After the beginning of summer, the temperature rises significantly, the hot summer is coming, the thunderstorm increases, and the agricultural products grow up rapidly. ”

Guanzhong is fertile for thousands of miles, and it is really a country of abundance. With the advent of May, the land is full of greenery and vitality. The spring flowers are gone, and the grass burrows out of the ground; The peach blossoms are defeated, the willow branches are green, and when the apple blossoms bloom, the swallows have already caught the spring mud; By the time the locust flowers bloom, the rape has set pods, and the wheat is spitting. In the purple and red May Pass, the acacia flowers dot the countryside.

At the beginning of the Han Dynasty, many farmers in the Guanzhong area had already tried to plant winter wheat, and in early May, the wheat had already sprouted green, and some wheat had already begun to tassel. It's just that due to dietary habits, corn is still the staple food of Guanzhong people, and the price of wheat is less than half of that of corn.

Since the beginning of spring, the workshops near Chang'an City have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and many have suddenly appeared, and there are busy scenes everywhere. Since last winter, the counties and counties of Gyeonggi have been plastered with notices to recruit craftsmen, and looking at the many notices made of silk silk on the wall, many old men and women are distressed, and they are scolding and scolding the government, which consumes a lot of money and does not know how to control it. The scribe on the side of the notice did not dare to refute at all, the Han ruled the world with filial piety and respected the elderly, and these elders in the age of the sixtieth year would be polite to the Son of Heaven. If the scribe annoys them, it is light to be hit with a few crutches.

The common people listened to the scribe carefully read the note on the notice, and felt that the monthly order was a little outrageously high, if it were not for the large seal of the government on the notice, it would have been a deception. The credibility of the official seal in the early Han Dynasty was not as low as that of the new China in later generations, and the Qin and Han dynasties used the seal as a proof to know people and do things, and fraudulently used the official seal, according to the Han law, but it was a felony to rob the family, not only did their own head fall to the ground, but even the whole family had to be used as official slaves.

Craftsmen from various counties in Gyeonggi went to the government office one after another, got the talismans from their hometowns, and gathered in the capital. Some parents and officials who like fame also put on a show of going out of the city to send each other, repeatedly instructing the craftsmen to work hard in the workshops in the capital.

However, the officials and officials knew in their hearts that the workshops near the capital were all bought and sold by the nobles in the capital, and these notices were specially sent by them, and they repeatedly told them to do things thoroughly. The officials and gentlemen all have the intention of currying favor with the nobles, so they are naturally extremely hard-working. If the craftsmen talk more about the goodness of their hometown in the capital, and how their parents love the people like children, once it reaches the ears of the nobles, they will inevitably be praised. It is necessary to know that the primary election of officials in the Han Dynasty, in addition to hereditary filial piety, is the most important official reputation, no matter what your ability is, reputation is the most important. Now that there is such an opportunity, the people under his rule can go to the feet of the Son of Heaven to make a name for themselves, how can the officials and masters let it go easily?

As a result, the already prosperous Chang'an City and the surrounding counties have become more and more crowded. At the beginning, some black-hearted merchants were happy to hunt and took the opportunity to raise grain prices, thinking about making a lot of money. Who knew that there were suddenly more than 10 rice shops in Chang'an Dong City, hanging the signboard of "Six Chen Xing", and selling a large number of six kinds of grains at affordable prices: millet, millet, rice, wheat, barley, and soybean. Prices in Chang'an instantly returned to the previous level, neither high nor low. Liu Che is well aware of the truth that "rice is expensive and hurts farmers, and rice is cheap and hurts farmers", and he stockpiled a large amount of grain early, which caused price fluctuations in order to stabilize the large number of population movements caused by the industrialization process.

A large number of new workshops opened by the Tian Business Group and the Imperial Industrial Group, under the requirements of the crown prince Liu Che, greatly increased the monthly rate of craftsmen and hired laborers, at least twice the price offered by other workshops, and some diligent craftsmen with good craftsmanship even received more than ten times the high remuneration. Liu Che, who has strong financial resources, has never been stingy in improving employee welfare. Because Liu Che knew that in the future, a large number of bourgeoisie would inevitably appear in the Han Empire. In his lifetime, he had to do his best to reduce the oppression and exploitation of workers by the capitalists, and he really did not want the Han Empire to experience another history of Western industry. Of course, Liu Che is not a god, and he obeys the destiny of heaven in his best affairs, but he has a clear conscience.

In the decades since the founding of the Han Dynasty, the people have been constantly reducing rents and living with the people, and as long as there is no large-scale disaster, the people can have enough food and clothing, and occasionally eat some meat. Therefore, the folk diet has gradually improved from the initial filling of the stomach to the realm of satisfying the appetite. Recently, in the counties around the capital, there has even been a new kind of food - steamed locust gnocchi.

The wisdom of the common people is infinite, since Chang'an Dong City opened some pastry shops, selling some delicious pastries that only the nobles could eat in the past, and the people who occasionally have extra money will also buy a few pieces to try it. The more I eat it, the more I will inevitably learn to make it at home. Strangely, the manager and the guy in charge of the pastry shop don't seem to be annoyed, but will explain some simple ways to make pastries very kindly.

As for the main ingredient for pastries, the so-called flour, the wheat is simply ground into flour by grinding it with a stone. However, most of the people go to the newly opened flour shops in Dongshi to buy them, and rarely grind noodles at home. It's not that they don't know how to make their own products, it's just that the price of the flour shop is not much more expensive than wheat, and they save themselves more work. With the effort saved, even if you go to the newly opened workshops near the capital to do chores, you can earn a lot of flour money.

With flour, it's not easy to make pastries. Pastries were sweets, and in the early Han Dynasty, sugar was not cheap. However, the people were pleasantly surprised to find that the pastry shop actually began to sell a large amount of caramel at half the price of the market. As more and more people came to buy caramel, especially some big businessmen who came to hear the news, they proposed to buy a large number of them, and the head of the pastry shop, surnamed Suo, opened a few shops next to it, specializing in selling caramel candy.

As early as the last years of the Yin Shang Dynasty, the people of the Central Plains knew that they used grains to make sweet food, and made caramel sugar. The so-called starch sugar is a starch sugar made from grains, similar to the maltose of later generations. By the beginning of the Han Dynasty, as a sweet food, the consumption of caramel was already common. The manufacture of starch syrup is a viscous product formed by mixing the starch of the grain with malt and then boiling it by glycosation, which is widely spread among the people.

In fact, as early as last winter, there was a "stone honey workshop" in Beique Jiadi, where the powerful gathered, to supply sugar products to the powerful at high prices. In the past few months, he has already earned a lot of money, which makes Tian Sheng, the owner of Tian's Business Group, happy. What Shi Mi sells is not the caramel eaten by the common people, but the sucrose concocted by the crown prince Liu Che, which is very close to the white sugar of later generations.

Liu Che originally did not intend to engage in sugar production, because he had never seen sugar cane in the land of Guanzhong, and thought that there was no sugar cane in the Han Dynasty. When he first made pastries, he used the usual caramel candy.

It wasn't until last winter, when Liu Che and the emperor's father were having a banquet, that he accidentally drank too much, and Sun Quan, the eunuch with the palm print, served a bottle of "Zhe Pulp" to let him relieve his hangover, and he knew that he was wrong, very wrong. This "syrup" is sugarcane juice! Solid sugar cane juice!

After asking the Shaofu soup official carefully, Liu Che learned that although the white sugar had not really been made at this time, sugarcane juice had been widely used for seasoning. During the reign of Gaozu Liu Bang, the king of Minyue once offered stone honey Wuhui, the so-called stone honey, which refers to solid products made of sugarcane as raw materials.

And the so-called "Zhe pulp" is extremely common in the south. At the end of the Warring States Period, Qu Yuan made "The Conjuring", which has the sentence "Shy turtle cannon lamb, there is some syrup", which means that when cooking these delicious foods such as turtle fish and fried lamb, some "syrup" should be poured with some "syrup" seasoning. The so-called syrup refers to the sweet juice squeezed from sugar cane.

It can be seen that the Chu State in the south at that time not only had sugarcane cultivation, but also people were able to squeeze the sweet juice in it to be used as a condiment when cooking food; And because the poem "The Conjuring" describes the common folk customs and etiquette of summoning the souls of the dead, and at the same time describes the commonly used foods such as rice, wheat, chickens, and cattle, which is enough to show that the extraction and consumption of cane products were quite common at that time.

Although the cane sugar products of the early Han Dynasty were still rare, otherwise they would not have been offered to the emperor as a tribute. However, the consumption of cane juice has become a relatively common thing for the upper class of society, and the use of sugarcane juice is not only a commonly used seasoning food, but also often used as an anti-hangover.

By the time of the Jingdi Dynasty, there had been sand and stone honey. The so-called "saga" refers to crystalline sugar products. Starch sugar is viscous, and in order to get crystalline sugar food, there is no second substitute except sucrose, and now the Chang'an magnates have been able to eat sucrose products with granulated sugar rudiments.

Liu Che couldn't help but be overjoyed, and hurriedly asked Tian Sheng to send people to Chudi to buy sugarcane on a large scale, and arrange for people to plant a large number of them for future use. Sugarcane is an annual or perennial tropical and subtropical herbaceous plant, so there is also a large amount of sugarcane available in winter, especially some wild sugarcane, in the dense mountain forests of Chudi. And the fiefdom of Changsha King Liu Fa has many wastelands, which are now used to grow sugarcane.

In just over a month, a large amount of sugarcane has been sent to the newly built sugar mill at the foot of Nanshan Mountain. The craftsmen of the Prince Zhan Shifu, who had already tried to produce countless times, took more than 1,000 Qiang female slaves to make cane sugar day and night, and finally made the first batch of finished products after the beginning of spring and sent them to the stone honey workshop in Beique Jiadi. At the beginning of the opening of Shimifang, it detonated the Beique Jiadi, and the magnates sent housekeepers one after another, pushing carts of copper coins to buy cane sugar. The high price of 10,000 yuan per stone could not stop the crowd of people in the swarm, and the sucrose of more than 1,000 stones was sold out immediately.

Uncle Tian Sheng looked at the copper coins piled up in the treasury, and his tender face in his early twenties was stunned and smiled a chrysanthemum.

(I deliberately waited until more than two o'clock to update, and I wanted to see if the editor gave a recommendation this week, who knows if I was disappointed.) It's really helpless, complain, why can some books be recommended for more than a month, I'm really speechless...... ）

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