In the morning, Chongzhen came to Xinuang Pavilion as usual, started breakfast, and then started eating while listening to the recent situation report. This was the only time of the day when people in the Jinyiwei system could see the emperor.
Today there are not only people from Jinyiwei, but also a director from the Ministry of War. They are all here to report the situation.
Although Chongzhen's fiscal revenue has not improved significantly in the past two years, it has not continued to deteriorate.
In particular, the economy of the North Zhili region has made great progress. In the past two years, the number of refugees has been decreasing day by day. The development of industry is like a sponge, absorbing all the refugees. It is like a bottomless pit, absorbing as many as they come.
Over in Yang Fan, railways and roads were being overhauled. More than a thousand workshops and factories of various kinds were developed from scratch. The reason why workshops developed one after another was mainly related to steel.
Steel is the backbone of industry.
A country, food, and steel. If we have these two things, all problems will be easy to solve.
Zunhua's current annual steel production has exceeded one million tons. Pig iron, wrought iron, and steel each account for one-third. Especially after Yang Fan acquired the land in northern Hebei, where most of the later iron mines are located. Due to the use of new
With the new mining method, the efficiency increased hundreds of times, and a large amount of iron ore was mined.
There are also many coal mines in this generation. Due to the development of the steel industry, coal mines have also sprung up in large numbers.
At present, tunnel support mining has become the mainstream. Drilling holes and blasting, and extensive use of gunpowder to blast tunnel face mining are also widely used. Technologies such as steam engines to pump water and remove gas are also widely used.
Now, there are more than 200,000 miners. As a result, the trackers in Tianjin have become extinct. Fortunately, Yangfan's railways and steam engine tugboats have been put into operation in large numbers. There is no need for trackers to go upstream. These trackers have changed their careers and become workers.
This is a great blessing for these people. Although the factory is very tiring, it is much better than stretching naked in the freezing cold river in late autumn. The trackers cannot work for a few years. It is too harmful to the body.
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Yang Fan's Xincheng Gunpowder Factory produces the best formula, black gunpowder with white sugar added, which has a very good mining effect. It is suitable for blasting coal and mining. Coupled with the tunnel coal mining technology, productivity has been greatly enhanced.
Railroads were laid in the coal mines, small mine cars were used, and steam engine winches were used for traction. A large amount of coal was transported out of the mines, and the output increased more than ten times, or even hundreds of times.
The original hundreds of mining and smelting workshops also began to use new blast furnaces.
Yang Fan began to spread some low-level technologies to the Ming Dynasty Northern Steel Alliance. The main purpose was to increase the production of pig iron and provide sufficient raw materials for open-hearth steel.
These small workshops were integrated and eventually merged into twenty joint-stock companies. They mainly used blast furnaces to produce pig iron and wrought iron. Yang Fan's Xincheng Iron and Steel Plant mainly produced steel.
As the chairman of the Northern Steel Alliance, Wei Bancheng's prestige and power are more than ten times higher than before. Twenty joint-stock companies and more than a thousand metal processing plants in the steel industry are now members. Chairman Wei has almost become
Representative figures.
His family now focuses on investing in the mining and pig iron smelting industries. He owns more than 400 large blast furnaces and 20 iron-making companies, six of which are controlled by the Wei family.
Yang Fan is now supporting a class of industrialists. These people are currently providing upstream and downstream support for Yang Fan's steel plant. Yang Fan's huge steel output must have a complete supply chain and downstream product channels.
We have basic industries, and there are so many types of steel processing industries.
Yang Fan began to spread metal processing technology and disclosed the design and production processes of thousands of farm implements, tools, and knives. He also provided production equipment. Yang Fan only invested in technology and equipment, and also provided worker training.
Yang Fan actually doesn’t need to invest in each type of investment. He mainly wants to hold part of the shares and play a technical control role to prevent some technologies from flowing out of Beizhili.
As a result, in Shuntian Prefecture, Beizhili, more than a dozen industrial categories and more than a thousand factories of various steel products have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. There are many products ranging from agricultural tools, tools, to knives. Each of these products is more expensive than the Ming Dynasty.
The products are of good quality, better in use and cheaper in price.
Business has also developed, and merchants selling these products to various parts of the Ming Dynasty have also made a fortune, attracting more people to invest. The logistics industry has also developed. After all, these heavy metal products need to be transported.
The most sold steel product is actually nails, which no one expected.
In reality, nails are used in many more places than bolts. Many businessmen, seeing business opportunities, bought land to build small reservoirs and dams in Beizhili, and purchased hydraulic machinery from Xincheng Machinery Factory. They pressed various products through molds. Especially
Produce iron nails.
In the past, to produce a nail, a blacksmith needed to hammer it out. Nails were very expensive.
The reason why ancient China invented the mortise and tenon structure was because of the price of nails.
The mortise and tenon structure is not easy to decay, is not a rigid connection, has room for movement, and can resist earthquakes. It has many benefits. However, it has a fatal problem, that is, the cost is too high.
First of all, it is time-consuming. Making mortise and tenon joints is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the technical requirements are extremely high. It is almost impossible to install a qualified carpenter. The cost of training a qualified carpenter is very high. The mortise and tenon joints also require wood. Not all woods are suitable for making mortise and tenon joints.
. They are all hardwood or relatively good miscellaneous wood.
If you are building a palace or a public building built by the government, it is okay. Building a house by yourself is very expensive. If you can use nails, it is simple and efficient and can greatly reduce the cost of building a house.
But the nails hammered by hand are huge in size and use a lot of iron, so they are definitely not cheap. In the West at this time, nails could be used as money for payment because they were so versatile. They were used everywhere.
During production, each iron nail requires the maker to raise a fire, then burn the rough iron material until it is red hot, then place it on the anvil to forge it into a thin iron rod, and then use tools to cut the thin iron rod.
The iron rod is cut into small iron rods of the same length, and then the small iron rod is heated again, and one end of the iron rod is pierced, and the other end is hammered into a sharp shape. Then it is polished, reheated, quenched and hardened, and annealed and heat treated to finally get a
Iron nails.
After Yang Fan introduced the hydraulic forging hammer, he could use the hydraulic pressure machine to make thousands of nails of different sizes and models at once with each strike of the mold.
Because of the huge market for iron nails, a large number of investors have joined in.
Yang Fan issued prospectuses for five nail companies on the exchange and completed the fund raising in just ten days. These nail factories use water conservancy machinery to produce nails, steel nails and metal fasteners of various sizes and materials.
Son.
Because of the huge production capacity of the steel industry, thousands of metal processing products have been developed downstream.
At present, steel and steel products are completely a seller's market. As long as you can produce it, you can sell as much as you want. It will never be unsaleable.
In the first two hundred years of capital development, there was no economic crisis. Surplus would only appear after the popularization of large-scale machine industry. If it was not used domestically, it would also be available abroad.
There are already Dutch armed merchant ships going to Nagasaki Port to trade with Yang Fan's merchant house in Nagasaki.
When they left Nagasaki, many ships were loaded with iron nails and steel spikes. These items were a hot commodity when shipped back to Europe. As soon as the ships arrived at the port, they were sold out within a few hours.
Because many dealers were waiting at the dock, the auction started directly.
These factories brought millions of taels of tax revenue to the court a year. They also absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees, turning them from refugees into industrial workers.
The emperor was very happy to see that the commercial tax increased from 300,000 taels a year to 1.5 million taels. He also noticed that Shuntian Prefecture and Tianjin actually contributed one million taels of commercial taxes. You must know the business tax of the Ming Dynasty.
Taxes are very low.
Generally, it is 30% tax, which is equivalent to a tax rate of 3.3%.
