After ten days of rest at the end of the year, these people clamored to go out of the city to collect soil.

Long Xiang saw that the clay transported to the west of the city had piled up more than a dozen hills next to the kiln. If he continued to transport the soil, it would occupy the place where the bricks were dried, so he asked these energetic people to dig several large brick kilns nearby.

Standing above the new kiln and watching, Long Xiang had already thought of the prosperous scene of firing kilns and moving bricks.

Time always flies when you focus on work.

By the time the brick kiln was completed, there was not much left in the first month of the New Year.

Long Xiang forced the people to rest for more than ten days, and then came the busy spring plowing and sowing season.

There are currently no officials in Hefei receiving salaries. Long Xiang collects taxes from the people under his rule simply and roughly, that is, the grain produced per acre of land is divided equally between the public and private parties.

If there is a bad harvest year, it will be tilted towards the farmers, and the grain in the public warehouse will be used as a strategic reserve for consumption in disaster years and wartime.

There are no middlemen to make profit, and the army protects farming. The people cultivate the land very carefully.

In addition to the young men who cleared the wasteland last year, adult women also participated in the spring plowing. For a while, Hefei was very busy outside the city.

The people in Hefei are full of confidence in the future, while the people in northern Huainan are increasingly desperate for life.

One year after Yuan Shu proclaimed himself emperor and founded the country, he did not gain any territory. Instead, he lost the land north of the Huaihe River in several wars.

The huge bureaucratic aristocrat group "sucked blood" together with Yuan Shu, and coupled with the drag of natural disasters and wars, the increasingly exhausted Huainan court could only satisfy the expenses of the interest groups by constantly exploiting the people.

It is obviously the spring of hope, but people choose to leave their hometowns with their young and old in tow.

In March of the third year of Jian'an, the spring plowing in Hefei had not yet ended, and sentries outside the city gradually discovered the refugees heading south.

Longxiang was short of manpower, so he asked Tang Yui to open the north gate of Hefei and temporarily place the new refugees in the north of the city. Cao Xing would count the number every day and then report to Feng Zhong for approval to distribute rations.

The newly arrived residents missed the spring plowing, but Longxiang had work for them to do.

The clay that was brought into the city last year has been dried for several months and can now be used to make bricks.

In April, when the farming work slowed down, in addition to farmers who needed to patrol their fields on a daily basis, many people also returned to the city to make bricks, and there was a lot of activity.

In late April, Hefei had housed nearly a thousand refugees for two months, and the difficulty of managing personnel increased sharply. The workload of Feng Zhong, Tang Yu, and Cao Xing also increased. Several people went to the Hou Mansion to discuss with Long Xiang.

The three of them arrived at the Hefei Marquis Mansion and found no one in the main hall. Finally, they found Long Xiang in the garden.

Long Xiang was painting on the ground with branches at that time. The content of the painting was square frames connected with square frames, with intersecting vertical and horizontal straight lines in the middle.

Feng Zhong asked curiously: "Yunqi, what are you drawing?"

"I'm designing houses for people."

Long Xiang did not look back when he spoke, but continued painting with the branch.

Tang Hui knelt down after hearing this. He looked at it carefully for a while and asked, "I don't understand. Why is this house so weird? Can it be built with so many floors?"

"Hahaha, this is the floor plan, which is what it looks like when looking down from the sky." Long Xiang was instantly amused.

"Plane?" Everyone looked at each other.

Long Xiang turned around and picked up the branch and introduced it like a real estate consultant:

"This location is the front yard, where you can grow fruit trees and vegetables; here is the middle hall, and here are several bedrooms... There is a pig pen in the backyard, and a chicken coop can be built next to it..."

The layout of Longxiang’s houses is reasonably designed, and compared to ancient private houses, they are almost overwhelming.

Feng Zhong looked at the side and felt yearning for it. He thought to himself that there was no Bai Xue in your dream, and couldn't help but murmured: "It's so good..."

"What are these lines in the middle?" Cao Xing asked, pointing to the painting.

Long Xiang replied: "This is an underground sewage culvert. The sewage produced by washing dishes and vegetables at home, as well as the excrement of humans and animals, can be discharged through this culvert to the sewage pool outside the backyard."

After hearing this, Cao Xing scratched his head. He had followed Lu Bu to Chang'an and had seen the world. He said that even in Dong Zhuo's Imperial Palace, he had never heard of sewage culverts.

Is Long Sima fantasizing?

"Old Feng."

Tang Wei looked at Feng Zhong in confusion, "Do you understand what Yun Qi said?"

"I understand a little but don't quite understand..."

Feng Zhong frowned, shook his head slightly, pointed to the line in the middle and asked: "Sewage can flow along the culvert, how can feces flow into that pool?"

Cao Xing added: "Sewage pool."

"Yes, cesspool." Feng Zhong nodded.

"Can't we just find a slope? It's just..."

Long Xiang stopped abruptly in the middle of his words because he began to have doubts in his mind. In ancient times, there were no PVC water supply and drainage pipes. If you build a house, you need to consider sewerage. What should be used to replace the convenient sewage pipes of later generations?

Feng Zhong has a lot of life experience. He heard Long Xiang mention the slope and tried to draw it with his arms. Suddenly he felt that if he made a certain slope and then washed it with water, he might be able to bring it to the sewage pond.

"Yunqi, tens of thousands of bricks have been made so far. If we build a house according to your drawing, how many bricks will be needed to build a house?"

"Maybe several thousand or tens of thousands of dollars, the specific amount needs to be calculated in detail..."

"hiss..."

The three of them were shocked at the same time after hearing this. They originally thought that tens of thousands of bricks were enough. When Long Xiang told the number, his shirt became cold. He said that a family needs tens of thousands of bricks. Now there are more than a thousand households in Hefei. Why don't they want it?

Tens of millions of bricks? Can I still live in a new house in this life?

Long Xiang saw the expressions of the three people and immediately understood the other's worries, and quickly comforted them: "When the brick-making kiln reaches a large scale, the speed of producing bricks will be much faster. When there are more people in the city, we will specially arrange people to do this."

"If they specialize in making bricks and firing kilns, what will they eat?" Feng Zhong didn't understand.

Long Xiang explained: "We will distribute grain at the beginning, and later it can be distributed in the same way as farming. Households who need to build houses will exchange grain for bricks."

"You still have to exchange grain for it? That's not cost-effective..." Tang Hui shook his head.

Long Xiang smiled and said: "It's all labor. There is nothing cost-effective. If you don't want to live in a new house, you don't need to replace the bricks. We can use the extra bricks to build the city wall."

"How to distribute it in the same way as farming? Is it based on the number of people who make bricks in the kiln, and then divide the baked bricks equally, and then let them exchange for food?"

Feng Zhong is now in charge of taxing grain and is most sensitive to distribution issues.

Long Xiang: "Private transaction prices are confusing. When the time comes, I will set a standard. All bricks will be handed over to the public, and then they will be converted into grain and distributed to the craftsmen. Households who need bricks will go to the government to exchange them."

"Miao Miao Miao." Feng Zhong said repeatedly.

Tang Wei nodded as if he understood, and then asked: "By the way, Yunqi, what kind of glue are you going to use for laying bricks? Yellow mud mixed with hay?"

"Yellow mud? Of course it's cement..."

Long Xiang mentioned cement casually, and he couldn't help but give himself a slap in the face, thinking how could he forget this? Although there is no mechanical equipment in this era, it is not a problem to make local cement.

The main raw material of indigenous cement is the same as that of bricks, which is to grind sun-dried clay into powder, add limestone to calcine clinker, and finally grind it into ash together with the slag left over from ironmaking.

Long Xiang was thinking about building a cement factory in the Three Kingdoms, but it seemed that the conditions were not very harsh.
Chapter completed!