The Red Husbands organized large-scale military households in the occupied areas, surrendered generals and obtained excess allotment of land, and then enslaved and squeezed the subordinate people for farming, and to a certain extent they became de facto military aristocrats.
Although the aristocratic military system will produce various disadvantages over time, no one can deny that in the early stage, it can play a huge role in gathering the morale of generals, improving combat effectiveness, and stabilizing rear supply.
Chushan and even the whole of Dai Viet were unable to launch a large-scale counterattack. Xu Huai may feel a little lucky at this time. It was probably because the Chihu people were organizing military households on such a large scale in the war zone. There were too many things to sort out and he was unable to do so.
Launch an offensive against Huaishang this winter.
After the Chihu people have firmly occupied Guanshan, Hehuai, Hedong and other places, the next step will probably be the first to attack the Dangxiang people.
This will probably give Chushan at least two years of breathing space.
Whether Chushan can withstand more violent impacts in the future depends on whether it can make full use of the two years of respite to further consolidate its foundation. At least it cannot let the internal divisions in Dai Viet hold it back.
At least as long as the imperial court did not spend any additional money or food, Chushan could still maintain a standing army of 100,000 troops.
Simply relying on Qianchapu Qiao to relocate to Nancai County is not enough.
When you move to Nancai County, you need to invest a lot of money in the early stage for construction and reclamation. Don't expect to have a chance to recover the cost within two or three years.
What Xu Huai values more is the large-scale reclamation of tidal flats in Nancai to recruit and resettle refugees and expand the number of young men under Chushan's jurisdiction. At the same time, it can steadily transport two to three hundred thousand dan or even four to Chushan every year.
Five hundred thousand stones of fine grain.
During the Tianxuan period, the brown rice per stone in Jinghu only fluctuated between one and two. However, after the fall of Bianliang, hundreds of refugees went south. The situation in Jianghuai and Jinghu became extremely unstable, causing Xiangyang, Nanyang, Ezhou,
The price of rice in Shouchun, Luzhou, Yangzhou, Jianye and other places soared to 89 guan per stone.
Nanyang Prefecture opened its doors and allowed Lifengtang's caravan to bypass the market merchants controlled by the gentry and nobles (due to the high concentration of land, the large and small landowners who collectively control the land are also the most important grain merchants in various places) and purchase directly from the villagers.
The cost of transporting grain and brown rice to warehouses in Wuyang and other places is still as high as four or five guan per stone.
At present, the grain directly paid by the imperial court to Chushan is only enough to feed 30,000 soldiers; the grain tax collected directly by the local government can only cover 40,000 defenders.
However, Chushan maintains such a large scale of manufacturing industry. In addition to soldiers and guards, the number of craftsmen, craftsmen and engineering and supply troops remains at around 40,000 to 60,000 all year round.
This group of people are not engaged in agricultural production. If all the grain they directly consume every year is purchased from Nanyang and other places, the cost will be as high as more than 2 million yuan.
This price is quite reasonable at this time.
One of the most critical reasons for the high military resources of Huaidong Camp and Huaixi Camp is that the food directly allocated by the court can only cover the needs of the generals and generals in the camp, but the larger-scale small family
While stationed with the army, there is no corresponding allocation of farmland. The food and other living materials needed can only be purchased at market prices.
In addition to military rations, the imperial court paid salaries to generals, which needed to cover their families' small livelihoods. How could it be so low?
Fortunately, Chushan started to solve the problem of farmland for generals and soldiers very early.
Even though the Tongbai Mountain area is narrow and densely populated, the grain fields that can be allocated to a small family are extremely limited, but it can still meet the basic needs of livelihood.
In addition, within the jurisdiction of Chushan, Lifengtang has full control over the purchase and sale of grain, ensuring that most of the limited surplus grain in Chushan's jurisdiction can enter the camp's reserve warehouse and will not be hoarded by the gentry on a large scale.
, let alone be transported to other places by other grain merchants for profit.
Even so, Chushan's grain supply is extremely tight. This year, it had to purchase hundreds of thousands of shi of fine grain from Nanyang and other places at a high price and put it into storage as a reserve to prevent disasters.
If Nancai can be initially developed in two years' time and can provide Chushan with an additional two to three hundred thousand refined grains per year to fill the food gap caused by the expansion of military equipment, Chushan can basically guarantee the internal balance of supply and demand——
Naturally, the consumption of military resources will not be as terrible as that required by Huaidong Camp and Huaixi Camp.
Of course, Chushan can only achieve this to basically ensure the internal balance of supply and demand, but it is not enough to resist the more coercive military pressure from Jingxi and Heluo after the successful implementation of the world military system.
Chushan needs to produce more primary products for transportation to Jinghu, Jianghuai and other places in exchange for more sufficient and abundant resources.
It is not only necessary to ensure that Chushan's military equipment has room for further expansion, but also to ensure that Chushan's internal production system continues to progress and develop.
The new iron-making and porcelain-burning base was chosen to be located at the southeastern foothills of Funiu Mountain, near Longtan Ridge in the Nanyang Basin, in order to make use of the connected waterways of Dongzhao River-Tangbai River-Hanshui River-Jingjiang River to produce fine porcelain.
Iron is directly transported to Jinghu, Jianghuai and other places.
Considering that Chushan may only have two years to breathe, this work must be pushed forward with great efforts now.
Xu Huai came to Ruzhou to inspect the defense, specially took Shen Lian with him, and planned to arrange for Shen Lian to go to Longtan Ridge to take charge of his affairs.
Shi Zhen had previously planned to establish an iron-making scale with an annual output of one million jins of refined iron in Longtanling. Xu Huai thought that the first step would be to directly increase the scale to 5 million jins.
The smelting method improved by Shen Lian in Chushan is officially named "Shen Lian downflame method", and the techniques of each method have become relatively mature.
The fine iron frying method has been around for thousands of years. However, due to the limitations of furnace structure, size, fuel and other factors, it is difficult to fry fine iron on a large scale, and the quality of the iron is also uneven. If you want to use this method to make a good knife, you still have to
It requires good workmanship and repeated forging to remove impurities.
Even the quality of the refined iron smelted by the furnace method can only be said to have been further improved, but in order to create sophisticated knives, the ordnance supervisor also needs to perform subsequent processing of the iron material.
The breakthrough of the continuous furnace method is also of great significance: on the one hand, it realizes the continuous smelting of iron ore into refined iron; second, it puts cooked coal into use, making high-quality fuel more accessible and cheaper; third, it puts large-scale smelting furnaces into use.
This has resulted in a significant increase in the amount of iron ore that can be smelted into the furnace at one time.
The superposition of these three factors makes the refined iron produced in batches from Chushan half cheaper than the crude iron and pig iron produced in Jianghuai and other places.
However, in the past two years, Shen Lian has further created the inverted flame method based on the continuous furnace method, which is even more rare.
There seems to be no essential difference between the new method and the continuous furnace method in the furnace structure. It seems that it only makes the furnace structure simpler, but it is actually a pioneering innovation.
What is even more rare is that Shen Lian has been studying and figuring out the relationship between flames, wind power and materials in the past two years, laying a certain theoretical foundation for gold smelting.
Speaking simply of the smelting method itself, the side furnace of the continuous furnace method mainly uses the heat conduction of the furnace body to slow down the cooling rate of the molten iron. Compared with the traditional frying method, the continuous furnace method stirs the molten iron more fully, and can stir the molten iron at one time. The scale of hot metal smelting has also increased significantly, which naturally established an incomparable advantage.
The biggest structural difference between the downflame method and the continuous furnace method is that the tuyere and flue are placed on both sides, and the flow of air in the continuous furnace is used to suck the flame flow into the side furnace for melting. Iron ore or pig iron.
This not only enables fuel and materials to be burned and smelted in separate chambers, but also steadily increases the flame flow of the side furnace to an ultra-high melting temperature that was previously difficult to achieve.
On the one hand, it is easier to obtain high-quality refined iron or even soft iron, reducing the mixing of impurities in cooked coal. More importantly, the down-flame method is used to directly smelt crude iron materials to prepare refined iron components, making the operation more convenient.
The traditional preparation of iron tools, such as farm tools and knives, involves re-opening the furnace, melting pig iron or refined iron, pouring it into a mold, roughly shaping it, and then forging it repeatedly to remove impurities.
Although most of the preparation of traditional iron tools involves the process of opening a furnace and re-melting it, traditional farm tools and knives are relatively small, and small furnaces placed indoors can meet the demand. Therefore, ordinary blacksmiths' demand for fine iron is far greater than that of traditional iron tools. It's not as urgent as imagined.
The real advantage of the continuous furnace method and the down-flame method lies in the direct large-scale casting of fine iron materials into batches of semi-finished or finished ironware.
For example, casting fine iron bars and then heating and processing them to create fine knives is much simpler than traditional knife-making methods.
For example, if arrow clusters are directly cast from refined iron, the sharpness and armor-piercing ability of the arrow clusters will be much higher than those of cast iron arrow clusters.
For example, it is much simpler to directly cast iron beetle embryos from refined iron and then precision forge them into beetle leaves. Especially using the cold forging method to make beetle beetle leaves is much simpler than the old method.
The greater the demand for batch preparation of various iron products semi-finished products and finished products, the higher the quality, and the advantages of the down-flame method over the continuous furnace method will become more obvious.
However, the traditional frying and refining method simply cannot prepare medium and large refined iron components.
Using the inverted flame method to produce angle iron and iron coins has become relatively mature after more than a year of exploration.
"...the downflame method separates materials and fuel, but the flame temperature can be higher. It can be used to refine porcelain, which has more advantages." Xu Huai talked to Shi Zhen about some of his ideas and thoughts on returning to Huaishang a few days in advance. He decided and said, "The inverted flame method was created by Shen Lian. Naturally, it is most appropriate to send him to Longtan Ridge to take charge of the construction of the porcelain kiln..."
"Really?" Shi Zhen asked uncertainly.
He had long speculated that the down-flame method might be suitable for making porcelain, but the down-flame method was the core secret of iron-making in Chushan. It would definitely not be easy to find a kiln owner in Jishan to try it out. However, he did not expect that Xu Huai was even more confident. , without any preliminary exploration, decided to build an inverted flame furnace in Longtan Ridge and directly try firing porcelain.
There is no doubt about the ingenuity of the down-flame method. It can certainly be used for the firing of porcelain. As for the changes in flame flow that will lead to corresponding changes in the porcelain firing process, that is a matter for exploration after the down-flame furnace is built.
The respite left to Chushan by the Chihu people was too short. Xu Huai would definitely skip some steps and jump to promote some things...
