"Boss, do you really want to go to Erdaohezi? It's not a good place, I heard there's a pretty big gold mine nearby. ”

"Steward Wang, what do you mean by that? Since Erdaohezi is rich in gold, it should be a treasure land, why isn't it a good place? ”

For example, China's largest gold producing area is the Shandong mining area, which can account for more than half of the country's total gold production, followed by the Liaoning West Corridor Mining Area, the Yunnan-Guizhou-Guizhou Mining Area, the Western Sichuan and Qinling Mining Areas.

As a native of Shandong, Yang Congxun has heard many stories from the elders of his family about a poor mountain farmer who originally lived in a gold mining area and became rich overnight because he accidentally picked up a piece of dog's head gold (a high-purity gold nugget formed in a natural state) while hoeing in the field...... If there's gold in the ground, there's a lot of wealth, right?

Listening to Yang Congxun's cross-examination, Steward Wang smiled bitterly: "You have to take care of the owner, if you have gold, you will have wealth, but sometimes, wealth may not be a blessing." ”

Steward Wang told Yang Congxun that most of the gold produced in the Shandong mining area was produced in the mining caves, while the gold in the western Liaoning mining area was mostly sand gold produced in the riverbed.

The biggest difference between this mining gold and sand gold is that it does not require too many manpower to mine the gold. After all, the underground veins of gold seedlings are only three or four zhang wide, and it is enough for thirty or forty miners to go down the mine and follow the cross-section of the veins to mine and dig gold...... If it weren't for the veins, there would be no gold, and even if they were dug up, they would be all worthless stones.

As long as gold has been found in the bed of a river, it is possible to produce gold in the riverbed of the entire river from upstream to downstream, dozens of miles and hundreds of miles...... Of course, there must be more or less gold produced in different sections of the river, depending on the vision and a bit of luck of the gold diggers.

If you want to mine river gold, you have to rely on gold diggers to stand knee-deep in the river water, holding gold sieves to filter out the sediment on the riverbed little by little, so that the sand gold buried in the river sand can be collected little by little. (Gold is dense and is always the first to settle down from the suspended sand.)

No, mining river gold obviously requires a lot of manpower.

"The owner, the large-scale gold caves on the border of Shandong are all taken care of by the government, and the miners who dig for gold in this cave are also mercenaries who eat imperial grain; Although the errand of digging gold is hard and dangerous, as long as people don't keep memorizing words, they can earn some money and come back to support their families. But these gold-producing rivers outside the border are all controlled by big mine owners and local bandits! ”

According to the king's steward, those who went to recruit gold diggers were all desperate destitute people who had no other way to live than to soak in the river for gold.

As a result, the gold miners who recruited the prospectors did not regard them as human beings, and often hired bandits from the local mountains to keep an eye on the gold panning in the river. If someone is found to have secretly mined the gold sand gold, they will be killed immediately, and the corpse will be suspended from a wooden stake on the bank of the river as a warning.

However, from late spring to early autumn (the rest of the time was too cold to go down the river), the gold prospectors had to see the juice of the river knee-deep for almost half the year... If you want people to go down to the river and suffer such hardships, you have to use the silver that has been spent in vain as wages.

According to the king's steward, the reward given by the gold mine owners was 'one tael of gold, one tael of silver', and as long as the gold prospectors could collect one tael of gold from the riverbed, they could exchange it for one tael of silver from the miners.

It stands to reason that the wages given by the owner of this gold mine are not low, like an ordinary family of three, one two or three taels of silver is enough to eat and drink for a year.

But the gold miners didn't want their gold prospectors to earn enough to leave...... After all, it takes a lot of manpower to mine river gold, and the departure of a large number of gold diggers will cause the production of river gold to plummet.

In order to extract as much money as possible from the gold prospectors, the gold mine owners tried almost everything to welcome all kinds of gold caves near the shacks where the gold diggers rested at night, from gambling stalls to brothels...

As long as none of the gold diggers can hold it, then after a night of absurdity, the money bag that has just been loaded with blood and sweat in exchange for wages will be empty again.

I heard the king's steward sigh faintly and said: "People are flesh and blood, even a strong and healthy mountain walker like Ma Wuye, just because he was strong and bloody when he was young, and he saw the ice and snow, which made the cold go deep into the bone marrow and could not be removed, and he actually sat down with an old cold leg when he was old." ”

But Ma Wuye, he was also covered in thick robes and leather pants back then, and he only went to lie on the ice and snow after he was tied from head to toe, while those gold diggers were naked and soaked in the knee-deep juice of the cold river water... How can this kind of work be done for a long time?!

"Soon, the gold prospectors who have made a fuss and will never go down to the river to pan for gold will be swept away like garbage by the gold mine owners, and left to die of starvation in the wilderness! On the banks of this gold-producing river, there are dense graves and mounds where the bones of gold diggers are buried...... Owner, although there is brilliant gold in this sand gold mining area, it is a place where people eat people and don't spit out bones! ”

Yang Congxun saw that the king was in charge, and he couldn't help but muttered hesitation in his heart; At this moment, he heard that the Wang steward hesitated and said: "The owner must not think that Wang Mou's mouth is broken, the gold mining area is already a dangerous place, but I just listened to the meaning of the owner, and now it seems that even the Huang family is involved, which is even worse!" ”

Steward Wang told Yang Congxun that when he had taken a few brothers up the mountain to settle for grass, he had heard a brother who had been a gold digger in the cottage mention that one of the several Dasha gold mines in western Liaoning was actually controlled by the Huangxians.

Although this gold mine also has a titular human mine owner, that person is a puppet who obeys Huang Xian's orders in every move.

The former gold digger once swore that he had to assure Steward Wang that the gold mine he had worked in was opened by the Huang family, because this gold mine was very abnormal: there were no gambling stalls or brothels!

According to the gold digger, not only does this gold mine have no ancillary facilities that are common to other gold mines, but even the way the mine owner pays his wages is very abnormal: the owner of this gold mine does not engage in 'one or two gold, one or two silver', but after each casual worker, he holds a palm-sized weasel in his hand, and asks the weasel to stretch out its paws, and grabs a handful of each gold digger's harvest as a tap for the mine, and the rest is naturally the gold digger's wages.

How big can a weasel with a palm-sized body be? At best, it will only take away a piece of sand gold the size of broad beans...... As long as it's not too lucky, a gold digger can find two or three pieces of sand gold the size of broad beans; This way of paying wages is much more than 'one tael of gold, one tael of silver'.

(The price of gold in the Qing Dynasty changed greatly, for example, in the early Qing Dynasty, the price of gold rose all the way during the wars, and the highest exchange rate was more than 1:140; In the middle and late Qing Dynasty, the price of gold was relatively stable, and one tael of gold could be exchanged for seventy or eighty taels of silver. ）

However, things are weird here, and the golden beans that were captured by the weasel as a tap must be a gold digger to harvest the best quality and purest piece of sand gold.

There was once a gold digger who secretly hid a piece of sand gold on his body and wanted to get away with it.

But when the weasel took the head, the man was shocked to find that the sand gold had been hidden by himself earlier...... It turned into a slippery pebble!