January 10, 1642, heavy rain.

The Portuguese ships have been gone for several days. After removing some indiscriminate Koreans and Japanese from the 3,022 new Ming people, after some bargaining, Shi Qinjie still paid a total of about 900,000 yuan to the Portuguese for them. Of this, $860,000 is for immigration costs, while the remaining $40,000 is used to pay for some of the purchased Oriental tree seedlings, crop seeds and livestock. These seeds will play a great role in the future, such as those lychee seedlings, which are particularly suitable for the growth of this crop in New China, and will become a major local specialty in time.

In addition to lychee, cashew nuts, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, etc., all of which are cash crops that can be grown locally in large quantities. As for sugarcane, although the climate is suitable, it is too laborious, and Shi Qinjie has given up for the time being.

With the onset of the rainy season, most outdoor activities in the New China area have stopped, but that doesn't mean everyone has nothing to do. In addition to the construction of coastal forts and land defense fortresses, the timber processing factories by the Coconut Tree Creek, the brick kilns, cement factories and lime factories outside Xinhuabao, and the ship repair yards near the wharf were full of busy Ming immigrants. After some time in their cultivation, these immigrants are now organized to do what they can. They work in various places during the day, and at night they are taught language classes mainly in common language, as well as courses on hygiene, precautions for tropical life, and government regulations.

Such a communal life may stay with them for up to several months, until the arrival of a ship that has come to pick them up and take them to their homeland. At that time, those who are in good physical condition will be given priority, and those who will learn language and other aspects will be secondary. The government workers who gave them lessons also constantly described to them how vast the land is, how good the living conditions are, and of course, the rules are very strict. With this content, the ideological education of these newcomers is constantly carried out.

Sergeant Kyle walked unhurriedly through the building. It was nearly noon. But it had been raining heavily for a day and night, and it had no intention of stopping. Fortunately, the brick factory was built on higher ground and was surrounded by drainage facilities, so it was not a problem that the factory would be flooded by rainwater. The factory is a mixed brick and wood structure, with some of the load-bearing walls or columns made of masonry, while the rest is made of poor quality wood and thatch. The roof was covered with tarpaulin and thatch, and the walls around it were covered with small windows, most of which were only covered with a layer of oiled paper, and only a few windows were inlaid with some glass—the clear glass that had been brought in from the country. It was lucky that it did not break in long-distance sea transport.

The raindrops the size of beans crackled against the glass windows, and people began to worry about whether the oil-papered windows at the back of the factory would be able to withstand such a violent rain. Lime is sprinkled in many parts of the building to absorb moisture from the air. The rainy season is so nasty, and the humidity of the air is so high, which is definitely not a pleasant thing for the more than 300 brick workers here. This is because the bricks made in this case have a great breakage rate when they are fired, and in many cases, irregularly shaped bricks such as "bread bricks" are fired. And this will undoubtedly attract reprimands and scolding from the foremen.

Sergeant Kyle took a casual look and noticed that a lot of the quicklime that had been sprinkled around the corners had reacted to moisture. The air was so humid that even the walls inside the factory were covered with moss. The dark clouds in the sky still did not have the slightest intention of dissipating, and the room was a little dark. Sergeant Kyle ordered the foreman to light the brazier, which brightened the room. There are five factories for making bricks. This is just one of them, and the total number of workers working on the bricks in the five factories is about 1,600 people, which is a huge scale. If they are all skilled, it will not be a problem to make nearly 40 million bricks a year. And bricks are definitely strategic-level materials for the East Coasters, especially the East Coasters in overseas colonies. There are nothing without bricks, and do you want to build walls with clay and stones, like the Dutch?

These more than 1,600 brick-making workers are not all those Eight Banner slaves, and their total number is less than 1,600. Most of them were later immigrants from the Ming Kingdom, and a small number of skilled workers from the Eight Banners stayed here to teach them how to make qualified bricks for various purposes quickly, with quality and quantity. By this time, most of the Eight Banners workers had been transferred to the mouth of the bay, where they were braving the rain to drain water, cut down trees, and build part of the unfinished coastal defense fortress. It can be seen from this how important it is to master a skill, such as these Eight Banner slaves in front of them, because they have good brick-making skills and fast speed, they have the opportunity to stay in the factory and take their apprentices. Instead of going to the dense forests of the mouth of the bay to cut down trees, clear open fields, and so on, as their compatriots did, you have to risk malaria.

Most of the more than 1,000 Ming immigrants here are women and children, after all, making bricks is not a heavy physical job, for them, these jobs are still competent. Sergeant Kyle observed that the men were generally malnourished, the women were thin and shriveled, and the children had protruding cheekbones and bony appearances. However, it can be seen that after a week of eating a full meal, these people's complexions have obviously improved a lot. In the past week, everyone has three meals of sweet potato polenta a day, and the child can also get an extra glass of milk and a piece of salted fish, which is almost unreal compared to the dark life in Daming.

On the one hand, they can rob, fight, and change children for the sake of a little food that can survive; On the one hand, there are clean and tidy houses and clothes, as long as you do some work within your ability, you can eat the sweet "taro" and golden "rice" every meal, and the children can also drink milk and eat fish and meat. In the eyes of many Ming people, even the emperor of the Ming Dynasty can only eat these things, well, maybe the emperor can eat a few more meatloaf. Could it be that this is the gap between "industrial society", "scientific management", "productivity", etc., that the official who came to teach everyone said?

People say that "goods must be thrown away, and people must die more than others", and this is also true today. The common people are the most practical, they don't know what "Huayi defense" is, what "loyalty and patriotism", they can't eat, how can they take care of these vain things? Even if these people in front of them are barbarians, so what? They gave themselves new clothes to wear, a place to live, food to eat, and taught themselves trades, and it is said that the leading officials among them were originally descendants of Yan and Huang from Middle-earth, and shed the same blood as everyone, so it is no wonder that they are so good to everyone, and they are indeed their own people!

In front of me, more than 1,000 Ming people have just come to the brick kiln factory for three or four days, and many people are already very decent in making bricks, and the progress of learning is much faster than those Eight Banner slaves at the beginning. These people work 14 hours a day, 8 hours of which are spent working and 6 hours studying. They can make more than 100,000 bricks every day, and according to the rhythm of burning one kiln every three days, each kiln can provide more than 400,000 pieces of various red bricks for construction sites throughout the New China Colony, which effectively guarantees the construction of the colony.

Some Malay slaves walked into the factory with their heads bowed under the supervision of the overseers, and they carefully stacked the bricks on the flatbed ox carts, and then drove the ox carts out of the factory and walked through a long enclosed corridor to the wheel kiln about a few dozen meters away, waiting for the slave workers there to put the bricks into the kiln one by one according to the foreman's instructions, and then set them on fire. The fired bricks are stacked on a flat ground, waiting for the construction site to send someone to pull it.

Sergeant Kyle had circled the entire plant, ordered the foremen to change the lime in the room, and then, donning an oilcloth poncho, he left the brickyard factory with a few retinues and headed for the nearby lumber mill on the banks of Coconut Tree Creek. There are several logging camps near the timber processing plant, in the upper reaches of Coconut Tree Creek, where about 200 Eight Banner slaves cut wood, then remove useless branches and bark on the spot, and then pull them down Coconut Tree Creek to the downstream timber processing plant for processing. At present, about 50% of the logs harvested in the New China Colony are only sent to the mainland after preliminary antiseptic and insect control treatment; The remaining 50 per cent is dried in the timber processing plant, where some of the dried timber is left for local use, and some of the timber is hauled to South Africa or mainland China by returning transport ships like the logs.

Sergeant Kyle tightened his poncho, his cuffs and trousers were tightly tied with ropes, and even his face was covered with a towel, revealing only a pair of eyes on the outside. The logging camp is located on the edge of the forest in the southeast, and the environment is extremely complex. Although many of the puddles over there had been filled in, the recent heavy rains and the many places in the forest that had accumulated water inevitably caused a large number of mosquitoes to breed, and he didn't want to be like the few Eight Banners slaves under his management who had suffered from malaria recently, huddled in the corner of the clinic all day long. Although he is eligible for medical treatment at his level, he also has to suffer a common crime, and the most terrible thing is that it cannot be cured at that time, so it will be difficult in the future.

The field was white, shrouded in dense rain and fog, and the ground on the banks of the river was a little slippery, and it took more than half an hour for Sergeant Kyle and his party to reach the logging camp as they walked on the dirt road softened by the long soaking rain. (To be continued......)