Tianjin: A little under the nine rivers, named after the Yongle Emperor who crossed the river here. Although there is an Acropolis here, the most prosperous area is the Sancha River estuary northeast of the Acropolis.

The mouth of the Sancha River is the confluence of the Haihe River, the South Canal and the North Canal, which is just in the center of the confluence of the northern rivers, so it is naturally formed, the earliest residential area in Tianjin, the earliest water and dry wharf, and the earliest commodity distribution center.

Before the development of Tianjin Marine Terminal, it was the only way for merchants from the north and south to go north to the capital or to the Grand Canal in the south. Therefore, around the mouth of the Sancha River, many inns and warehouses have been formed.

However, compared with Tongzhou at this time, Tianjin is still just a well-developed town. It must pass through Tongzhou is the terminal of Daming Cao's grain, and most of the southern goods transported north are also unloaded in Tongzhou.

Until last year, the imperial court carried out the renovation of the Haihe River water system and carried out dredging and berm protection at the mouth of the Haihe River, so that after the official opening of Tianjin, many buildings and streets sprung up in the southeast of the Tianjin Acropolis.

In just one year, the wharf business district in the southeast of the Tianjin Acropolis has more than doubled, from two or three crooked streets to three horizontal and five vertical straight avenues. The new business district of Tianjin Port Terminal looks not far from the scale of the old bazaar at the mouth of the Sancha River.

Unlike the spontaneous bazaar at the mouth of the Sancha River, the Tianjin Port Terminal Commercial District is planned first, followed by the construction of sewerage, streets and houses. As a result, the new marina business district not only has smooth roads, straight streets, but also neat houses on both sides.

Walking in this new business district, there is no longer the pain of being covered in mud on rainy days and mud on sunny days. The cleanliness and beauty of the new business district made people more willing to come here to shop, and the market at the mouth of the Sancha River was suddenly a lot more leisurely.

And Tianjin Wei also began in the first month of the new year, officially becoming the city of Tianjin under the direct jurisdiction of the imperial court. Tianjin Wei was originally a health office, the land under its jurisdiction is not large, out of the north gate of the acropolis, the west gate is the land of Wuqing County, but after the city change, the surrounding Wuqing and other counties are included in the jurisdiction of Tianjin City.

In addition to the old Tianjin Governor, the Tianjin Prefecture also established the Tianjin Prefecture and the City Hall, the former to govern the civil affairs of the prefecture, while the latter to manage the urban planning and development of Tianjin's urban area. The Tianjin Port New Terminal Commercial District is a test before the Tianjin Municipal Hall was formally established.

In April of this year, the entire new marina business district was completed. The principals who presided over the construction of the new business district found that the merchants and artisans who were willing to move into the new business district far exceeded their expectations. The time has just entered June, and all the houses in the new business district have been sold out.

As a result, the voice of continuing to develop the new urban area along the north bank of the Haihe River to the east suddenly became louder. Whether it is a wharf or a new business district, they are all located north of the Haihe River. Further east along the Haihe River, many water- and wind-powered mills and machine factories were built on both sides of the river.

There were many people in the city hall who advocated that the city of Tianjin should continue to expand eastward until the location of the Tianjin Acropolis to Dagukou was connected to form a huge urban area. Tianjin Wei can also build a railway to Dagukou to help those ships that are too large to unload their cargo at Dagukou because they cannot enter the Haihe River.

Before the new urban development plan was discussed, Tianjin, a new city, had already emerged, surprisingly vibrant. By the time the new business district moved from the three-way junction northeast of the Acropolis to the banks of the Hai River to the southeast, several industries with a high concentration of labor and capital had begun to emerge in the undefended city.

The first is the lumber mill, a large number of trees brought from the Tohoku, except for a part of which is selected as ship timber and placed in a special warehouse for drying, a large number of trees are unraveled into planks of a certain size. Using a wind- or water-powered circular saw, one hour of work can complete the work of 30 workers in one hour.

In other words, wood that used to take hundreds of people to process can now be done by just a few dozen people. This newly developed circular saw greatly promoted the investment of the gentry and merchants in the lumber mills.

The timber stewards of the Sihai Commercial Bank finally don't have to have a headache, and the wood they have been transporting back from Yingkou has to find a place to stack it because of the lack of processing capacity.

And these unraveled timbers are quickly delivered to coopers according to specifications for making barrels of various specifications. Because of sea and ocean fishing, wooden barrels used for the transportation of materials at sea have become the most sought-after goods in Tianjin.

In March alone, 14,000 barrels of 330 kilograms of salt were sold to Jeju Island, Japan, Sakhalin Island and other places. According to the records of the Tianjin Municipal Taxation Bureau, the number of barrels sold in the Tianjin market each month has broken the record high of 50,000 in June, up from more than 30,000 at the beginning of the year. The number of barrels made in Tianjin has just broken 40,000.

In the past, it took 2 or 3 days of work for a craftsman and an apprentice to make a wooden barrel, and ordinary carpenters could not make wooden barrels. Therefore, the value of a large wooden barrel is about 15 taels of silver.

But with the introduction of cheap wood from the Northeast, coupled with the initial processing of lumber mills, and the matching specifications of iron accessories sold by blacksmiths, now hoop coopers only need to buy certain specifications of materials in the market and then assemble them.

Not to mention that the technical requirements of hoop barrels have been greatly reduced, and the production efficiency of wooden barrels has also been greatly improved. In the past, one person could not make 15 barrels a month, but now at least 60-100 barrels can be completed. If you follow the barrel making process announced by the Bunsi Academy, 15 people can complete at least 125 barrels per day through 11 processes.

The coop industry, which used to require thousands of people to work to meet the needs of barrel making, is now sufficient for only 3-4 hundred. Moreover, the price of locally made wooden barrels in Tianjin is also nearly one-third cheaper than that in other regions. However, contrary to the decline in the price of barrels, the income of coopers has increased by 3-5 times.

The development of Tianjin's barrel manufacturing industry has dealt a great blow to traditional craftsmen. Many craftsmen realized that the old way of relying on a single craft for generations was no longer working. The division of labor and cooperation mode in the same industry, and the use of machines to produce parts of uniform specifications, not only reduce the production cost, but also greatly break the technical barriers.

Although those craftsmen in Tianjin's barrel manufacturing industry can only assemble several types of barrels according to the drawings. Without drawings and accessories of uniform specifications, they could not produce other types of barrels. From the perspective of traditional craftsmen, these people are not real craftsmen, they are just a group of half-understood apprentices, but they are more proficient in a certain process.

As soon as there was no longer a need for large quantities of barrels in the market, these people had to close their businesses and drink the northwest wind. However, it is clear that some businessmen do not see it that way, and they have learned something from the production process of Tianjin barrel making.

That is, the production is set up in many small links, and then workers are recruited for training and production. Since these workers only complete one of the production steps, there is no need to invest too much in their training. The process of division of labor and cooperation is adopted, which enables workers to greatly improve labor production efficiency, thereby reducing production costs.

The most important thing is that because of the division of labor, after a worker leaves, he can quickly find someone to replace him, and will not cause the production of the workshop to stop. Workers who only have a certain production process, once they leave the merchant's workshop, it is difficult for them to find another job, so it is good for the production of stable workers.

Apparently, the company did not stop at a barrel manufacturing industry, and after that, it launched a carpentry factory that made cheap furniture. Compared to barrel making, these fixed-size furniture are much easier to make. Although these furniture looks the same, it is not at all comparable to the elegance of Soviet-style furniture.

However, the cost advantage of mass production makes the price of these furniture 30% cheaper than that of finding a carpenter to make a set of furniture. These cheap furniture soon spread along the canal to Shandong, Henan and other places.

Immediately after the making of wood, there is the making of iron. After all, these industries are quite related, and like woodsmithing, there is also a division of labor and cooperation in the ironware industry.

In fact, the leading role of the barrel manufacturing industry has led many artisanal workshops to begin to change to a greater or lesser extent, after all, if they do not change, they will have to endure the low-price competition of the pioneers.

If the above two industries are more or less the shadow of the Wensi Institute behind the scenes, then the leather processing industry in Wuqing County and the Sancha estuary is completely the result of the spontaneous investment of private businessmen.

A large amount of leather transported from Zhangjiakou and Yingkou soon gathered in Tianjin. After the processing and production were completed here, they were either sold locally, or transported to the Henan area under the canal, and even tried to be transported back to Yingkou for sale.

In addition to these booming private businesses, the most prosperous enterprises in Tianjin are still semi-government enterprises jointly invested by the government and businessmen.

For example, the paper industry, shipbuilding industry, chemical industry, cement factories, various mills and so on. Most of these industries are arranged along the Haihe River, mainly to facilitate the use of water, and to reduce labor intensity with the help of water power.

Because of the development of industry and commerce, the peasants near Tianjin also began to live a life of half-agriculture and half-work. Last year, when there was a severe drought in Gyeonggi, thousands of Gyeonggi families moved to Tianjin to repair the embankment of the Haihe River and the wharf of Tianjin.

By the spring of this year, many people simply stayed. The money earned by working in Tianjin is much more than that of shaving food in the fields.

The newly established Tianjin Prefecture and the Tianjin Municipal Government have turned a blind eye to this, and for them, what Tianjin lacks now is its population. In particular, the hometown of these people is not far from Tianjin, and their living habits are no different.

It is better to turn them into new Tianjin people than those displaced people from outside the Guanxi and other provinces. The only people who are dissatisfied with this problem are probably only Shuntianfu and the magistrates of these people's hometowns.