"Are you alone in Qiongzhou Mansion?" Tao Donglai asked in amazement. Although it is a matter of time before someone is sent to Qiongzhou Fucheng in the north of Hainan Island to inquire about the situation, it is not urgent for the crossing group, so the executive committee has not been in a hurry to arrange this matter, but he Xi took the initiative to mention it.

"Mr. Tao, don't be nervous, I don't plan to stay over there, just follow Shopkeeper Zhang to take a trip to see the situation, and by the way, visit the boss of 'Anfu Bank' to see what the strength of this firm is. He Xi thought for a while and added: "Isn't the executive committee planning to buy a ship? I think you should have talked about this matter with the two shopkeepers in the afternoon, and I can come forward to take a trip, and I can also check the quality of the ship first and negotiate the price." ”

Tao Donglai thought about it, nodded slowly, and said, "Sooner or later, you have to send someone over, you can go and stand first." By the way, I also hired some shipwrights and sailors over there, and the treatment could be appropriately relaxed, and as soon as the ship was bought, the plan to open the mine was about to be launched. ”

Now it was He Xi's turn to be surprised: "So fast? This route has never been run before, wouldn't it be too risky?"

"We have arranged for North America to help those two ships make a trip to Hongji Port to do field surveys, and when they come back, we will start to formally prepare supplies and manpower. Tao Donglai sighed and said: "The material consumption in the early stage of development is estimated to be very large, and the preparations in all aspects are also very complicated. ”

He Xi nodded and said, "Speaking of this, I really have a little bit of a construction." The products we are now selling are luxury goods in addition to salt, and the development of the daily necessities market is completely blank.

Tao Donglai said: "Your plan coincides with the plan of the Executive Committee, and we happened to talk about this matter when we had a meeting yesterday. However, many daily necessities are not yet in the conditions for large-scale production, and can only be done step by step, and often require the coordination and cooperation of multiple departments, but it is not possible to make it immediately if you understand the production process. ”

He Xi was interested in Tao Donglai's words, and hurriedly asked: "Then tell me first, what products are you going to develop to put on the market next?"

Tao Donglai raised two fingers and said, "One is soap, and the other is matches." ”

Soap is not a new thing in history, as the Romans began primitive soap production as early as the 2nd century AD, using animal fat and plant ash to make soap. The history of soap making in Chinese also has a long history, and by the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, the term "soap" had clearly appeared in the books of the time.

Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" records the preparation method of soap very clearly, and the "Renzhai Zhiji" written by Yang Shiying of the Song Dynasty also has a very detailed formula for making soap. "** Plum" once mentioned "jasmine soap", and from the perspective of future generations, it should be regarded as a relatively primitive soap. Li Yu of the Qing Dynasty recorded in the book "Idle Love Couples": "The best soap, after a bath, the fragrance will not dissipate." In the classical masterpiece "Dream of Red Mansions", there is also a description of Jia Baoyu's use of soap.

However, the soap used by the Chinese is still very different from the soap and soap seen in later generations, the production efficiency and decontamination ability are far inferior to the latter, and the use of the people is very common, there is no doubt that soap is still a daily commodity with huge market potential even in this relatively primitive era.

However, the first department to propose the production of soap at the Executive Committee was not the Ministry of Chemical Industry or the Ministry of Commerce, but the Ministry of Military and Police. The Military Police Department did not propose this plan for economic reasons, but for the express purpose of producing soap in guò to obtain glycerol, commonly known as glycerin, a by-product. In addition to glycerin in medicine, printing and dyeing, food, paper and other industries, glycerin also has a very important role in the manufacture of nitroglycerin, that is, the main ingredient of safety explosives invented by the Swedish scientist Nobel in the 19th century.

Of course, to make nitroglycerin explosives, glycerin alone is not enough, sulfuric acid and nitric acid are also indispensable, and even if there are detailed recipes and manufacturing processes in the large database of the people, it is still an extremely dangerous thing to produce explosives on a large scale, and it is impossible to achieve it overnight. I don't know how many times more cumbersome it takes to go through the development process in the middle of this, than the boring text descriptions in the database, and it may take many years before glycerin can really be used in the military field.

When the Military Police Department put forward this plan, it did not expect to produce yellow explosives in a short period of time, but only wanted to use it as a pre-research project for future military science and technology. But in any case, the manufacture of soap or soap is indeed a project with good market prospects, and it is not too difficult to put it into production.

The Sanya area is rich in coconut resources, and the metallurgical workshop has produced a set of oil extraction equipment according to the requirements of the Executive Committee, and the next step is to build a small oil extraction workshop to produce coconut oil. After two or three years, the oil palm planted by the Ministry of Agriculture will start to bear fruit, and then it will be replenished with some palm oil, and there will be no need to worry about the supply of oil used in soap making. Caustic soda, another material needed to make soap, can be produced by electrolysis of salt water in a simple way when the hydropower station is put into operation. From a technological point of view alone, there are no obvious technical obstacles to the large-scale production of soap.

Immediately after the Executive Committee approved the plan for the production of guò soap, the Ministry of Chemical Industry proposed a plan for the production of matches. Their reason was simple, that is, all the materials needed to make matches were already available, and there was no reason why they should not produce such a necessity, and if they did not sell it, they would use it sooner or later.

The raw materials for making matches are not complicated, mainly potassium chlorate, manganese dioxide, sulfur and other substances on the match head, as well as the ignition surface coated with red phosphorus. As early as the beginning of the crossing, when the executive committee organized a team to visit Li Tong, it had already proved that the Damao phosphate manganese mine located in the inland area, where the phosphate rock reserves were nearly 10 million tons, and the manganese ore reserves were also more than one million tons, which was enough to support the production needs of the crossing group.

However, at present, limited to transportation conditions, only small-scale mining can be carried out, and then the Li mountain people will carry the ore to the concentrator located in Tiandu for deep processing, and only when the conditions are ripe to open a concentrator near the mining site, it is possible to improve the mining efficiency. However, even with the current production efficiency, it is more than enough to meet the supply of manganese and phosphorus needed to produce matches.

As for sulfur, it is still mainly imported, but the supply is very sufficient, and it is even easier to buy than coal, after all, sulfur is not a necessity of life, and there will not be a market trend as tight as coal.

The most troublesome is potassium chlorate, which needs to be made from potassium-rich raw materials such as plant ash, saltpeter or alum, and then after a series of chemical reactions to make potassium chlorate. At the current level of production in the chemical sector, it is unlikely that large-scale production of potassium chlorate will be possible for the time being, which may become a technical bottleneck limiting the production of matches.

Of course, there are some minor issues that need to be solved one by one, such as the location of the future explosives workshop, such a dangerous place naturally cannot be placed in densely populated areas, even if it is only a real room for pre-research explosives, it must be built in a relatively remote mountainous area. In the end, the executive committee found a col near the pit of the Tiandu Iron Mine, next to the Songhe Reservoir in later generations, and set aside a piece of land for the Military Police Department as the future ordnance research and development institute. This place is far from the residential area, even if the bombing does not hurt the No. 2 base and some major production plants, there is a mountain lake next to it, in the event of a fire, you can get water nearby to extinguish the fire.

In addition, match packaging has also led to the demand for papermaking, although there is still a lot of paper that has not been used so far, and many occasions still rely on paperless office of laptops and tablets, but it is necessary to take precautions, and sooner or later it will have to rely on pen and paper. What's more, the use of paper is far more than that, if the reserve of toilet paper is used up, do you really want to use bamboo and grass blades and other things to wipe your buttocks? So in addition to approving the production project of matches, the executive committee will also include the construction of paper workshops in the next batch of construction projects of the Ministry of Construction.

Early the next morning, He Xi left Shengli Port on the merchant ship "An Fu Xing", and he would go to the capital city of Qiongzhou in the north of Hainan Island, which was later known as Haikou City. It is now the location of the entire Qiongzhou Island, and the materials and information in all aspects are more abundant than that of Yazhou, which is undoubtedly a better stage than Yazhou for the industry He Xi is engaged in.

The other merchant ship of "Fu Ruifeng" departed an hour late, because the shopkeeper Li was instructed by Schneider to deliberately delay the time. After the ship "Anfu Hong" departed, Schneider took Shopkeeper Li to the warehouse to receive another batch of goods unknown to competitors and 1,000 catties of refined salt.

Schneider does not intend to support a second local distributor on Hainan Island, in addition to Luo Shengdong, not only to take care of Luo Shengdong's interests, but also to avoid competition between the two distributors in the local market. Luo Shengdong has ships and soldiers on hand, and it is suitable to do this private salt business locally, but developing one more dealer is actually a disguised waste of resources. The situation of "Fu Ruifeng" is different, the roots of this commercial bank are in Guangzhou, if this relationship can be used to sell the illegal salt produced by the group to the mainland, then it can be regarded as the door to the private salt business has been truly opened.