On April 1st, Bowang County.

Li Su and his party inspected Gao Shun's new army expansion training in Wancheng, learned about the current situation of supporting military funds for non-weapon equipment, and then came to Bowang to inspect the progress of the canal project.

Li Su came at a certain time. Because before he came, the morale of ordinary civil servants who carried out the canal project, the generals who maintained discipline, and ordinary civilians were quite high. Some of the problems they encountered before seemed to be able to solve them.

But just as Li Su was about to come, he just encountered some serious new problems and urgently needed a magic needle to win back everyone's confidence.

...

The construction of the canal project was started relatively early.

Since the slack season after the autumn harvest last year, the entire Bowang County and even the opposite Ye County and Kunyang County have become a large construction site.

Tens of thousands of civilians, plus nearly 100,000 new recruits and even former hostile prisoners of war, were mobilized to this construction site and worked hard day and night.

The excavation project between Bowang, Ye County and Kunyang is carried out in an orderly manner as planned.

The court's supplies were also powerful, and it was always ensured that the civilians and prisoners of war had enough food to not be able to eat enough to do heavy work. Therefore, the hearts and morale of the laborers were stable. Until the beginning of spring this year, most people were full of hope.

Gao Shun, who is responsible for the protection and training of nearly 200,000 men, has always been full of confidence and thinks it is no big deal.

After all, it is just a canal with a straight line distance of only 80 miles!

Even if some locations require a large depth of excavation, the amount of earthwork operations soared. How much greater is the gap built by the Wei people during the Warring States Period more than 500 years ago?

More than 500 years ago, the Wei people built the Gangou, of course, is not exactly the same as the "Tongji Canal" of the Grand Canal in the Sui Dynasty, later. Because Gangou also utilizes some of the natural river channels of Yingchuan and Jishui.

In history, this part of the river channel has been used for hundreds of years and silted. In addition, the Yellow River later diverted the route to seize Ji into the sea, resulting in the abandonment of the natural river channel around the Ji River. Therefore, by the Sui Dynasty, the distance between the Tongji Canal required manual excavation was more than half as high as during the Warring States Period.

Therefore, the Warring States Period's Great Gate only starts from Daliang City (Kaifeng, which was also the capital of Wei during the Warring States Period) and goes south to Xiangcheng on the edge of Yingchuan and between Ruyin (now Fuyang, Anhui).

It is equivalent to the construction from the south bank of the Yellow River to the location where the Ying River in later generations is at the junction of Henan and Anhui. The straight-line distance of the whole journey is five or six hundred miles (the entire journey of Tongji Canal in the Sui Dynasty is more than one thousand miles).

Considering the tortuous increase of the mileage of the canal itself, the entire distance is no more than 700 miles.

Five hundred years ago, the Warring States people could build such a large canal. Now Gaoshun has 200,000 full-time civil servants and has been working as a labor force, and its production technology has been so advanced that it is still only one-eighth of the mileage of the former. It just needs to overcome an additional "small project" of a mountain pass?

Therefore, after the autumn harvest last year, until the end of October, the entire construction party worked hard from top to bottom. At that time, Li Su had not even asked for Liu Bei's imperial edict and invested huge sums of money to provide formal support from the court.

In other words, at the beginning, I just took the local money and grain from Jingzhou, and did not take this project seriously, so I directly launched the construction specifications of the "wartime grain road".

As the local power rank of governors of the southern states, Li Su does have the power to approve "small projects" that use no more than 100,000 people without passing through Liu Bei.

When the construction reached the end of October last year, the first situation occurred, that is, the actual mileage of the canal is 80 miles away from the straight line.

At that time, considering the reduction of the excavation depth throughout the whole process, we could not directly pull a straight line to dig to the shortest position of Fangcheng Pass, but had to go around it a little halfway.

After surveying, it was found that if you go straight to Fangcheng Pass to get straight, you would have to dig more than ten feet lower than the natural terrain next to it! The amount of earthwork operation is too large.

If you go around a little, although the depth of the commanding height of the last pass is still more than twenty zhang, the digging depth of more than 60% of the mileage can be controlled within five zhang, and more than 20% of the mileage is left, and the digging depth can also be controlled between five and ten zhang.

In addition, there is another advantage of circling, which is that it is convenient to find the equal water locations connecting the Lishui River in Bowang County and the future canal, and the equal water locations connecting the Lishui River in Yexian County and the canal opposite.

This can also reduce the pressure of water storage in the canal, so that all natural rivers on one side will be flooded to the other side.

Because there is a biggest technical difficulty in digging natural canals, it is to try to ensure that the water levels and altitudes of the two ends of the canal communication are the same. Otherwise, if the canal is high and the other end, the water in the riverbed will quickly dry out and pour to the lower end. Unless the shipbuilding locks, it will not be stored at all.

Considering these new problems, you can only choose to go around and find highs such as water levels.

The price of circling is that the total mileage increases from 80 miles to nearly 110 miles, and the total earthwork operation volume increases by about 20% compared with the initial estimate before the start of construction.

At that time, Gao Shun didn't take it seriously. The Sikong Mansion worker, who was supervised by the canal, and the officials of the imperial work department, also felt that it was not a big problem.

Isn’t it just that the project has been built and I find that the budget is missing 20%! Just add the budget! It’s time to start construction, and I can stop and waste the initial investment! Spending an additional 700 to 800 million or even more than one billion, we must ensure that the construction is done well!

Besides, the section that has been dug north from Bowang does not need to be discarded. It is just a fine-tuning of the subsequent direction. The money invested has not been wasted, nor has it been pushed back and reworked, which has been considered as minimizing the losses.

After adjusting the river path and refining the water location, the construction will continue to be implemented. By the end of the twelfth month of the year, the second relatively serious difficulty appeared again, that is, when the construction team found that it was digging the highest point of Fangcheng Pass, the amount of earthwork was really large.

Moreover, as part of the Tongbai Mountains, Fangcheng Pass has a relatively hard rock texture, and the soil depth of the pass is much thinner than expected.

In other words, at the beginning, Li Su roughly told everyone about the construction difficulty, thinking that the deepest point in the digging was about "digging 7 or 8 zhang deep soft soil, digging a few zhangs of sandstone down, and then there will be a hard strata."

Li Su said it didn't count. After all, he was not professional, but the geological exploration professionals under Li Su also told everyone this and asked the people from the Ministry of Works to do the initial project volume estimate.

As a result, when I dug up the mountain pass in the twelfth lunar month, I found that I had just dug two feet of soft soil and one meter of sandstone, and there were hard rocks underneath. This time, the construction party's sharpness inevitably slumped again.

If it weren't for the management of this construction team, he had followed Li Su from Yizhou for eight years and had seen various advanced engineering equipment and construction skills created by Li Sikong and Zhuge Prefecture.

If you change to a different construction team, your morale will be broken long ago when you encounter such difficulties.

In the same historical period, if the engineering troops under Yuan Shao and Cao Cao came here, they would have given up. Hard stones were almost twenty feet deep, and the mountain at the highest point of the pass was several hundred feet thick.

The parts with a slightly lower depth of less than fifteen zhang on both sides can reach more than two thousand zhang. Such a large amount of soil is a waste!

At that time, the project engineers roughly calculated and found that the total excavation project volume would increase by at least 30% compared with the figure after the first additional budget, or 50% more. It is impossible to accurately estimate it—

Because I don’t know what texture this rock layer is after digging more than 20 meters below. The surveyors were already scared. The estimated amount of 30% was built on the bottom twenty meters below, which was limestone-level hardness. If there was granite below, it would not increase by 50% of the project volume.

The result is that the total project expenditure after accounting has obviously exceeded the Wei people’s construction of the gulf five hundred years ago! (but it has not exceeded the original history of Emperor Yang of Sui’s construction of Tongji Canal four hundred years later)

At that time, they had to ask Li Su for instructions.

Fortunately, it was already the twelfth lunar month last year. Li Su had already come to Luoyang to take office, and Liu Bei's imperial edict was also invited. This second wave of project volume and budget increased, and Li Su approved it with a stroke of his pen.

At the same time, the Minister of Works Guoyuan and the Minister of Civil Affairs Zhuge Jin also came to the front line to take office one after another. They worked together to coordinate and used the blasting plan of Li Sikong when he built the "Leshan Yan" in Jianwei County, Yizhou six years ago.

Let the construction party improve the black gunpowder to be used vigorously without limit, and at the same time design a blasting construction plan for Fangcheng Pass.

After all, for this kind of project where the excavation height is particularly deep, but the horizontal excavation distance is not too far", it is directly to tunnel to break the bottom and collapse, causing the landslide to cause the huge rocks to collapse directly and then pull them away. This is more convenient than breaking the huge rocks one by one and digging down.

"Crumpled stone" is the most annoying step in this kind of project. If you don't have to crush the stones too much, you can just pull them away in large pieces, and you can even quarre up and process the stones. This will achieve twice the result with half the effort, save a lot of construction, and link multiple engineering projects.

The large stones picked can also be pulled away from nearby frontier military fortresses and built into stone city walls. With the city defense fortifications in the late Han Dynasty, few cities would directly use large stones to build the city walls, and at most some key cities would have a layer of stone foundations outside the key cities.

This is also a special situation now. It just happened to be blowing up the mountain pass and digging a canal. There were so many stones that there was no place to use. If it weren't for the fact that this place was too far from Luoyang and there was no direct river, Li Su would even want to pull these stones to build the walls of Luoyang New City.

After receiving the instructions from Li Su and Guoyuan and Zhuge Liang's technical guidance, construction during the blasting stage was also launched one after another since the twelfth lunar month last year.

It was not very smooth at the beginning because the terrain of the Fangcheng Pass and the Leshan estuary at the Minjiang-Dadu River is not exactly the same.

The slope here is relatively slow, and it is impossible to directly dig holes from the foot of the mountain to bury gunpowder. After research and several failed attempts, the construction party, which summarized the experience, changed to digging tunnels to bury gunpowder diagonally downward.

Although the final blasting effect is worse than when I was in Leshan a few years ago, it is still at least more than 30% faster than digging stones directly.

In addition, Zhuge Liang also popularized the multiple vertical shaft construction methods he used when digging tunnels in the Hanoi battlefield to dig Kaner wells from the Western Regions to canal construction projects. In this way, several more construction teams can be arranged in parallel to blasting the opposite wells to speed up.

This small measure is not helpful in how to save money, and even spends a little more money. After all, the waste of digging wells has increased, but the advantage is that it can shorten the construction period and make full use of the slack season to do more work.

Otherwise, a large number of civilians stayed there and had to wait for the blast to dig before digging. The waiting time would also require meals to consume the imperial court's food. The corvee period had to be settled as the construction day, and wages would be paid after the period was over. Therefore, since people were brought in, everyone would be able to move efficiently, which was a way to save money.

After the blasting measures were pushed forward stumblely, for more than one and a half months of the twelfth lunar month and the first lunar month, there were finally no more accidents or complaints. From top to bottom, from officials to people, the morale of construction projects was still maintained.

But unfortunately, since Li Su chose to take action first and report to Liu Bei first, this means that Li Su actually knows how many pitfalls there are in this project.

Until this point, the previous exposed difficulties are actually nothing. Otherwise, this project would not have been defeated many times in many dynasties in history.

Li Su didn't say the difficulty at once, because he was afraid that there were too many oppositions in the court, and that he would expose too much difficulty at once, which scared the court officials, so he did not dare to take the most difficult first step.

That's why he chose to take action first and then report, gradually unleashing difficulties and gradually increasing the investment budget, making everyone unable to stop and reluctant to part of the "sinking costs" that had been invested, and finally barely struggling to go all the way.

Li Su’s understanding of the difficulty of digging a canal at Fangcheng Pass is lucky because of so detailed.

Because this information comes entirely from the detailed news reports he had read in later generations of the "South-to-North Water Diversion Project".

Li Sude thanked the official media reporters who wrote this matter in the future because they wanted to praise them and emphasized "How difficult this project is, how great the government and the country that completed this project are."

So those later journalists looked for many examples of failure in history, using them in detail to contrast and slapped the ancient feudal dynasties in the face.

The most failed negative textbook found was during the Taiping Xingguo period of the Song Dynasty (Zhao Guangyi, Emperor Taizong of Song Dynasty), who also tried to build a canal at the Fangcheng Pass, and then died due to some technical difficulties. Later, after Emperor Taizong of Song Dynasty, the two emperors wanted to continue working, and in the end they encountered more new difficulties, they had to give up.

And how these technical difficulties have been overcome in the great "South-to-North Water Diversion Middle Line Project" after the present. What are technical problems and which are the shortcomings of the ancients and cannot see through how much money it will cost to complete this project. Therefore, fear and retreat are a matter of perseverance and determination.

Li Su read all these geopolitical and historical geography reports in his previous life and carefully analyzed them. Therefore, he had the greatest advantage over the Song Dynasty people, that is, he knew how many pits there were and how much money he spent could finally solve them. And he would not be as desperate as a person who could not see a way out.

Historically, the Song Dynasty later abandoned the Fangcheng Pass Canal, which, on the one hand, did indeed spend more money than the early stages, but on the other hand, it was also because of fear of the unknown.

Not knowing whether a thing can be done objectively is the biggest factor that shakes the determination to invest. For example, if the first country to study the atomic bomb does not know whether the atomic bomb can be done or not, it will take detours and shake. And the second country to engage in the atomic bomb has much greater determination because he firmly believes that this thing can be done.

That feeling is a bit like the one described in "The Smiling and Proud Wanderer". The elder of the Demon Sect who was trapped in the secret cave of Siguo Cliff in Huashan was obviously holding two sharp axes and cutting the mountain rocks wildly and trying to break out of the road. However, because he didn't know how far away from the exit, he gave up while cutting and finally died in Siguo Cliff Cave.

However, because of his good luck, Linghu Chong finally punched the rock wall where it was about to be cut open, and then smashed the gap open, finding the magic sect's martial arts cracking and the lost sword technique of the Five Mountains Sword Sect.

Compared with those engineering coordinators in the Song Dynasty, Li Su’s biggest advantage is not only construction efficiency, but also his perspective. He knew the progress bar of the total project volume and the subsequent solutions to several difficult points that have not been exposed, and he had hope in his heart.

This time, he came to solve the following problems, whether they were just exposed or not for the time being.
Chapter completed!