readx;? After succeeding to the post of Governor of the East India Company in Batavia, Van Diemen hosted and attended banquets far more often than he had in earlier years when he had traveled with his fleet between the colonies of the Java and Banda Seas, but not as often as he had during his visit to Hainan Island. The pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info the dense banquet arranged by the Haihan people has already made him quite unbearable. Therefore, when Qiao Zhiya, who met for the first time, mentioned the reception banquet, the expression on his face was inevitably a little strange.

Qiao Zhiya listened to Ning Qi's explanation, but he could guess seven or eight points, and said with a smile: "Your Excellency, don't worry, our reception banquet here is not as good as Sanya's rules, just drink casually." Yacheng and Sanya, where you went earlier, are all places where wine is produced, how can you show local characteristics if you don't drink it?"

Fan Dimen can only express his helplessness about this "local characteristic", although he personally likes to drink, but he really can't stand the wine table culture of Haihan, and two and a half of the three meals are dizzy. It would have been nice if he had a drink when he had nothing to do, but this expedition was of great significance to the East India Company, and Van Dimen did not want to mess with this precious time. He can only keep the loss in mind silently, and the next time he has the opportunity to deal with the Haihan people, he will also bring a group of men who can drink to fight, so that these Orientals can see the amount of alcohol that the Nordic people drink.

Qiao Zhiya is a good talker, and sure enough, no one launched an offensive against Fan Dimen at the reception banquet, and the toasts are all to the point, unlike the wine table in Sanya, there are still any rules of "three circles on the left and three circles on the right", after receiving these six circles of toasting, he has to return the toast six circles, and most people can't hold it in the toasting stage.

Without the frequent toasting offensive, Van Dimen was finally able to taste Haihan food with peace of mind. He had to admit that even if the same ingredients and spices were used, Haihan's cooking method was indeed much more sophisticated than that of Batavia's cooks, and this technique seemed to be different from the Han cuisine, but Fan Dimen's understanding of the way of eating could not list the details, but he felt that the method was more refined. Although I don't know the Chinese saying that you don't get tired of eating and don't get tired of being fine, Fan Dimen thinks about it carefully and feels that this is in line with the style of Haihan people who have always emphasized material enjoyment.

Fan Dimen also noticed a detail during the banquet, Qiao Zhiya was in charge of much more official affairs than the two places he had inspected before, and there were constantly people coming to ask for instructions and report on the work during the banquet, so that Qiao Zhiya had to leave the table frequently to deal with problems. This level of busyness could only be achieved by a few high-ranking officials in the Haihan Executive Committee when they were in Sanya.

"He is in charge of the local administration and production alone, so he will be very busy. Ning Qi explained for Qiao Zhiya, who left the table again: "Presumably, Mr. Van Dimen should have been in this state when he was in Batavia, right?"

Fan Dimen smiled bitterly with deep feelings: "That's true, this visit to your country is also the longest period of time since I took office. ”

At the beginning of his tenure, Van Diemen encountered the Mata Blues attacking Batavia, and finally managed to survive until the end of the war, and continued to face heavy post-war reconstruction projects, and the Haihan people also took advantage of the weakness during this period to penetrate deep into the South China Sea, step by step to suppress the scope of activities of the East India Company, it can be said that there was not even a single day of ease during his tenure. Although he came to Hainan Island with a mission this time, it was a rare enjoyment for him to be able to get away from his original working environment for a while. Although Fan Dimen had all his concerns before coming here, it turned out that the Haihan people were quite generous, and the expedition arranged was much better than he expected, such as Changhua, which produces steel, and Fan Dimen did not expect to be allowed to visit here.

The next morning, Qiao Zhiya led Ning Qi and Fan Dimen to visit the local smelting workshop. The blower used in the furnace here is driven by the steam engine, and the kinetic energy output of a steam engine can drive the blower of several blast furnaces at the same time, and the efficiency is far beyond manpower. The only thing that the steam engine needed was cheap coal and fresh water.

Fan Dimen also noticed that the iron-making furnaces used by Haihan were not quite the same as the ones he had seen, but Qiao Zhiya's explanation did not involve the relevant design principles and usage methods, and his understanding of smelting was limited to the skin, so he could only take a few more looks, keep the shape in mind, and plan to draw it again and hand it over to professional technicians to figure out the mystery.

Fan Dimen thinks that since this stove is a style that has never been seen before, with Haihan's usual style, this thing must also be the most advanced technology, and imitating one may have the same effect. However, his idea is too simple, Haihan's design on the smelting furnace is to take into account its own scientific and technological conditions, and there are matching solutions in terms of furnace materials, fuels, smelting process and temperature control, not just imitating the shape of the furnace can copy the whole set of smelting methods. This steam-powered blower, which is used to raise the furnace temperature, cannot be made anywhere else.

However, Fan Dimen is not wrong about one thing, Haihan's technology in smelting is indeed the best in the world, but due to the current conditions, there is no way to build high-end equipment such as oxygen converters, electric arc furnaces, and electroslag furnaces, and can only build blast furnace ironmaking and open-hearth steelmaking according to local conditions. Of course, even if the principle is the same, the iron-making and steel-making furnace built and designed by Haihan far exceeds the level of the same era in terms of technological advancement, and it does have great advantages in terms of production efficiency and product quality. In addition, Haihan manages and arranges the smelting workshop according to the model of modern industry, so the operation of the entire smelting system is closer to the state of the industrial age, rather than the common workshop-style operation mode of this era.

"Most of the coke used in our smelting furnaces here comes from the Black Earth Port, where the coal is prepared and the finished coke is transported directly to the port for use. Qiao Zhiya explained to Fan Dimen: "In terms of steel production capacity, our smelting workshop here has exceeded the sum of the two provinces of Daming, Fuguang and Guangzhou. ”

Fan Dimen couldn't help but be a little moved when he heard this figure, he had collected some information about the Ming Dynasty in his early years, and the information about steel production was naturally an extremely important part.

Daming discovered and mined as many as 232 prefectures and counties in the country, including 28 in Fujian, 23 in Guangdong, and two in Guangxi, and these three places together have as many as 53 iron ores. As for the private smelting workshops, they abound, such as the ironmaking plant in Nanhai County, Guangdong, which has reached the scale of 3,000 employees during the Chongzhen period. According to the statistics of the Jiajing period, the annual output of pig iron in the country has exceeded 10,000 tons of smelters and private workshops, far exceeding the production level of European countries in the same period, and in this figure, the production capacity of Fuguang and Guangzhou provinces accounts for almost half. With the production capacity of a smelter in Changhua, Haihan can be equal to the sum of the two major iron-producing provinces in Daming, which shows its high production efficiency.

However, what Fan Dimen didn't know was that the start of the smelting base in Haihan was so fast, in fact, it still relied on the many craftsmen trained by various official and non-governmental smelting institutions in the Ming Dynasty. The non-governmental iron smelting industry in Guangdong is particularly developed, such as the iron mines in Shaozhou, Huizhou and other places, every year at the time of the autumn harvest, some people gather people and horses, hundreds of thousands of people cross the border, open mines and build furnaces on their own, and incite iron for profit. Of course, in addition to this "wild" operation, there are more legal smelting workshops and mines that have obtained official licenses and paid taxes on time.

For example, the scale of the iron casting workshop in Foshan, Guangdong Province is quite large, and there are thousands of practitioners in iron frying alone, which are subdivided into stokers, casters, fitters, hammers, etc., and there is already a more detailed division of labor. However, these craftsmen were still limited by the conditions of the times, and were basically under the orders of the guilds, rather than free wage laborers of a capitalist nature.

In the early years, Haihan brought in a large number of refugees from Guangdong caused by war and famine, and many of them were craftsmen engaged in this industry, and most of them were later concentrated in Changhua to work. Through the connections of these people, the civil affairs department has successively dug up many craftsmen in the smelting industry from Daming.

The Guangdong Provincial Department has relatively clear regulations on the business structure of private iron mines, with the mountain owner as the head of the furnace, and the head of the furnace is the total A, and every ten people below set up a small A, and to fill in personal information, and then submit it to the county government to get the business license. And Haihan directly got these lists through the people in the government, and then poached people according to the lists, and pulled them to Changhua one by one to settle them. This method of poaching people was even used in government-run ironworks later, where all craftsmen were poached with high salaries.

At that time, the income of these craftsmen who served the official was about "ten stones and eight buckets of grain per year, two pieces of clothing and cloth in winter and summer, and two catties and eight taels of cotton", which could only be regarded as a relatively basic level in the treatment linked to the level of labor in Haihan, and Haihan has always been very generous to craftsmen with professional skills, as long as the treatment of third-level laborers is shown, it is enough to make most of the craftsmen moved, and there are early peers who invested in Haihan to persuade them to be sure, and this action of digging the foot of the wall is going very smoothly. And the officials in charge of this field have long been fed by Haihan's sugar-coated shells, and they also turn a blind eye to such behavior, as long as they don't make things too big, how many people Haihan poachs will have no negative impact on officials.

At least four or five hundred of the thousands of smelters working for Haihan in the Changhua area have been dug from Daming. Most of these people are already serving as the leaders and foremen of various production links, and they have also trained more practitioners for Haihan. Recently, it has even begun to accept trainees from Annam to train workers for the ironworks to be built in cooperation with the two sides in Annam within the year.

Regarding the scale of the smelting industry here in Changhua, Fan Dimen can only observe with envy, jealousy and hatred. There are no such large-scale smelters in Batavia, and there are only about thirty professional blacksmiths in the city, so it is okay to make agricultural tools and weapons and armor, but it is indeed a bit difficult to carry out large-scale smelting operations like Haihan. Of course, the absence of large iron mines near Java Island is the most fatal shortcoming. At a time when Batavia was still worried about the source of pig iron, Haihan's production capacity was already large enough to lay long-distance rail transit lines, which really made Van Dimen a little distracted.

Before Fan Dimen came to Changhua, he had heard that there was one of the longest railway lines on Hainan Island, and the unique advantages of this railway line in terms of transportation had been briefly experienced by Fan Dimen during his time in Sanya. He can only sincerely express his admiration for Haihan's invention, but this thing is also the same as many Haihan characteristics, and there is no way to copy it to other places, first, because the steam locomotive can only be built by Haihan, and second, there are too many rails needed to lay the railway, which is several times more expensive than the cost of building ordinary roads, and other families can't afford to invest this money.

After visiting the smelting and production site in Changhua, Qiao Zhiya really invited Fan Dimen to take the train from Changhua Port to the inland Shilu mine. And Fan Dimen naturally readily agreed, in addition to taking the car, he really wanted to see what the situation of the mines mined by the Haihan people was.

In the afternoon of the same day, the group boarded a specially hung VIP car at the port train station, which is mainly characterized by the use of relatively fine interior decoration, soft sofa seats and glass windows. Considering that a large amount of coal ash will be contaminated inside and outside the carriage after each use, it is usually sealed in the garage next to the port station, and even Qiao Zhiya himself rarely uses it. It is only on occasions like today that this luxury wagon has a chance to see the light of day.

As the whistle sounds, the train slowly moves away from the station. VIP cars are hung at the very end of the entire train to keep as far away as possible from the coal ash and water vapor emitted from the locomotive's boilers. The journey takes more than an hour, and it doesn't stop except for the wrong train in the opposite direction.

Fan Dimen also took a train when he was in Sanya, but the journey between Sanya and Shengli Fort was too short, and it was not enjoyable to take such a trip. From time to time, he looked through the window of the train to see the regression outside, using this to judge the speed of the train.

"Mr. Van Dijmen, what do you think of our train?" Qiao Zhiya couldn't help but ask him when he saw his curious baby look.

"Very powerful!" Fan Dimen thought for a while, and added: "It's just that the cost of this kind of railway should be very high, and the construction will be more complicated, so it will be difficult to promote." ”