A late scholar rushed into the door of Wen Weng's stone room at a gallop, blowing past Guo Shiyu like a gust of wind, and he didn't even have the most basic gift for a Confucian student to meet. Maybe he's late, or he's in a hurry to speak on the platform, or he's as anxious as a dog robbing.

Guo Shiyu was in no mood to deal with this guy who didn't know etiquette. He only turned his head slightly, glanced at the man's distant back, and then lifted his tired thighs and stepped out of the high threshold of the academy.

I listened to it for an hour or two, but I didn't hear a reason.

What the subjects of this year's autumn school will be, and whether they can change back to the original rules, no one is sure.

But can a fuss solve the problem?

These people are so naïve! Guo Shiyu snorted lightly.

Over the years, various places in the Ming Dynasty have been making trouble.

Shaanxi, Henan, Shandong thieves;

Liaodong, Beizhi, Shanxi Tartar;

Jiangnan slave rebellion;

Jiangxi shacks.

As for Sichuan, there are more people and things to do. The thieves entered Sichuan three times, went and came, came and went; At the beginning of last year, the riots of five beetles swept the province; The local rioters have been entrenched in northern Sichuan for more than ten years, fighting and killing.

Seeing that the thieves are gone, in addition to the five beetles have subsided, and the official army has recently defeated the local tyrants in northern Sichuan, the peace of the province is just around the corner, and those scholars have come out to make trouble again in this season!

What will be the result of making a fuss? The most likely is that the head will fall to the ground.

It is true that the son of the world is young and kind, but the old fruit is never false. According to He Youyi's words, it is "the hero of the world and the hero of the world"!

A group of unarmed scholars thought that they would be able to keep Xiang's head by carrying Confucius's spirit card to make trouble?

Immature! Guo Shiyu scolded again in his heart, and his heavy mood was suddenly much refreshed. But the pleasure was fleeting, and a sense of powerlessness filled the whole body again.

"If you don't raise your career, your career is hopeless. So far, the veteran has achieved nothing! Guo Shiyu scolded hatefully.

In this sentence, he is not scolding others, but scolding himself.

……

Guo Shiyu was born into a very wealthy merchant family. How can you be very rich? Anyway, it's a long way from the top rich; It's not a little better than the people in the market.

Guo Shiyu's father was originally an ordinary farmer's child in Renshou County, and he did not choose to continue his studies after studying in Mongolia, but went to Chengdu to become an apprentice in a printing and dyeing workshop. Because of his diligence, loyalty, knowledge, and reasoning, he was deeply appreciated by the boss, and the owner of the workshop married his only daughter to his father, that is, Guo Shiyu's mother.

After Guo Shiyu's grandfather died, his father's business became bigger and bigger. Soon, his father changed the printing and dyeing business from simple processing with supplied materials to large-scale printing and dyeing, and later climbed the relationship of Shu Wangfu and embarked on the high-end route. His father had money, and according to the rules of the Ming businessman after he made a fortune, he invested in two industries:

One is the most traditional industry: buying land;

One is the industry with the highest input-output ratio: education.

In his hometown of Renshou County, the Guo family has no more than 1,000 acres of land. But in the surrounding counties of Chengdu Prefecture, Guojia Land has 10,000 acres.

But education is not about buying land, just giving money, it requires great diligence and a little talent.

The three sons of the Guo family. The boss Guo Shixun is in his early thirties, and he couldn't pass the test for life and death, so he could only give up writing and business and take over his father's class; The second child is Guo Shiyu, who finally took the test to show his talent, so that the huge investment of the Guo family was not in vain; The third Guo Shixiang is only a teenager and has a clever and eccentric temperament. Recently, he gave up his science and went to the Research Institute of the Machinery Bureau as an assistant without saying a word, which made his father angry half to death.

Can be feng shui in turn. Guo Shiyu, the most beautiful of the three brothers, became the most miserable in a blink of an eye.

As soon as the subjects of the township examination were changed, Guo Shiyu's proud eight-strand Shiwen suddenly became a chicken rib, and all the courses had to be re-learned, standing on the same starting line as those children in Mengxue.

"No, worse than a child!" Guo Shiyu thought indignantly. In the first lesson of physics, the levers, pulleys, gears, and transmissions, his third brother Guo Shixiang talked about the Tao at the head, and he could only take the book and understand it word by word. As for mathematics, he had to start with the Arabic numerals!

Damn it! Thinking of this, Guo Shiyu couldn't wait to go to the Shu Palace, and questioned He Youyi, Shu Guoping and Li Chongwen in person, and asked them to tell them how they misled the country and confused the king! But as soon as he thought of the Shu Palace, Guo Shiyu had to face his teacher Shu Wenyi, and face the stubborn old man who would rather not bend.

Master Shu is a great Confucian in Shu, how did he teach someone like Shu Shizi?

Is the son of Shu an immortal or a demon?

"Second brother!" A crisp cry interrupted Guo Shiyu's meditation. A teenager jumped across the street and handed over a beautifully wrapped halva.

"I'm so old, and I like to eat such children's snacks!" Guo Shiyu reprimanded his third brother with a smile on his face.

The young man retorted indifferently: "When I went out, my mother was afraid that I would be hungry, and she wanted me to carry it!" As for her, she has always treated me like a child. As for me, I might as well plan and rejuvenate! Besides, there is a sentence in the Book of Filial Piety: Those who are filial are happy with their parents! ”

"You're going to make up nonsense! Have you ever read the Book of Filial Piety? Guo Shiyu glared at Guo Shixiang, took the halva, put it in his mouth and took a bite of it.

The halva was bitten by two rows of teeth, shattered one after another, and turned into a sweet flavor in the mouth. After Guo Shiyu swallowed a few bites, he asked his third brother: "How did you come here?" ”

"I'm here to pick you up!"

"Phew! Expecting you to pick me up? I'm afraid I made up another reason to go out and play, right? You don't have to go to that institute today? I told you a long time ago that the institute is a collection of strange skills and ingenuity, and it is also called research. What is research? Investigator ,......"

"What's wrong with the tricks? I'm here to pick you up today, just to study strange tricks with you, second brother! ”

"What's going on?" Guo Shiyu asked curiously.

"Let's get in the car first! I'm really hungry! Guo Shixiang saw his family driving the carriage over, and hurriedly dragged the second brother into the carriage.

"The red apricot building on the west side of the Nandu temple pool!" Guo Shixiang commanded loudly.

Hongxing House is a restaurant adjacent to Nandu Temple Pond. The lot there is expensive, and the consumption of restaurants is naturally expensive.

The two brothers entered the restaurant, Guo Shixiang didn't say a word of nonsense, and directly took his second brother to the private room on the third floor. One person in the private room hurriedly got up, and it turned out that someone was doing the east.

"Autumn is coming, how can Brother Xianzhu steal half a day's leisure?" Guo Shiyu said with a smile. It turned out that the person who was the east was Song Xianzhu, a person he knew. That Song Xianzhu is not only a talent but also the owner of a business, and he is two years older than Guo Shiyu. His wife is Guo Shiyu's sister-in-law's sister-in-law, so the two Guo and Song families have a family friendship.

"Brother Shiyu is not idle here?" Song Xianzhu greeted the food and wine diligently, and refuted it tepidly.

"You and I are different!"

Guo Shiyu was not annoyed, and said to Song Xianzhu with a smile: "Brother Song is the only son of the Song family, so whether you take the test or not, the family business can never be lost." The contemptible people have the eldest brother to inherit the family business, and the younger brother has the younger brother to fulfill his filial piety to his parents, and the contemptible people have nothing to do, so they have to study the sage book! ”

"But once the rules of this autumn season are changed, the sage book will not be able to be read!"

Song Xianzhu's words really hit Guo Shiyu's pain.

Guo Shixiang saw that the scene at the banquet suddenly cooled down, and hurriedly gave Song Xianzhu a look, and smiled at the two: "The younger brother is studying that strange skill in the research institute every day, and yesterday in the factory area of the East Gate Machinery Bureau, I saw a good thing again. Would the two brothers be interested in hearing about it? ”

With Guo Shixiang's clever ghost, Guo Shiyu got rid of the shadow of Qiuyu. Just when the wine and food came up, the three of them shouted that they were hungry, so they rolled up their sleeves and moved their chopsticks to eat first.

"You know what? The Machine Bureau has built a novelty, the rail car! Walking on flat ground, that's fast! Guo Shixiang chewed meat in his mouth, and there was a piece on the chopsticks, "Two wooden rails connect all five factories ......"

Song Xianzhu shook his head when he heard this: "For my brother, I am close to the water, and I delivered the goods to the Machinery Bureau the day before yesterday, and I have already gone up to sit down!" ”

Song Xianzhu's ancestral business is wood furniture, which also does timber trading, and there is a large workshop in Jiulidi outside the north gate.

Recently, however, Song Hsien Joo has stopped his ordinary wood processing business and has become a special supplier of the Machinery Bureau. In other words, standard parts are produced in accordance with the order requirements of the Machinery Bureau.

There are many types of these standard parts. Some have their uses indicated on the drawings, such as threshing machines, windmills, looms, spinning machines. Some are not marked with their uses, but people in the industry can still roughly distinguish them, such as the bed and the gun carriage.

……

Before the advent of the big machine age, the utensils often used by human beings were nothing more than these few ordinary things:

Wood is used for all kinds of utensils, clay is fired into ceramics, and stones are built into bridges and pillar bases. plus the "gold" that makes tools and weapons; The "water" that people and living beings have to drink and the "fire" that changes the properties of matter, which constitute the most primitive and simple understanding of the elements of nature by the Chinese: "five elements".

However, these five common elements are still very different from each other. For example, mud and stone can be found everywhere, but good trees are difficult to find in many provinces of Daming. Yongle moved the capital to Beijing, built the Forbidden City, and found a few golden silk nanmu trees used in the Huangji Palace, and there are not many people who died in the deep mountains and old forests. The total cost of transporting a piece of wood from Sichuan to Beijing exceeded the total cost of "10,000 gold" (Note 1).

Sichuan is rich in forest resources and has a very developed forest harvesting industry.

Tens of thousands of catties of large trees are cut down from the mountains in the west, and then float down through the Minjiang River, Jinsha River, Jialing River, Dadu River and other rivers, and collect into the waterways outside the cities on the plain.

The larger ones are left alone, while the smaller ones are nailed into rows with large iron grips.

There are special wood fishers on the Funan River. They ride in small boats or bamboo rafts, and move nimbly through large trees that descend the water. If you're not careful, you'll be caught in a rampage of big wood and turned into a meatloaf.

The timber is usually engraved with the name of the logger and the destination of the timber. After the timber is controlled at the wharf, the timber collector will notify the nearby timber merchants to start the goods according to these words.

Lifting wood from the river is a really difficult task, requiring cables, pulleys, and dozens of strong men.

Two small logs are laid diagonally side by side on the embankment to act as a slide rail. The fish frog (Note 2) in the water disappears from time to time, wrapping several thick cables around the big tree from bottom to top, so that the circle of the big tree itself forms a movable pulley.

Damu leaned against the embankment, and the people on the shore shouted the trumpet to pull the rope together, and Damu rolled on the slide rail, rolling from the river to the embankment.

When the big wood is ashore, it must be peeled on the spot, and then piled into a mountain of wood to dry naturally.

Wet wood cannot be made into wood, otherwise it will be seriously deformed after drying, and it will also aggravate the rust of iron nails.

The dried wood is also processed, first by opening the pieces and sawing them into large planks one or two inches thick, and then changing the thick planks into wooden squares or thin planks as needed.

The carpenter is the most basic and the hardest: two workers, one perched high on a log, the other squatting on the ground. The chainsaw that was tightened by the twisted rope was pulled and pushed in their hands, and it took them about a few days to get a two-foot-thick piece of wood ready (Note 3).

Recently, however, the Song family's timber shop renovation was eliminated. The reason for this was that the Machine Bureau began to use a large disc sawing machine.

Song Xianzhu saw with her own eyes that the big wood was lifted by two tripod cranes, and the ends were fixed on a thick wooden frame. A cart that could move forward, backward, left and right on the vertical and horizontal tracks was pedaled by several people, and the side showed a large disc saw. The disc saw rotates at high speed driven by manpower and an iron flywheel, and feeds the knife one by one.

Splashes of wood chips quickly change the logs into square logs, and then into thick planks.

Song Xianzhu estimated that although the disc sawing machine of the Machinery Bureau was worth 10,000 gold, one of them was worthy of dozens of renovations of his family's timber shop. Instead of raising so many people and paying so many wages, it is better to take the improved semi-finished products directly in the machine bureau for processing. In this way, a large amount of manpower can also be saved, so that the hands of workers can produce more standard parts with fine requirements, so as to create more profits for themselves.

Note 1: From "History of the Ming Dynasty". In the Qing Dynasty, it was no longer possible to find a complete Nanmu tree. Several dragon golden pillars in the Taihe Hall are all made of wood. Today we visited the Forbidden City, and what we saw was. As the saying goes, "gold and jade are outside, and corruption is in it".

Note 2: Fish frogs, i.e. cormorants and ospreys. This refers to divers who are very well in the water.

Note 3: Interesting off-topic.

Before the famous writer Comrade Liu Shahe was rehabilitated, he changed wood. Xiangmu once touched the alteration frame where Comrade Liushahe fought and lived (somewhere in Chengxiang Town, Qingbaijiang District, Chengdu, I don't know if it is still there), and his brain made up for Comrade Liushahe sweating under the scorching sun, and his arms were doing inertial mechanical movements, but his brain was brewing the scene of great literary works, and he couldn't help but feel the speed of the world's reincarnation!