After playing happily for a few days, Xiao Niangpi started to get down to business.
Because in the past few days, the postal car of the train has delivered a lot of backlogged documents from the Secretariat. They need to process and give instructions. Some of them involve appropriation and cannot be delayed for too long. The people below will be anxious, and they will be reminded by a telegram every day.
Each train has a dedicated postal carriage. The postal carriage uses a fully enclosed tank car. Because the tank cars are made of steel, ordinary people cannot open them in this era. As long as the door is locked, the safety is excellent.
Postal carriages are usually at the end of the train and are temporary additional carriages. If necessary, if you have enough mail for a tanker car, you can hang it on the rear of a train. Then you can hang it on the freight car's caboose and drive away.
At present, there are several types of temporarily added carriages on the railway:
One is a carriage for live poultry and livestock. It is used to transport live animals. It also includes war horses, etc.
One is a medical carriage, which is used for field hospitals and disaster relief. It can perform surgery and trauma rescue.
Xincheng Hospital even has an entire special railway mobile hospital train with fifty carriages. It can be driven along the railway line for battlefield rescue and disaster relief.
One is the postal carriage, which is used to carry letters, documents, conveying orders, and first-class urgent postal parcels that need to arrive quickly. Second-class urgent postal parcels are transported by car.
One is a refrigerated carriage, which is used to transport fish and meat. The inside of this carriage is decorated with insulation materials, and ice cubes harvested in winter and placed in underground ice cellars are packed inside as insulation materials.
But as the demand for ice continues to increase, people in the Yang family have begun to try artificial ice making.
At the beginning of the 18th century, some European countries began to use saltpeter (potassium nitrate) as a refrigerant to make ice based on the principle that saltpeter absorbs heat when it dissolves.
Although this method is less efficient, it has laid the foundation for later refrigeration technology.
Yangfu's ice-making factory now uses this method as a supplement to ice harvesting in winter. After the saltpeter solution is dried, the saltpeter becomes solid again and can be recycled.
It can be said to be a cost-effective way to make ice. It is environmentally friendly and green.
Every summer, ice is a good business, and Xiao Niangpi is very optimistic about this market. There are so many cities in the Ming Dynasty, which one does not need an ice-making workshop.
Xiao Niangpi also acquired steam ice-making technology and equipment from Yaoguang. She also set up a company called Xia Chong Co., Ltd. (Zhuangzi's Xia Chong cannot be said to mean ice). This factory is owned by the ladies.
, the annual dividends serve as their private money.
At present, Xia Chong Co., Ltd. has been listed on the market and plans to build an ice-making workshop in every county in Daming.
Especially in the hot southern summer, selling ice cubes can bring huge profits. After all, the cost of this thing is groundwater. The saltpeter solution can be dried in the sun at no cost and can be recycled indefinitely.
Although the steam engine machine consumes fuel, it can be made on a large scale. It is still very cost-effective to put it in prosperous big cities such as provincial capitals and Beijing and South Beijing, Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Guangzhou.
Xiao Niangpi plans to adopt a front store and back factory model for ice making workshops in various places. In the front store, one-foot-square ice cubes are sold. In the back is the ice making workshop.
The front store also has a cold drink shop, where you can consume and take away cold drinks, various fruits, slushies, smoothies, bowls of ice cream, etc.
Now Yangfu can produce ice cream powder, and sugar can also be provided by sugar factories. Now on the Wusuli River plain over Shuangchengzi, in addition to rice, the largest cultivated crop is sugar beets.
There are many sugar factories in Vladivostok and Shuangchengzi.
Milk and yogurt can also be obtained from the grassland. Various strawberries, mangoes, bananas, watermelons, cantaloupes, durians, etc. are fully supplied by clippers and trains. This provides sufficient raw materials for cold drink shops.
After these stores opened in the summer, they immediately became popular among the wealthy people of Ming Dynasty. After all, who doesn’t want to have cold drinks and ice desserts in the hot summer?
Especially ice cream, even in winter, there are still many people coming to eat it. Ice cream and popsicles are also popular in the Ming Dynasty. Many women push trolleys and use quilts to insulate them, carrying popsicles, ice cream, and ice cream in the streets and alleys.
The hawking made both adults and children cry.
It is said that the queen has to buy some for the palace every day.
After finishing the overwhelming government affairs, Xiao Niangpi stretched out cutely and announced that she would finish lunch tomorrow and organize studying after a nap.
The women of the Yang family are not just flower vases, they need to regularly participate in study activities. These activities are irregular, usually a few days a month.
"Madam, what is the topic of tomorrow's study?" Chen Xi asked.
"Well, since we are here in the grassland, let's study the history of the grassland people tomorrow. The speaker will be Liu Qianqian, the history lecturer at the academy."
Chen Xiang, the confidential secretary of Xiao Niangpi, immediately went to send a telegram and asked Liu Qianqian to sort out the handouts and pack her luggage. The telegram booked her a sleeper train ticket for tonight to come to Jiuyuan and give training to the ladies group at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon.
"Tieman is also participating. Although you are a Mongolian, you probably don't know how the grassland people evolved." Xiao Niangpi said.
Tieman nodded and expressed her willingness to participate. Although she is a pure Mongolian girl, her wet nurse is a Han lady who was kidnapped to the grassland. She has received formal Chinese cultural education since she was a child. There are many books in her study
Books, and a lot of calligraphy and paintings.
She is familiar with history books, but she doesn’t know much about the history of her nation and the grasslands. Many of them are legends, because writing appeared very late on the grasslands. They all rely on oral transmission or the lyrics of troubadours to spread history. But now
So far, the Mongolian people have only one written history book, "The Secret History of Mongolia".
Seriously speaking, "The Secret History of Mongolia" belongs to the genre of folk songs and prose. It is not a strict history book. "The Secret History of Mongolia" is a historical work written in the 13th to 14th centuries by an unknown author. The book describes the formation of the Mongolian nation over more than 500 years.
, a history of development and growth.
The original intention of the Yuan Dynasty royal family in writing "The Secret History of Mongolia" was not to be passed down through the ages like "Historical Records", but to truthfully record the historical events of the genealogy of Genghis Khan's golden family, including all merits and demerits, and to provide the Mongolian people with ancestral family traditions.
Later emperors gave instructions and admonitions.
The era when this book appeared is similar to the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Water Margin" in the Han area.
Tieman must be familiar with this book. After all, it is related to the issue of her origins and the inheritance of family bloodline. This "Secret History of Mongolia" has a total of 12 volumes and 282 sections, covering the production and life of the ancient nomadic society of the Mongolian nation.
all aspects
In terms of time, it starts from the Mongolian national totem, the distant ancestor of Genghis Khan, to the reign of Genghis Khan's son, Ogedai Khan. From a geographical perspective, it spans the Mongolian Plateau.
The whole book is roughly divided into three parts in terms of content: the first is the genealogy of Genghis Khan's ancestors, the second is the history of Genghis Khan's life, and the third is the history of Ogedaihan's activities.
Xiao Niangpi made it very clear that tomorrow's learning activity is to invite a history lecturer from the academy to tell the evolutionary history of all ethnic groups in the entire grassland area from ancient times to the present. Tieman immediately became excited.
The five thousand years of history of the entire grassland is so fascinating.
