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"Rich? Have we made less money? Geng Jingzhong smiled and said undeniably.

"Lord Wang, that's different. The coarse salt on the market is generally only about one tael to one tael or two taels of silver, and if it is refined salt, it can be sold for at least three taels of silver per load, which is absolutely no problem at all. If it is pure green salt, it can even be sold for more than ten taels of silver per load. It's just that green salt is produced in the northern inland, and transportation is difficult, but the price of refined salt is compared with the price of one tael per load of coarse salt, which is also a big profit. Moreover, when the salt merchants bought coarse salt from the salt farmers, the price did not exceed 400 wen and one stone at all, so to speak, the price of the two is really one heaven and one underground. ”

"Our Fujian is far away from the origin of green salt, and the supply of green salt has been intermittent for a hundred years, coming and going, and the market is often out of stock. However, the rich family only recognizes green salt, and other salts are not eye-catching at all. There are often rich and noble families outside who offer a high price of 300 wen per catty, but unfortunately there is still no goods. And our side is basically coarse salt from the sea, refined salt is very rare, if we can provide a large number of refined salt, its profit can be imagined! Yao Qisheng gave Geng Jingzhong a detailed analysis of the sale of salt in the market, and Geng Jingzhong nodded secretly when he listened.

This is also true, green salt does have many advantages, compared with salt produced in other places. Wealthy families all pay attention to a face, they pay attention to the taste of life, although there are alternatives. But whoever uses it feels like he's lost his identity. Rather raise the price. and buy the green salt of the origin. The green salt on the market in Fujian is about to enter the wax moon, and it has risen to one or two silver pounds, especially now that it is the end of the year, and the price has risen by two percent. At this price, it can only be bought by powerful people in familiar warehouses, and at the same time, refined salt with almost the same effect is also sold, but it is not sold at a price.

In fact, I don't know when or who said that rich people need a way to show that they are rich. When the rich get together with each other, someone always mentions, intentionally or unintentionally, that they use green salt to rinse their mouths and clean them, and pretend to be knowledgeable and say: "This green salt is fresher and refreshing than other salts!" As soon as these words come out, if you don't clean your mouth with this green salt, you won't dare to open your mouth, of course, the real powerful and rich families don't disdain to show off like this, but the housekeeper is very close to the family members who buy it, and they must buy green salt.

In fact, it is very simple to say that this thing is fake, but every family buys it. They are all staring at each other, and whoever cheats will inevitably be shaken out by others. At that time, the people who bought salt had no face to see people, and the salt sellers smashed the signboards. In fact, how much green salt is left on the market, who is it, everyone is thinking clearly, anyway, sooner or later it will be used up for a day. This is a crooked trend, even the pharmacies and doctors in Fuzhou City regard this green salt as a necessary medicine to refresh and calm the mind, and when prescribing medicine, they must specially tell the patient "You must use green salt, if it is ordinary salt, it will have no effect."

The price of refined salt is so high that it is sad that the salt farmers, who have been boiling sea salt for hundreds of years, do not know that this method can turn coarse salt into refined salt. If I had known such a purification method before, I would have not had to be as poor and miserable as I am now. In fact, it is no wonder that the coarse salt is also boiled by the salt farmers with hard work, and after it is cooked, it is immediately packed and covered with cotton cloth, for fear that it will not be sold if it gets wet. Who is willing to continue to dissolve coarse salt in water, filter it over and over again, and then evaporate it again? It is this subtle difference in concept, a very simple purification process, that no one has noticed.

"This is the truth, this kind of refined salt is much better than coarse salt just by appearance." Geng Jingzhong also picked up a little bit of freshly refined refined salt and said. Geng Jingzhong knew that even what he made now was not pure salt at all, and the standard of salt in later generations was pure sodium chloride without other impurities. But at this time, the sea salt can have this color, which is already very good. However, in the future, it is possible to vigorously exploit well salt, which contains much less impurities than those in sea salt, and has a higher purity.

"I'll write down the whole process of refining when I go back, and you can take some time to organize people to learn it. Then a factory area was set aside in this Mawei Development Zone for coarse salt purification, which is also convenient for us to manage. This method can only be known to our own people. If it is learned by others, then the whole of Fujian will be refined salt, and the price will not be able to sell. This tenfold profit is really not a small amount of money! Geng Jingzhong touched his chin and said with a smile.

Yao Qisheng really admires Geng Jingzhong, although Geng Jingzhong's literary talent is not high, but he can always do things that are expected, and he has his own things that are beneficial to the people. "Yes, my lord! I will carefully select all the personnel. Come to think of it, it won't be long before we can not only occupy the refined salt market in Fujian, but also the surrounding provinces and even the whole country can have a share of our refined salt! Yao Qisheng seemed to see a glittering cash cow beckoning to him, as the chief internal affairs strategist under Geng Jingzhong, no matter how much money he had, he would feel less!

"In addition to this, there is also a technology in the salt pan that I think can be improved. I also read the method of drying salt in the salt field recorded in this report, which is basically the same as the one recorded in "Heavenly Creation", and I feel that the efficiency is still too low! The most obvious thing is that when the salt is dried on a large scale in the salt pond, the temperature is not enough, and the evaporation rate is too slow, so it will take a long time. I lowered it a bit and came up with some ways to improve it, but I'm not sure if it's feasible, and if it works, doubling the yield of sea salt is not a problem. In two days I'll go to the beach and find a place to test it, and if it works, I'll do it in the salt works! Geng Jingzhong didn't wait for Yao Qisheng's excitement to pass, and dropped another bomb, which shocked Yao Qisheng a little unable to come back to his senses.

"Double production?" Yao Qisheng was really shocked, if they could double their output, it would be with the two salt farms they had just controlled. It can completely supply the salt consumption of the whole Fujian. There is even a superfluous. In that case. This means that the original profit will also be doubled.

"Don't look at me like that, I'll have to do it myself. There's been a lot of going on lately, and I've got you to cooperate with things on the Luzon side. As soon as this is done, I will go to Luzon, and then this home will be handed over to you to guard! Geng Jingzhong continued.

What the situation. Surprise and surprise how one after another! "The prince is still going to Luzon?" Yao Qisheng asked with wide eyes, this was a little too sudden, Geng Jingzhong didn't have any warning before.

"Yes, Luzon is under control. I'll have to inspect the new territory myself. Besides, after the Spring Festival, the recruitment and training of cavalry will also be carried out in Luzon, and I am not at ease, so I have to go and see it myself! Geng Jingzhong said.

"Hmm!" Yao Qisheng nodded, this reason is also sufficient. The new territory, the size of Fujian, if it is fully incorporated into the control and utilization, will have a huge impact on the Mawei Group.

"It's a year before I go, come on. Take a hand and dissolve all the remaining coarse salt. After filtering, change to a large pot to boil, I want to purify all of these, and see if there are any problems with large-scale boiling! After speaking, he took a wooden bucket, filled it with water, and shoveled the coarse salt into it, Yao Qisheng began to roll up his sleeves and stir. The two of them work together seamlessly, but they are quite like ordinary workers in the workshop

Song Yingxing said in "Heavenly Creation": Seawater itself has the saltiness of salt. The high-lying places on the seashore are called tidal mounds, and the low-lying places are called Caodang, and salt can be produced in these places. Sea salt is also used, but the method used to make it is different.

One way is to take salt from the shore highlands where the tide cannot flood, and each household has its own lot and boundary, and does not encroach on each other. It was expected that the weather would be fine the next day, so on the same day, more than an inch thick of rice, wheat and wheat ashes, reeds, and thatch ashes were sprinkled all over the ground, pressed and evened. The next morning, the ground was heavy with moisture and dew, and the ashes were already full of salt grass. When the fog clears and the sky clears, after noon, the ash and salt can be swept up together and taken to be washed and refined.

Another way is to do not sprinkle ash in a shallow place where the tide is shallow, just wait for the tide to pass, if the weather is fine the next day, you can dry the salt frost in half a day, and then quickly sweep it up and fry it. Another method is to dig a deep pit in advance where it can be submerged by the tide, and lay bamboo or wooden sticks on it, and spread reed mats on the bamboo and wood, and sand on top of the reed mats. When the top of the sea tide covers the deep pit, the brine gas will seep into the pit through guò sand, remove the sand and reed mats, and shine a light into the pit, and when the brine can wash out the lamp, you can take the brine out and refine.

In short, the key to success lies in whether the weather can be sunny, and if it rains for many days, the salt production is forced to stop, which is called a "salt shortage". In the salt field in Huaiyang, Jiangsu, people rely on the sun to dry the seawater, this kind of salt frost that naturally condenses after the sun is like a horse's tooth, it is called "big salt", it does not need to be fried again, it can be eaten by sweeping. In addition, the salt made by using seaweed that drifts in the sea water and is boiled by people is called "puffy salt".

The method of salt washing and decoction is to dig two pits, one shallow and one deep. The shallow pit is about one foot deep, bamboo or wood is erected on it, a reed mat is spread on it, the salt material swept up (whether it is ash or ashless, the method of washing is the same), spread on the mat, pile it higher around it, make a dam shape, and use seawater to irrigate it in the middle, and the salt brine can seep into the shallow pit; The deep pit is about seven to eight feet deep, and it receives salt water poured from the shallow pit and then poured into a pot for frying.

At this time, the pot for frying salt is called "prison basin", and the circumference of this prison basin is several zhang, and the diameter is more than one zhang, and there are only two specifications and shapes. One of them is made of iron, the iron hammer is beaten into a blade, and then riveted with iron nails, the bottom of the basin is as flat as a bowl, the depth of the basin is about one foot and two inches, and the interface is blocked after the marinade crystallization, so that it will not leak again. Under the prison basin, a stove is built to burn firewood, and there can be twelve or thirteen stove eyes, and seven or eight stove eyes are few, and one pot is boiled at the same time with firewood. There is another method of making in Fujian, which is made of bamboo strips to form a pot enclosure, which is about one zhang in diameter and about one foot deep. Paste clam ash on the rim of the pan and attach it to the sides of the pan. Heat the pot until the brine boils and until it gradually forms salt. This type of basin is also called a "salt basin". But in general, it is not as convenient and trouble-free as a pot made of iron sheets. When decocting the salt marinade. If there is no immediate condensation. You can mix the saponaria with millet bran and stir it well, and the salt will quickly crystallize into salt grains. Salt is curdled by adding soap, just like using gypsum when making tofu.

The salt produced in Huaiyang, Jiangsu Province, is heavy and black, while the salt produced in other places is light and white. In terms of weight, the salt in the Huaiyang Salt Farm weighs about ten taels per liter, while the salt in Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Changlu Salt Fields weighs only six or seven taels. The source of puffy grass salt is less reliable. Sometimes it comes once every few years, sometimes several times a month, so you can't always count on it. Salt dissolves when it encounters water, it flows salt brine when it encounters wind, and it becomes harder when it encounters fire. You don't have to use a warehouse to store salt. The characteristic of salt is that it is afraid of wind blowing but not afraid of wet ground, as long as the ground is spread with straw stalks three inches thick, there is no harm in letting the terrain be low and wet. If the surrounding area is built with bricks, the gaps are covered with mud, and the thatch is more than a foot thick on top, so that even if it is left for a hundred years, it will not deteriorate.

There are also salt farms here in Fuzhou. It is on the coast of Changle County, and it is only seven or eight kilometers away from the Monkey Island Port Development Zone. However, this salt farm is smaller. It is not as good as the two salt farms in Zhangzhou, but the salt production is considerable, and the tobacco eaten in Fuzhou is basically produced here. Geng Jingzhong wanted to improve the operation method of the salt factory, but it was obviously not enough to rely on what was recorded in the report, since the salt factory was not far away, it was better to go and see it himself, and at the same time choose a place to carry out his own practice.

In the process of inspecting, Geng Jingzhong turned out the record of salt in Song Yingxing's "Tiangong Kaiwu" and looked at it, and sure enough, it was very detailed. Compared with the Changle Salt Farm in front of me, the operation method is indeed basically in line, and there is no improvement in the future. After all, Song Yingxing had only died a long time ago, and what he recorded was also summarized by Tong Guò's own observations. When Geng Jingzhong saw the back of the pool salt, well salt, soil salt, cliff salt and other parts, Geng Jingzhong smiled again, it is really rare and strange, many inland areas are indeed not as easy to produce salt as the seaside, but it does not mean that people can't produce salt in that place.

Like Wu Sangui's Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan, neither near the sea, nor as huge natural salt pan basins as Qinghai, but the reserves of salt in these places are very rich, and after exploration in later generations, the reserves of a random salt mine are hundreds of millions of tons and billions of tons, so that the people of the whole country will not be a problem for hundreds of years. Not only these provinces, but also Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Henan, and Jiangxi are all large production areas, but the key thing is that there is no technology in this era that can mine these well salts on a large scale.

On the stone mountains not far from the river in Sichuan, most of them can be dug to extract salt. The current salt well, the circumference is only a few inches, the upper mouth of the salt well can be covered with a small bowl, and the depth of the salt well must reach more than ten zhang (more than 30 meters deep) to reach the salt brine layer, so the cost of sinking the well is very large, it takes a long time, and it is also very difficult. The tool used to sink the well is an iron cone, which is shaped like a mouth, and the tip of the iron cone must be made very strong and sharp, so that it can be used to punch holes in the stone.

The cone of the iron cone is made of a piece of bamboo that is broken in half and then wrapped tightly with a rope. Every few feet deep, it is grafted with a bamboo pole to increase its length. At first, how deep is this zhang, you can use your feet to step on the tip of the mill, just like the rice. If it is deeper, raise the iron cone with both hands and then ram it down with force, which may crush the stone, and then tie the long bamboo together and tie it with an iron spoon to dig out the gravel. It takes about half a year to drill a deep well, while it takes more than a month to drill a shallow well. If the borehole is drilled too large, the brine gas will dissipate and will not condense into salt. When the salt well is dug to the brine layer to produce water, select a good bamboo about one zhang long, chisel through the knots in the bamboo, keep only the bottom section, and install a one-way valve at the lower end of the bamboo to absorb salt water into the tube.

Tie this bamboo tube with a long rope and sink it to the bottom of the well, and the bamboo tube will be filled with salt water. The water lifting tools such as orange trees or rollers are installed on the well, and the operation method is to put on the ox, and use the ox to pull the turntable and drive the roller rope to draw up the salt water. The brine is then poured into a pot and fried (using only a medium-sized pot, not a prison basin) and it will soon condense into snow-white salt. Therefore, the salt wells of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces can easily evade official taxes. Difficult to trace. Wu Sangui has also been actively boiling salt over the years. But the effect is not great. The scale simply can't go up.

Geng Jingzhong found that the salt pond for drying salt in this salt field is divided into an evaporation pond and a crystallization pond. The salt worker first introduces the seawater into the evaporation pond, and when the water is evaporated to a certain distance by the sun, it is transferred to the crystallization pond and continues to be sun-dried, and the seawater will become a saturated solution of salt, and the salt will gradually be precipitated by the sun. But at the time of salt harvesting, due to the salt ponds. The collected salt is mixed with a lot of impurities, such as sand, clay, and soil.

If you want to say that the sea water in this era is still very clean, there is no pollution from the sewage discharge of later generations, if you just put the seawater in a pot and boil it, then you will only get ordinary coarse salt, and there will be no insoluble substances such as foolish soil. Although the color of coarse salt is not so pure white, but light brown and brown, it is already very good. In the salt field of later generations, Geng Jingzhong remembered seeing it in a documentary short film, the salt pond there. The place is covered with a layer of water cloth, which may be thick plastic paper. Or it is some other material, but it separates the seawater from the soil below, and the concealment reduces a lot of impurities in the salt produced.

Geng Jingzhong turned around for a week, and the solution he thought of was very simple, there was no plastic paper in this era, and there was no such large piece of water-insulating material, so the large salt field could be built with bricks and cement. A salt farm covers an area of not small, take Changle salt field as an example, the length and width are two kilometers each, the seaside covers an area of more than 4,000 acres, if all are built with square bricks, it is not a small project. But now Geng Jingzhong is not short of money and does not confirm that if the salt farm is renovated, it will not take much time.

There are several advantages to building the salt pond with square bricks and plastering it with a layer of cement; One is to reduce the pollution of impurities such as sediment, and the other is to lay the bottom of the cement, which can make the water temperature in the pool much higher than usual. I remember that before this era, a new sport popped up in the summer: "frying eggs on the ground outdoors". Maybe it's just to verify that the ground is frighteningly hot, or just to be curious, but I don't know how many eggs are spread on the concrete or asphalt pavement.

At that time, the temperature measured at the observation field was 36 degrees, while the surface temperature of the grassland was 43 degrees, the temperature of the cement floor was 52 degrees, and the temperature of the asphalt road was 53 degrees. Although the hottest is the asphalt pavement, the temperature difference with the air temperature is more than 17 degrees, but the cement floor is not much worse, and the temperature difference of 16 degrees makes people feel hot clearly. Even in the swimming pool in the community in later generations, after sun exposure, the water temperature in the pool is also relatively high.

If you can, think of a way to add some black pigment to the cement when plastering the cement, so that the ground will become pitch black, so that the temperature will definitely increase by a few degrees under the sun. As long as the temperature is high, the speed of seawater evaporation will be greatly accelerated, and the seawater will continue to evaporate and concentrate rapidly, quickly reach saturation, and the salt will quickly crystallize. This method is chemically called evaporation crystallization, and Geng Jingzhong is familiar with him as simple as eating and drinking.

In addition to this large-scale Changle salt farm, many places along the coast of Fuzhou can open up a small piece of salt farm, but the government has control over the salt field and does not allow ordinary people to privately store salt goods. However, Geng Jingzhong was not prepared to find another place, this Changle Salt Farm was good, anyway, it wouldn't be long before this place would be under his control. A low-lying grass pond covering an area of ten acres was selected from it, and hundreds of workers quickly built evaporation ponds and crystallization ponds under the command of Geng Jingzhong.

Some of the tools for the salt works were also prepared, and more than a dozen salt workers who could dry salt were also found. Large and small rakes can be used to catch salt, poles, baskets are used to carry salt, and wooden wheelbarrows can push salt to be transported to the beach, and then manually stacked with wooden shovels and small rakes. Of course, this has long been eliminated in later generations, but in this era, there are no advanced salt collectors, salt trucks, stackers and other combined tools to collect salt, transport salt and stack. Every qiē needs to be solved manually, such as the seawater diversion work that is now being prepared.

Hundreds of masons built the salt pond in just one day, but it would take two or three days for the salt pond to dry before it could be brought in. Time flies quickly, and when the weather is good, the salt pond can be used in only two days. It is not too difficult to divert the sea, after all, this is a low-lying grassland. However, before the water was diverted, the water storage ditch and many ditches were also excavated, and these ditches were also built with square bricks, but there was no use of cement, after all, it was not an evaporation pond or a crystallization pond, so as to ensure that no sediment entered.

These days, Geng Jingzhong has been staying in the Mawei military camp to deal with important military and political affairs with Yao Qisheng, but every three days, he will go to the salt field to check on the progress of the evaporation of seawater in the new salt pond. Not to mention, the black evaporation pond has only been introduced into the seawater for two weeks, and the half-meter-deep pool water has been reduced by half, and it can already be called brine at this time. Although the temperature in December of the lunar calendar is not high, and it is only 16 or 7 degrees during the day, it is fortunate that there has been no rain for many days. The temperature of the water in the pool is also maintained at 356 degrees, which is much stronger than the ordinary pool not far away. In two days, the brine in the evaporation pond can be transferred to the crystallization pond, and then the seawater will continue to be introduced into the evaporation pond. (To be continued......)

PS: 6,600 words chapter, brothers read him in one go!