Bai Liyan remembers that most of the spices in ancient China in the previous life were produced in tropical or desert and desert climates, such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and most of China's spices came from trade inflows and were cultivated by themselves.

However, the current world is quite magical, there are not many hot northern spices, but there are many varieties of temperate and cold southern spices, and there are even narcotic hallucinogenic and addictive spices.

At present, spices are still a luxury industry, and the spice production of the Jinxuedi people is completely monopolized by the high-ranking aristocracy, and the spices are all fried before entering the commodity market, so that the people cannot grow them themselves by obtaining the fruits and seeds of spices, so it is difficult to get back to the Central Plains to breed.

In addition to spices, Baili Yan attaches great importance to the collection of medicinal plants and seeds of other cash crops.

Shabu is full of delicious beef and mutton, Bai He, Tian Peng, and Fang Liang are very noisy, and they have nothing to say.

Due to the high-pressure rule of the Jin Xuedi people, Tian Peng and Fang Liang had no concept of gold and silver currency, and did not understand the monetary rules of the commodity market.

All in all, I have never seen such a rich territory of Jin Xuedi people in my life, and if I don't rob enough of this to go back to be chic, it is a crime.

Bailiyan also did not intervene in suppression, because there was no need for this, but it was a good thing.

As the saying goes, desire is the essence of motivation, and people can only have motivation if they desire.

The fleet slowly sailed all the way to Kelownas, and the villagers of Jinxuedi could already be seen rushing to the river, trying to cross the river and flee to the other side, but after being intercepted by the coalition warships, they fled back to the village, only to be driven by the coalition cavalry again and fled to Kelownas.

A few days later, the city outside Kelownas was overcrowded, and tens of thousands of villagers rushed into the city. In just two days, more than 80,000 refugees were accepted, and nearly 160,000 people poured into the city within five days. The news reached the city of Sundia as quickly as possible, and the consul Cahorn was on pins and needles:

"Gudapa, what do these northerners want to do, they can't be crazy and ready to attack Kelownas."

"There are only more than 30,000 sailors in them, and even if you add the men, women, and children of the Central Plains who have been plundered along the way, there are only more than 60,000. There are 2,000 auxiliaries in Kelownas, 5,000 cavalry have been newly moved, 5,000 civil defense troops have been temporarily formed, and 30,000 sailors are following behind them. ”

"But the Administrator of Kelownath has a letter, they are approaching Kelownas, and now they may be attacking Kelownas, we should immediately draw cavalry from other places and immediately go to support Logistnas."

"But if they attack the West, we will be fooled, because they have done a lot in Po Song Province before. Today we besieged here, we went to reinforce it, but the next day they were attacking elsewhere, and we were tired of coping, going back and forth every day, as long as we slackened, they could come at any time. They are the best at telling us what is true and what is false, and when we get dazed, they give us a fatal blow like a poisonous snake.

I would still suggest that all localities should continue to hold on, and that each village should also organize its own civil defense forces to resist the attacks of the northerners.

They will not hold out for long, their army is scattered in many parts of the province of Po Song, and now surrounded by our army, so they want to harass our hinterland and force us to draw our troops so that their main force can escape.

If we fall for their tricks again, we may really have to draw troops from the front line, and then it will be the most troublesome. ”

"Well, by the beginning of spring next year at the latest, the Civil Defense Force will have to resume farming, otherwise next year's expenses will be a problem."

"Their navy will not hold out until next year, and they will flee back to Po Song Province to rescue their accomplices."

"I hope that the war has been fought for so long, when will it be a head." Cahorn said in frustration, and then said something else: "By the way, the Heaven-Shaking Fire sent back by His Majesty from the front line, is there any progress in the academy in Posong City?" ”

"There are some, but they can only be cast in brass, and their guns are made of iron between pig and wrought iron, and they have a much longer range and are more powerful than our imitations.

Before, they were all loaded with black fire according to the dosage of the northerners, and as a result, our bronze sky-shaking fire destroyed several statues. After repeated attempts, although it can now launch iron pellets, its range is not as good as that of the Northerners' Iron Earthquake Fire, and the largest one can only hit a mile away. ”

The earliest tubular firearms were hewn from large stones and were extremely rudimentary in terms of power and practicality. The early fire period of metal tubular type was bronze casting, but due to the development of the iron-smelting industry, the price of copper was more expensive than iron, so there was a period of early pig iron running before the emergence of industrial converter and open-hearth steelmaking.

However, in the early days, the impurities of pig iron cannons were brittle and easy to rust, and the melting point of iron was high, and the calorific value of coal was not as good as that of coke, so it could not push up the furnace temperature, let the molten iron be fully smelted, and could not increase the fluidity of iron after liquefaction. Therefore, before coke was put into industrial metallurgy, the internal defects of cast iron cannons were many, and the chamber pressure was not as good as that of bronze.

Before the emergence of modern chemistry, elemental genealogy, open-hearth, converter steelmaking, material mechanics, heat treatment process, large-scale forging machine, and metallographic test, the control of metal composition depends on smelting time and stoker experience, and the material structure is difficult to optimize, and it cannot be technically fixed with quantitative indicators, so it is impossible to produce wrought iron cannon in the early stage, and even the difficulty of wrought iron cannon is higher than that of pig iron cannon.

So the artillery developed to the middle period, the pig iron cannon was eliminated, and changed to a pure copper cannon, the development of smelting technology in the middle and late periods, a number of wrought iron cannons appeared one after another, and in the later period, with the emergence of industrial steelmaking and breech guns and rifled guns, wrought iron cannons appeared. [Note 1]

Changsun Guo benefited from a kind of semi-wrought iron cannon that was captured, and it is not accurate to say that it was a half-wrought iron cannon, which was still wrought iron, but it would make a muffled sound like pig iron after being struck, rather than the crisp sound of wrought iron.

With the technical motherboard, after two years of imitation, without any experience in casting cannons, Changsun Guo took it for granted that he skipped the bronze cannon and copper cannon, and reluctantly made an iron cannon, and suddenly from bronze, copper, iron, and black powder, into the iron cannon era, the technical leap is not small, but its chamber pressure is far less than that of the captured artillery, the charge is small, and the firing range is far inferior to the "original" goods, and the weight is still extremely heavy, far from maturity.

If the eldest grandson uses copper cannons step by step, with the smelting process of the Central Plains, it is completely possible to make slightly better cast cannons.

After the Jin Xuedi people captured the artillery of Changsun Kingdom, they actively imitated it, and the quality of the artillery made by Changsun Guo was several grades worse than the original goods, and the Jin Xuedi people imitated it again, and even the iron cannon could not be imitated, so they could only cast copper cannons.

There are three reasons for this, one is that there is no coke. The melting point of iron is high, the boiling point is high, but the fluidity is worse than copper, and the unit calorific value required for heating and melting hundreds of catties and tons of iron is much higher than that of several catties of iron.

As soon as the temperature is low, the fluidity of the molten iron will be poor, and a large amount of molten iron will be completely formed in the mold, which will solidify the cold partition and produce defects. The calorific value of coke is higher than that of coal, and the Jinxuedi people could not smelt enough good iron, so the copper cannon in the early and middle periods was actually better than the iron cannon.

The second is that there is no heat-resistant material for the furnace, and the composition of the refractory mud used in the coke furnace, coal furnace and wood furnace is very different.

The limit temperature of coke can exceed more than 3,000 degrees, and coal is far from it, and firewood is even more not, in order to make molten iron or even molten steel achieve better fluidity, reduce casting defects, it is necessary to increase the temperature, the premise of increasing the temperature is coke, and there must be iron furnace refractory materials with coke.

In the absence of industrialization and the accumulated experience of modern technology system, it is difficult to make breakthroughs in materials, especially in the absence of cognition, rashly embark on projects that transcend the cognitive and technological span, and failure is inevitable.

The reason why Changsun Guo was able to cast artillery with pig iron was that it had sufficient coal, and although it had not yet mastered coke technology, it did not prevent breakthroughs in other technological paths.

Pig iron has a low melting point, much lower than steel, and has better fluidity than steel. In order to further increase the temperature of the molten iron and increase the fluidity, Changsun metallurgical craftsmen added phosphorus ore and magnesium ore to the molten iron based on experience, so that the temperature of the molten iron could be increased to a limited extent, so as to achieve better casting conditions. At the same time, the temperature increase of the iron furnace is limited, and the refractory material can barely withstand it.

Finally, the Jinxuedi people were not keen on casting large bronzes, so they did not have the construction and insulation technology of large iron furnaces and copper furnaces, nor did they have the experience of making large molds and production processes.

The Central Plains copper water, hot iron furnace can generally melt three or four hundred catties, the vassal state ordnance department also has five or six hundred catties of molten iron furnace, a very few princes even mastered the technology of the jack furnace, casting a small and medium-caliber artillery, the jack furnace can basically be satisfied, retreat to the second, can be cast at the same time with several hot iron furnaces, so it can also be formed.

The Jin Xuedi people can only smelt one or two hundred catties of molten iron at a time, for the moving iron cannon of thousands of catties, it is a cup of water, and the increase of the casting riser can increase the amount of iron cast at the same time, but it also means that the temperature of each iron furnace can not be guaranteed to be roughly the same, so it is easy to cause more defects in casting.

But with a bronze cast cannon, there are no such problems. Because copper has a low melting point and strong liquidity, as long as the temperature is increased to the limit, the uneven furnace temperature is not a big problem.

Due to various technical reasons, the Jin Xuedi people have never been able to imitate the artillery with iron, and the imitation copper cannon is slightly inferior to the Changsun iron cannon, coupled with the difference in the composition of the gunpowder, the caliber has not changed, the projectile weight has not changed, and the firing range is naturally much less.

Even if there are many unfavorable reasons, Posongcheng Academy has successively cast more than a dozen copper cannons of different calibers and sizes, as well as hundreds of shoulder-mounted copper earth-shaking fires.

At this time, the coalition warships arrived outside the city of Kelownas, and a large number of refugees crowded into Kelownas like a swarm of helpless lamb bees, and the dozen or so merchant ships parked on the docks on the east coast outside the city easily became the trophies of Bailiyan.

"Bai He listened to the order, and ordered the guard fleet to strengthen the vigilance, and the other ships sent people to land in formation, and the Tian Peng miners' battalion landed together, and everyone was equipped with a spear to prevent the enemy cavalry from suddenly leaving the city."

"The last will obey."

The coalition cavalry covered the landing of sailors on the beachhead, and more than 10,000 people successively landed on the east bank of the north gate of Kelownas, and under the arch of the cavalry, quickly detoured westward, and finally stopped at the south gate, completed the encirclement before dusk and began to camp in the lower village.

[Note 1] Regarding the development of artillery, the earliest artillery was still drilled with boulders, but in the history of thermal weapons, stone artillery only appeared for a short time, and was quickly replaced by iron artillery. The "iron cannon" here is not wrought iron or steel, but pig iron, and high-carbon iron close to wrought iron. Due to the constraints of metallurgy, casting technology and material science, the early iron cannon was easy to explode, while the steel cannon and wrought iron cannon could not be realized at all in the early stage of the artillery due to the extremely high requirements for metallurgical technology, chemical technology, mold technology and other fields, so the earliest iron cannon was pig iron.

But pig iron cannons only appeared for a few decades, and were quickly replaced by copper cannons, due to the low melting point of copper, as well as good liquid fluidity, and low metallurgical threshold and high performance, from the eleventh century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, between seven or eight hundred years, the artillery material is mainly copper, there are also brass alloy cannons and a small number of iron cannons, but the main artillery is copper cannons.

Therefore, there were several iterations between copper and iron in the early artillery, but in the end copper was still the mainstream, mainly because the performance of copper could meet military needs at that time.