"This is the saltworks? It's a big piece. Goldman's eyes widened in surprise. A land of white light, stretching north and south along the coastline, at least a dozen miles, for he stood at the entrance of the salt pan, and saw the end of the salt pan no matter how far south or north.

"The saltworks, of course." Han Gang nodded and said, "But that's only half of it. To the north, there is also a meadow of about the same size, which was originally used as fodder for boiling salt. ”

Huang Jinman stretched out his hand and pointed to a white land that reflected the sunlight in the sky in front of him, his hands trembled a little, "There is so much salt here, why don't you sell it yet?!" ”

Han Gang smiled, knowing that the gold was full of misunderstandings. Zhizhou Ma Zhu, who was accompanying him, also said with a smile, "I don't know about the group practice, this white ground that looks like salt is actually all land that has been soaked in salt water for many years. It's okay to let livestock like cows and horses lick it, but how can you sell it to people for food? He pointed south, "The salt-drying pond is a little bit ahead, and it only occupies a small part of the salt farm. ”

Han Gang is still in Jiaozhou at the moment, and even has time to visit the salt factory with gold - this is actually the reason why he stayed in Jiaozhou for ten more days, which is the problem of the reopening of the salt factory in Jiaozhou.

Salt is a necessity of life, and without salt to eat, people will waste it. Therefore, the profits brought by the imperial court's monopoly on the salt industry accounted for a large part of the fiscal revenue.

But to produce salt, it is not enough to have a salt farm, you also need to have enough manpower.

Jingdong, Huaidong, Zhejiang, Fujian, and even many salt farms in Guangdong and Guangxi, which one does not have hundreds or thousands of salt dings. The saltworks of Cochin are certainly no exception.

But in the previous battle to destroy the country, the salt of several salt farms along the coast of Jiaozhi was basically divided among the barbarians of each Xidong. At that time, Annan's attention was all about laying down the Thang Long Mansion. Where did Zhang Dian and Han Gang have extra energy to think about boiling the sea to make salt.

When Jiaozhou was pacified, Zhang Dian returned to Beijing to be his privy deputy envoy, and Han Gang, who stayed in Guangxi, had a headache. In order to reopen the salt works, he had to retrieve some of the discarded salt from the Xidong tribes.

No one in the 72nd Department of Jiaozhou complained about Han Gang's behavior. The Han people want to eat salt, and the Yi people also have to eat salt, in the salt field before the reopening of more than half a year, the accumulated salt has been sold out, the Jiaozhou salt field will not be opened, and in the future, all the departments will add up and down, and the men, women, and children will total millions, all of whom have to eat light food. When the time comes, I won't be able to do even the heavier strenuous work.

Regarding the shortage of salt, the gold mandu who stayed in Guangyuan Prefecture was anxious. His tribe used to eat illicit salt from Jiaozhi traffickers, and the price was very cheap. The price of Qinzhou official salt used now has more than doubled compared to the private salt eaten in the past, and the taste is not necessarily better. Huang Jinman complained about this, but the price of salt after the official salt of Qinzhou was transported to Guangyuan Prefecture would not be reduced by a penny because of his status as Xuanhe.

But the number of salts they sent back was far less than in the past, only a few hundred. Han Gang was trapped in a shortage of manpower, so he had to take a risk and change a method of salt production.

Although Han Gang didn't know anything about how to dry salt, he could test it out by knowing the general direction of the Dao, just like when he made a spaceship. But this time, he didn't need to test it, and all the salt produced in the most famous Jiezhou salt pond in Kansai was sunburned.

There are still a few hundred Guanxi people who remain in Guangxi, but there is a team from Jiezhou, although this team is not stationed near Yanchi, but half of their hometowns are near Yanchi. Among these half of the people, two more people understand how the salt pond in Jiezhou is dry.

With Han Gang looking at the overall situation and two experts to point out the details, this time the trial of the salt drying method in the Jiaozhou salt field was a success without any detours.

"Can sea salt really be exposed?" Although Huang Jinman has not traveled from south to north, he has lived to be forty or fifty years old, and he knows some common sense more or less: "Didn't you say that all the salt is boiled in a big pot?" When the last general first bargained with the smuggler who carried the burden to the cave to sell salt, they all said that how much firewood and grass would be needed to boil a pound of salt, and how much foot effort would be required to send a pound of salt all the way. How high the cost of this sale is, how low the price of salt sold to the last general, and how low the family children and eighty-year-old mother to support, it really can't be lower, and no matter how low it is, the whole family can only drink brine. ”

Huang Jinman learned to speak in the tone of a merchant selling goods, which made Han Gang laugh, any merchant is a virtue. Huang Chao's peers who dare to fight and kill, when they start trading, they can't get rid of the tone of businessmen.

Regardless of the tone of the businessman, when the smuggler bargained with the gold, he said that it would cost a lot of firewood and grass to boil the salt, and that it would add a lot of cost to it, but this was solid and not exaggerated.

"As long as the cost of firewood is reduced, the cost of salt production can be reduced by at least 70%." Ma Zhu explained for Huang Jinman, "In the past, a pound of official salt in Yongzhou was sold for 145 to 20 wen, and the official salt in Jiaozhi was also sold for 10 wen, and Guangyuan Prefecture was ......."

"Bawen. It's just private salt," Huang Jinman was indignant when he thought of the past, "The Jiaozhi people sold salt to Guangyuan, and they dared to ask for twenty-five wen per catty!" ”

Ma Zhu nodded with a smile and pointed to the pieces of salt furrows that looked like ridges: "Now that the salt drying method has been changed, that is, the official salt is sold for eight wen a catty, and the money earned by the government will never be less than in the past." ”

Looking at the white salt frost everywhere on the beach, the gold is full of joy and is also staggering. If the official salt is sold for eight wen a catty, the money earned is not less than that of selling it for ten or twenty wen, then the cost of a pound of salt is only about one penny?

These salt furrows are plastered with cement on the bottom and walls of the pool, just above the tide line. There is a sluice gate facing the sea. When the tide rises, the sluice gates are opened, and the seawater pours into the pool, and when the sluice gates are closed, the seawater in the ridges is left behind, and it gradually evaporates and dries in the sun.

Although the dry season has just begun, there are already places in the pond where the brine has been dried and white salt frost has appeared. The clean water from a nearby river is connected by a canal with two sluices in front and back.

Although Ma Zhu is the magistrate of Haimen, as Han Gang's former staff, he has put much more effort into the salt field than Li Feng, the governor. After a few days, everything has already been clear: "This is the same as the salt in Jiezhou, after the salt frost is precipitated, it has to be washed with clean water to wash away the bitter brine in the furrow, and the rest is edible salt." ”

Huang Jinman looked at the brine pool where he could already see the salt, and sighed, "The last general has been guarding Guangyuan Prefecture for most of his life, and he has never seen the sea. I don't know much, and I always thought that salt could only be boiled. I didn't expect that drying salt would be so time-saving and labor-saving. The Heavenly Empire is indeed not comparable to such barbarians as Jiaozhi. ”

Han Gang said with a smile: "It's not surprising that you don't know the Dao, and there are not many people in China who know the salt drying method. This method of drying salt also exists in Kansai, and other places use boiled salt. Now that the salt drying in the Jiaozhou salt field has been successful, the transfer department will promote the salt drying method in Qinzhou and Lianzhou to replace the original decoction method. ”

Han Gang has always been puzzled by the salt boiling method that is now in use along the coast and in Shuzhong. In this era, there is already a more labor-saving and cost-saving salt drying method, why has it not been promoted. If it is said that there is no motivation to promote the development of technology in this era, just look at the major copper mines in Jiangxi and Guangdong today, and know that this statement is slanderous. All of them have used the bile copper method to replace copper with iron filings, which have been popularized in recent years.

Han Gang sometimes can't help but speculate from conspiracy theories that the salt drying method is too simple, as long as there is a larger beach and a clean freshwater river, salt can be produced in large quantities. The law of boiling salt is that a large amount of forage is required, a lot of labor is required, and the iron pot and iron plate used for boiling salt are also provided by the government, the larger the scale, the easier it is for the government to control, and the salt industry can be controlled more in the hands than the salt drying method, and there is no urgent need to change the past production model.

However, Jiaozhou is a remote place, and the salt produced will not be sold to other roads, so there is no need to worry too much. Even the salt farms in Qinzhou and Lianzhou can implement the salt drying method – the interior of Guangxi eats salt from the salt factories in Qinzhou and Lianzhou, but the neighboring Luzhou has its own salt from other places.

After the popularization of the salt drying method, there is no longer a need to cooperate with the forage for boiling salt in the salt field, and tens of thousands of hectares of grassland along the road in Guangxi do not need to be planted with grass, thus saving a large amount of land suitable for cultivation. With the addition of that grassland, Guangxi's grain output can rise to a higher level.

When the first batch of salt came out, Han Gang asked Huang Jinman to bring more than fifty pack horses back to Guangyuan Prefecture and transport all the salt he could get. The rest of the tribes had to wait patiently for the next batch of salt to be produced.

In this process, Zhang Sui has already said goodbye and left Jiaozhou, and after he settled the business name in Jiaozhou, there is nothing else to do. As for salt-related matters, it has nothing to do with merchants.

Illicit salt is forbidden in the inland, but Jiaozhou does not have to worry, and no one will sell salt from Jiaozhou to the north to sell, using sea ships to sell illicit salt, this is an out-and-out joke - not that you can't make money, but the profit is too low, and compared with the risk, it really outweighs the loss.

The matter of salt was resolved, and there was not much left in front of Han Gang. He didn't even care much about the thriving overseas trade in Jiaozhou today.

After all, the purchasing power of overseas is limited, and compared with the economic and population level of the Great Song Dynasty, overseas countries together cannot lift chopsticks. The scale of maritime trade can support tens of thousands of maritime merchants, but it is not of much use to the whole country.

If you can make a lot of money in overseas trade from the perspective of a businessman, you can easily become rich. But for the country, the money they can share in the sea trade is really pitiful, and what should really be focused on is the domestic market.

When the sugar industry became the pillar of Jiaozhou, Han Gang's hard work in Jiaozhou was not in vain. The shopkeeper of the SF branch he arranged here, the next task is heavy.

Two days later, Han Gang received another letter, not the news of Wang Anshi's resignation, but Zhang Zai's serious illness.