The plan for the reorganization and expansion of the Chinese Army, drawn up in mid-April 1858, was not large on the surface, and the only completely newly built troops were the Guards Division, and the expanded troops were only two mixed brigades.

However, the actual scale is not only to see how many troops have been expanded, but also to see the need to replenish more soldiers, guns, and artillery!

Among them, there are nearly 30,000 recruits who only need to be replenished, and the total strength of the Royal Army of the Chinese Army is more than 40,000 people.

More than 20,000 rifles need to be replenished.

The second, third, fourth, and fifth divisions were originally short of artillery, but now there are the Guards Division and the expanded Seventh and Tenth Divisions, which have a very huge amount of artillery to be replenished.

Twelve-pounder field guns, six-pounder cavalry guns, four-pounder infantry guns, thirty-two-pounder and sixty-four-pounder large-caliber mortars, nine-pounder light mortars, etc., all add up to at least several hundred.

With such a large demand for ordnance, even if the military can get the full support of the Cabinet Finance Department and come up with so much money to procure it, in fact, it will not be able to procure enough ordnance in a short period of time.

In order to expand the modern army on a large scale, although the restrictions on the number of soldiers and military spending are great, what is greater is the production capacity.

In the case of the inability to import on a large scale, the production capacity of the armament industry in the territory of the Chinese Empire directly affected the expansion capacity of the Chinese Empire!

In order to increase the production of domestic self-produced weapons, led by the Ministry of Ordnance, the Finance Department of the Palace Affairs Department raised 100,000 taels of funds for the construction of a 'Jinling Arsenal' on the western outskirts of Nanjing.

The main technical support for the factory was provided by the Lindeji Qì Factory, a subsidiary of Imperial Industries, and in order to support the factory, the local government of Jiangning Prefecture directly granted them a piece of official land of thousands of acres at a symbolic price, and granted them tax exemption for up to five years.

The military even mobilized more than 10,000 people from two auxiliary defense divisions to level the land and build a factory building for free.

Not only that, this 'Jinling Arsenal' had just been established, and even before the factory had been repaired, the military couldn't wait to send money to the door, directly ordered 30,000 rifles and 100 artillery pieces of various calibers, and then sent an 'advance payment' of up to 200,000 taels of silver.

No way, it's not that the military itself is cheap, and there is so much money that there is nowhere to spend it, but that this Jinling Arsenal is in the military's expectations, and its production capacity needs to be comparable to that of the Linde Machinery Factory, and how much money did it cost to support the military of the Linde Machinery Factory?

So far, the military has placed orders for more than 500 rifles and more than 100,000 rifles to the Linde Machinery Factory, and the rifles in these orders are enough for the Linde Machinery Factory to produce for 10 years, and the advance payment alone is more than 1 million taels of silver.

Moreover, every time the military accepts a batch of ordnance, it will make normal payments, that is to say, the advance payment of one million taels is actually an interest-free long-term loan, and it does not have to be repaid in a short time.

Now, in order to support the early construction of the Jinling Arsenal, this advance payment of 200,000 taels of silver is nothing, and the military will continue to place orders to send sufficient advance payments to the Jinling Arsenal, so that they can have money to build factories, purchase equipment, hire personnel, and finally produce the ordnance that the military urgently needs.

However, despite the strong support of the government and the military, the Jinling Arsenal also needed at least a year to carry out the preliminary construction, which means that in the next year, the main supply of ordnance to the Chinese Empire will still be greatly dependent on the Linde Machinery Factory.

In order to allow the Linde Machinery Factory, the only large-scale weapons manufacturer in the empire, to focus more on the production of high-tech weapons, the military's ordnance department took the lead, and the cabinet's Ministry of Industry and Commerce cooperated, and allocated a large number of production tasks of cold weapons and auxiliary ordnance to other small factories and even handicraft workshops.

The Linde Machinery Factory concentrates all its output on the production of rifles and artillery!

The government of the Shanghai Business District also gritted its teeth and gave them a lot of tax incentives, so that Linde Machinery could retain more profits for expansion.

The government and the military vigorously support the military industry, even at the expense of posting it, which is naturally not because the royal industry covets the government's tax incentives, but because the military is really in dire need of these weapons, and if it can, the military is eager to send tens of thousands of soldiers to help them produce them for free.

However, the strong support of the government and the military can only be reflected in policy and financial support, and if you want to expand production, you will have to rely on the efforts of Linde Machinery Factory itself.

In order to increase the scale of production to meet a large number of orders from the military, in addition to increasing investment and speeding up the construction of a new factory in the south of Shanghai, Linde Machinery Factory also began to recruit a large number of workers, so as to increase the operating rate of the machine as much as possible, so that people rest, and even did not hesitate to arrange two or even three people in the same post, in order to increase production as much as possible.

Although this will cause a sharp rise in labor costs, it is not a big problem, because the bulk of the production cost of Linde Machinery is not the wages of workers, but the upfront investment of plant and equipment.

The labor cost of Linde Machinery is much lower than that of its European counterparts.

In this era, Linde Machinery Co., Ltd. recruits an ordinary worker who is unskilled and pure laborers, whose salary is about five dollars a week, and if it is a primary skilled worker such as a start-up machine, his salary is about one or two per week.

The salary of middle and senior skilled workers fluctuates greatly, as little as two or three taels per week, while some senior skilled workers who can replace foreign technicians can reach ten taels or even more than thirty taels per week according to their positions and technical capabilities.

Of course, the number of those middle and senior technical personnel is very scarce, and it does not generally represent the labor cost of this era.

The main labor cost of the Linde Machinery Factory, the vast majority of which are ordinary workers, and these people's wages are generally between five dollars and one tael a week, which is equivalent to three shillings and four pence to six shillings and eight pence in pounds.

At the same time, the average male worker in England was paid about ten shillings a week, while the wage of a skilled worker was twenty or thirty shillings a week.

This comparison shows that the wages of contemporary Chinese workers are much lower than those of European countries such as the United Kingdom. However, the low level of wages does not mean that the standard of living is worse than that of foreign workers.

As we all know, Britain and other countries in the era of the industrial revolution, although the national strength is booming, but the poor living standards of the working class are notoriously poor, and London, known as the fog capital, is the most industrially developed city in the world, but it is also the city with the largest number of poor people.

The vast majority of millions of workers across Britain struggled to make ends meet, a fact that can be seen in countless books describing the Industrial Revolution.

In the Chinese Empire, the income of the country's residents was generally low, and the prices were quite low, so although the salary offered by the Linde Machinery Factory was only about two to three taels of silver per month, it could also guarantee the daily necessities of the workers at a minimum.

At the same time, Linde Machinery Qì Factory often recruits the family members of workers to work in the factory, that is, female workers and child laborers.

For example, the quilt factory opened in the Linde Machinery Qì factory was actually aimed at providing jobs for a large number of workers' families.

Even in order to solve the problem of workers' accommodation, Linde Machinery Qì Factory has built a large number of simple houses in the factory area, which are provided as dormitories for these workers' families to live in.

You must know that Shanghai is now full of immigrants from all over southern Jiangsu, these people have no land and no houses, and they need to buy food and rent houses to maintain a minimum of life, and it is difficult to support them by relying only on their husbands' monthly salary of two or three taels of silver.

Even with the simple dormitories provided by the factory, the elderly and weak family members still need to go out to work so that they can earn enough wages to buy food.

In this era, the vast majority of people living in Shanghai, that is, the people at the bottom of society, need to fight for dinner every day, and large enterprises like Linde Machinery Factory are quite good.

In some small factories or workshops, when the factory owners recruit workers, they even only give some coarse grain porridge and do not pay wages at all, and the working hours are generally more than 14 hours a day, and some black-hearted workers can even work 16 hours.

And Rao is like this, those low-level people who fled to Shanghai because of the war are also helpless, in order not to starve to death and enter these black-hearted factories.

The treatment of workers by the factory owners of this era is cruel and bloody!

As far as the simple labor cost is concerned, the labor cost of Linde Machinery is less than half of that of its European counterparts, and for Linde Machinery Factory, its biggest expense is the purchase of equipment, construction of plants and other preliminary investment.

The construction of thousands of machines and equipment in the factory area that stretches for miles is often hundreds of thousands of taels of huge investment, and the original Lin family firm behind the Linde Machinery Factory and the current royal industry cannot come up with hundreds of thousands of taels of silver to smash it on their own, most of which are 'advance payments' from the military.

It can be said that the scale of the Linde Machinery Factory is getting bigger and bigger, and the more money it owes to the military, because every time it expands, it is inevitable to seek financial support from the military, otherwise it will not even be able to afford equipment.

When calculating the price of ordnance, the Linde Machinery Factory, which owes a lot of debt to the military, does not say that it only calculates the normal production costs, but also depreciates the equipment, plant construction, research and development expenses, such as a set of 1856 Linde rifles, including rifles, loading tools, bayonets, and included bullets, which are about 20 taels of silver a complete set.

Its price is actually much more expensive than the British 1853 Enfield of the same era, and the price of the 1853 Enfield rifle exported by Britain to the United States in large quantities is about twenty-five dollars, that is, about sixteen taels, which is still the CIF price of the British home delivery.

One is twenty taels of silver, the other is sixteen taels of silver, the reason for this price gap is mainly the new construction of Linde Machinery Factory, the initial investment is too large, and the scale of production is far less than that of the United Kingdom, the British are millions of production, and the annual output of Linde Machinery is only one or two hundred thousand, this output is less than the cost of thinning, and the price will naturally increase accordingly.

But Lin Zhe will not be like those short-sighted people, saying that it is better to buy than to build.

It is cheap to buy directly, but if you don't support the domestic arsenal, you can only buy it all the time in the future, and when it comes to wartime, especially when there is a war with a foreign country, you will be dumbfounded if people don't sell it.

Moreover, if you support your own national defense industry, although it seems to be a loss in the early stage, after the development of Linde Machinery Factory and Jinling Arsenal, the technical level is getting higher and higher, and the cost is getting lower and lower, and it will definitely be cheaper than direct imports.

Supporting the development of the national defense industry is the established strategy of the Chinese military, and it does not hesitate to spend hundreds of thousands of taels of silver or even millions of taels of silver for this purpose.

In return, the defense industry, led by the Linde Machinery Factory, needs to provide the military with a stable and large number of sources of ordnance, and at the same time, it also needs to continuously improve and develop new weapons according to the needs of the military.

For example, the 1856 Linde rifle, the nine-pounder mortar gun, the four-pounder light infantry gun, etc., these weapons were all developed and produced by the Linde Machinery Factory at the request of the military. (To be continued.) )