Ding Youben was restless on a bamboo chaise longue with a pergola made of bamboo and thatch above his head, shielding him from the warm Sumatra sun. Born in Huzhou, he doesn't like the hot and humid summer, but it is summer here in Sumatra, which is really painful.

But the only thing that can comfort him is that after a rainstorm every afternoon, the weather will be cooler, and he will not sweat every time he moves, as he does now. In fact, in the eyes of others, Ding Youben's life was too comfortable. Beside him, two native maidens knelt to serve him, one holding a large fan to fan him, and the other skillfully unscrewing the rambutan's shell to bring the white and juicy flesh into his mouth.

But in Ding Youben's opinion, where are these swarthy indigenous girls in the family and the beautiful domestic slaves. It's a pity that he had a quarrel with a passing merchant at the door of his house, and he beat the other party to serious injury for a while, and then he encountered the imperial court to track down the Taihu bandits, and the other party sued him to the government.

Originally, the family had already taken care of the matter, and also appeased the beaten businessman. But after hearing that Wei Zhongxian's father-in-law Wei personally came to investigate the Taihu bandits, his father was afraid that he would be arrested by the government again, so he sent him to Nanyang.

Ding Youben first settled in the Bo Ni Kingdom, and at this time, Brunei, the capital of the Bo Ni Kingdom, has become the largest gathering city of Chinese in Nanyang. It is located on the shipping route between Malacca and Daming, and it is also very convenient to go to all parts of Southeast Asia, and the Boni people are also very friendly to the Chinese, and this place has an excellent port of call, so it has become the first stop chosen by the Chinese to go south, and many Chinese who go to sea for the first time are here to inquire about the necessary news before continuing to take the boat to the destination.

The reason why Ding Youben came to Sumatra was that he heard about the most lucrative oil industry in Sumatra at present, so he borrowed a large sum of money from his familiar uncle, came to Sumatra to lease land from the local native chief, and hired a drilling team to try his luck.

Ever since British traders discovered oil in Sumatra, the oil industry began to be quietly born on the island. However, the British were extremely backward in their methods of collecting oil on the island, and they either hired local natives to take oil directly from the oil seedlings, or they dug shallow wells near the oil seedlings to extract oil. The daily output of crude oil is only one or two hundred barrels, and after removing other impurities, less than half of the kerosene for lamps can be refined.

However, after the Ministry of Internal Affairs drilled the first oil well in Yanchang County using the Zigong salt well, the oil well was 81 meters deep and produced 1-1.5 tons of crude oil per day. The Ministry of Internal Affairs soon recruited a number of Zigong salt workers and Shaanxi refugees to set up a professional well drilling team, and sent them to Sumatra and Borneo to carry out exploration and drilling work.

After the overthrow of the Sultanate of Aceh, China took full control of the Strait of Malacca and began to explore the islands of Sumatra and Borneo on a larger scale. On the island of Sumatra, more than a dozen oil companies were formed by the Four Seas Trading Company, the British East India Company, and free merchants from China and the United Kingdom.

On June 12, 1634, the English drilled the first oil well of industrial value in the village of Pontcarland-Brandant. In October of that year, the Chinese drilled the second and third oil wells in the Surabaya area. In early 1636, Chinese traders succeeded in drilling a self-blowing well in Kurd, Borneo, but the crude oil here was denser and less kerosene.

But even so, by June 1636, 44 oil wells had been drilled in Sumatra and Borneo, producing 4,000 barrels of crude oil per day, reaching an annual output of 200,000 tons of crude oil. The kerosene refined from these crude oils is estimated to reach about 100,000 tons a year, which is much faster than killing whales to extract oil.

According to the lighting consumption of a small household, about 12 catties of kerosene can be used in a year. That is to say, 100,000 tons of kerosene is enough to provide 16 or 7 million households with lighting for a year, and compared with traditional lighting fuels such as candles, tea oil, and tung oil, kerosene is the most cost-effective and does not hurt the eyes, and it is naturally in short supply in the market.

However, it is not a simple matter to let the people of Daming enjoy the convenience of this night light. Compared with the annual output of hundreds of tons of crude oil in the Yanchang area, if you want to provide enough kerosene for the people of Daming, you can only look for oil fields overseas. The demand for kerosene by the people of the Ming Dynasty alone is enough to consume the annual kerosene production of Sumatra and Borneo, not to mention how great the market demand of the people of other countries outside the Ming Dynasty is.

In addition to residential lighting, there is also a demand for urban lighting, such as in Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Beijing and other cities set up on the street of kerosene street lights, each city has no less than 3,000 units. These kerosene street lamps have transformed these cities into cities of light in the dark, reducing local crime and boosting the city's economy, allowing them to spend nearly half as much time on a daily basis as those outside the city.

Mankind's thirst for light is a never-ending market demand. Seeing the money pouring into their pockets simply because they couldn't provide more kerosene, the Chinese and British kerosene merchants were so annoyed that they went crazy looking for undiscovered oil fields.

In order to better understand the cause of the formation of oil, businessmen in both countries have invested heavily in geological exploration research, trying to find a more convenient way to find the black gold buried in the ground.

The efforts of these kerosene merchants were also strongly supported by the Ming Royal Academy of Sciences and universities, after all, the direct beneficiaries of the kerosene industry were the Chinese factory owners. Whether it is the production of kerosene lamps, or the glass, steel, copper sheets or wicks used in kerosene lamps, these are all from China.

The exquisite kerosene lamps manufactured in Tianjin and Shanghai are gradually becoming the best-selling industrial products in addition to raw silk, cotton cloth, porcelain and tea. Even the British have gone to great lengths to purchase a few special kerosene lamps for lighthouse lighting, which rely on optical grinding to reflect the lens and shine farther and brighter than traditional lighthouse lamps. However, the British did not understand the principle at all, but just five or six years ago, the first lighthouse in Tianjin was built with the help of the British.

Chinese people in China may be accustomed to the changes taking place around them. But for those outside of China and foreigners, some Chinese cities are undergoing a makeover on a monthly basis. And even Europeans, who are moving towards capitalist society, change in years or decades. As for those Asian countries around the Ming Dynasty, nothing will change for decades.

The drastic changes that are taking place in the Ming Dynasty today have shocked and surprised foreigners, but perhaps only a few people can see that the root cause of this drastic change is based on the ever-expanding needs of individuals in society. The pursuit of wealth and personal enjoyment is gradually being compared with the old concept of chasing power.

Ding Youben obviously didn't think so much, he only knew that he had to pay the drilling team 800 yuan to drill a 30-meter-deep well, and then he had to pay another salary according to the depth and underground rock formation. The deepest oil well on the island of Sumatra cost about 2,000 yuan, but most wells cost between 1,200 and 1,500 yuan to produce oil.

Many people spend 1,500 yuan to dig a well and still don't see oil, so they generally give up the old well and look for another place to re-drill. Therefore, drilling wells in search of oil is actually similar to gambling. You must know that hiring natives in Sumatra is only 5 cents a day, Ding Youben hired 30 natives, and also hired 15 mercenaries, plus the cook and the two natives and girls around him who served him, the cost was 12.5 yuan a day, and abandoning a well was equivalent to throwing away more than 1,000 yuan in vain, which is really a large amount.

Of course, if you can make oil, it is equivalent to digging a mountain of gold. The market price of a barrel of crude oil is 2.5 yuan, and only 5 barrels can offset the daily expenses, and the next 5 barrels can offset the rent and other expenses to the landowner, and the rest is the net profit.

According to Ding Youbenda, the smallest well in Sumatra produces 6 to 70 barrels of oil per day, while the largest well produces as much as 800 barrels of crude oil per day, which is no different from a well that flows gold.

The wealth brought by oil attracted not only the children of the Jiangnan gentry like Ding Youben, but also more domestic gentry, merchants, and the powerful clans who had been driven out of the country. In contrast to the emperor's domestic policy of suppressing large landlords and clan tyrants at every turn, and the foreign policy of allowing countrymen to freely pursue wealth overseas and protect them, most of the clan magnates and coastal tycoons began to shift their attention overseas.

Ding Youben has a good sense of smell in this regard, and seeing that there are more and more compatriots on the island of Sumatra, he also knows that his happy time of renting land at will to drill oil wells is coming to an end. Those who came from the bigger magnates and clans, they relied on their power to slowly fight the entire area of the encircled land, and the local landlords didn't even dare to fart at that time.

For example, the former British prince who was kicked out of the country by the emperor, although he lost the inheritance of the prince, he still did not dare to offend him overseas. After discovering gold in Borneo, the English prince seized several pieces of land with gold mines and made a fortune at once. After he became the governor of Malacca, he even set his sights on the gold mines in the mountains of northern Sumatra, and insisted that the Sultan of Aceh take a gold mine out, and the Sultan of Aceh could only offer it with obedient hands.

So, if he hadn't been able to get the oil out a day earlier, he would have been really worried that he would be kicked out of the land on the refinery registration of the Four Seas Trading Company.

Just when Ding Youben was a little worried, when he didn't produce oil in the past two days, he would change places to dig a new well, and the family Ding who accompanied him to the sea had already come around from the lake in the northwest, waving to him while shouting desperately: "It's oil, it's oil, young master..."

Ding Youben was a little confused at first, but after he understood what the other party shouted, he jumped up excitedly and ordered the housekeeper behind him: "Go and ask someone to bring the sliding rod over, I want to see it myself..."