of trial production and then conduct research and analysis. As the war progressed, the materials and personnel originally promised by the Executive Committee and the Government Council to Tieling Fort were drastically reduced. And even if supplies are sent to them. Today, inland waterway transport vessels are being deployed more and more powerfully. There simply isn't enough capacity to bring these things back.

Northwest Special Steel Plant, just like that, was delayed!

After Shen Gang and others left, the factory was temporarily taken over by Chen Kai, another deputy director of the factory. However, he himself was only in charge of personnel and finance before, and did not understand technology or production and construction, so the two department heads of the factory, Pierre and Hu Laosan, were also ordered to assist him in carrying out his work. At present, some important materials in the factory, such as some machinery and equipment, have been stored in the factory warehouse, but there are still quite a lot of mechanical parts, building materials, lubricants and other materials that can only be stored in the open air - at most, a layer of tarpaulin is spread on top for simple protection.

It can be seen that the Northwest Special Steel Plant complained loudly about the lack of materials, and at the same time hastily put the materials that were finally transported in the wild. Even the warehouses have not been built, and the organizational work is really chaotic enough, so it is no wonder that Ma Jia called Shen Gang over and scolded and even questioned his ability to work.

Due to the lack of materials and the lag in the construction of the factory, Ma Jia had no choice but to order the existing more than 200 workers of the factory to be transferred to level the land and build the foundation, except for a few to guard the factory area. Anyway, it's okay for everyone to be idle, it is better to repair the roadbed between Tieling Fort, the terminal station of the Northwest Railway, and Chengshan Fort, the penultimate station, and the land must be leveled first: fill in the puddles that should be filled, flatten the soil bags that should be leveled, tamp the ground that should be tamped, dig the drainage ditches that should be dug, and so on.

In fact, the biggest workload in building a railway is to build a roadbed. As long as the roadbed is in place, the bottom is to lay the sleepers and rails. It's still fast. Therefore, everyone has nothing to do now, and it is better to prepare the preliminary work for the construction of the railway first, so that the railway can be opened to traffic in advance. The railway was opened to traffic ahead of schedule, and the Northwest Special Steel Plant was able to start work normally ahead of schedule, so that everyone could also receive their normal wages in advance -- instead of receiving a seven-fold discount on their basic wages as they do now.

You know, because of the war, the price index in the country has long been miserable. According to the price index table of a package of commodities (including food, cloth, transportation, fuel, housing, lighting, daily necessities, and luxury goods, which has been weighted according to the importance of each commodity to the common people) proposed in 1645 by Qiang Quansheng, the current director of the State Administration of Precious Metals, the commodity price index has risen from 100 in 1645 (base year) to 155 last year (1647) (112 in 1646). The price index has risen by half in two years, which is not an ordinary rate of inflation. However, fortunately, the increase in the cost of clothing, food, housing and transportation, which is closely related to the daily life of the people, is not as big as imagined, and the rise in prices is mainly reflected in the luxury goods such as beef, fish and shrimp, poultry eggs, as well as tobacco, alcohol and sugar, so that there has been no major turmoil in the hearts of the people in China.

However, if the workers of the Northwest Special Steel Plant receive a salary equivalent to 7.5% of the normal salary (7.5 yuan) for a long time, it is still a very painful thing. Last year, due to the outbreak of severe inflation in the country, the minimum monthly wage of industry and agriculture in the East Coast Republic of China rose by 25% to 5 yuan after the application of the Government Council and the approval of the Executive Committee; Average wages have risen by about the same amount, since almost all of them are state-owned, and therefore the wage regulations are more enforceable.

The 7.5 yuan discount is one line higher than those construction workers and brick kiln factory workers who hold the minimum wage (mostly new immigrants), which makes these workers who regard themselves as skilled workers and are accustomed to receiving first-class wages in the Northwest Special Steel Plant think. Therefore, at this moment, they are really looking forward to the early start of the special steel plant, so when they are asked to build the railway collectively, they do not have too much resistance -- after all, there is a salary of five cents a day to build the railway, and it also includes food and drink, which is not without a small supplement to their wage income that has dropped sharply today.

In addition to the well-known Northwest Special Steel Mill in the industrial system, Tieling Fort also has a relatively low-key external - or deliberately blocked news - but internally (mainly the Government Council and the Ministry of Finance) also pinned the expectations of quite a few people - Tieling Gold Mine. The gold mine is located in the southern suburbs of the later Corrales mining area, and since Wang Dali's discovery of the first gold vein in mid-46, the explorers stationed here on the east coast have discovered several other veins in the past year, although not very large, but it is also a very gratifying achievement.

Later, in the 19th century, the Uruguayans mined here for 60 years to clean up this gold mine, and at the beginning of the 21st century, they explored and discovered new veins nearby, producing several tons of gold per year, so the gold resources here are still quite abundant, enough for the people of the east coast to mine for a long time.

Since the beginning of last year, a working group composed of the State Administration of Precious Metals, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Geology and the Ministry of the Interior has been secretly stationed here. In February, the Ministry of the Interior sent in a large number of police officers to seal the area with barbed wire, and after that, some prisoners who were supposed to be exiled to overseas colonies were also sent to the area to begin trial gold mining on several veins.

There are two parts to the mining of local gold. One of them is to wash the gold placer from nearby rivers and streams, that is, to send someone to stir the silt at the bottom of the river with one side in the direction of the flow, and then use a guò mesh screen to sift out the gold placer mixed with the sediment at the bottom of the river. Of course, there is a bit of technical content here, for example, you first need to build slopes to facilitate the flow of sediment and sediment from the bottom of the river. The purity of the collected placer gold is generally not high, and it also needs to be purified by the guò amalgam method, and the color of the purified gold is generally more than ninety, and a few with high purity may exceed ninety-fifty. At this time, more than 90% of the gold will be sent to the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Natural Sciences for final refining to further improve the fineness.

In addition to the placer gold in the river, the main method of gold mining in the Tieling gold mine is, of course, from the ore. These prisoner miners excavate tunnels and ore in the area selected by the prospectors, and after the mined ore is crushed with steam or hydraulic breakers, the impurities such as quartz stone and pyrite are manually removed, and then the remaining gold-bearing ore is collected and continued to crush and grind to make it into powder.

The crushed and ground gold powder is then rinsed under water more than ten times with a mesh sieve, and most of the impurities are removed. At this time, the remaining gold-containing ore powder can be used for reaction and refining by the guò amalgamation method, and the refined gold needs to be taken to the Institute of Natural Sciences for the final step of refining like those river placer gold.

By the end of last year, after overcoming many difficulties such as lack of manpower, equipment and gunpowder, the Tieling Gold Mine still produced about 200 kilograms of gold throughout the year, worth more than 100,000 yuan on the east coast. It is believed that as the Government Council continues to invest more manpower and equipment here, the output of Tieling Gold Mine will have a big leap in the next few years.

After refining the gold at the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Natural Sciences, it was loaded into trucks by heavily armed Ministry of Internal Affairs police and transported to the Army No. 1 Prison next to the Dingyuan Army Military Academy. Army Prison No. 1 is full of all kinds of die-hard elements, and it is extremely heavily guarded, and it is still very suitable for the gold reserves on the east coast to be placed here.

The gold extracted from these mines will form the gold reserves of the East Coast Republic of China, together with the gold obtained from trade, the gold returned from the Far East, and the doghead gold sent back to the central government from South Africa. After these gold reserves reach a certain amount, the State Administration of Precious Metals can formally abolish the silver "yuan" and replace it with gold "yuan", that is, implement the gold standard system.

The rate at which silver is depreciating is now too exaggerated, and Spain's "quantitative easing" (mining of silver) will continue for another 200 years, which is putting huge inflationary pressures on the world. The early implementation of the gold standard system will naturally benefit the country's economy one day earlier. (To be continued......)