Originally he wanted to refining oil with local methods, but he accidentally picked up golden lumps. People in the Song Dynasty may not understand Su Jin's mood at this time, because people in this era also liked to use wood-fired charcoal for heating, and used firewood, straw and platycodon.
Although charcoal is mined as fuel, it is not fully accepted by people because it is raw coal that has not been washed and screened. It burns with quite a lot of smoke and irritates people's nose and eyes.
Moreover, logging and excavation are also quite difficult. It is very difficult to dig deep caves underground and carry out frame by frame from rock gaps and narrow holes. Without the support of advanced technology, the price is quite high; an expensive and useless one.
Things are naturally regarded as useless, so although the imperial court mines minerals and the people occasionally buy them for use, they actually do not regard them as an extremely important energy source in the future.
The difficulty of mining this "open-pit" carbonaceous layer discovered by Su Jin is extremely simple. What's more important is that the raw coal is of high quality, with few impurities, and has a slight smell of smoke when burned. It is a source of high-quality raw coal, which is even more important.
Quite rare.
Su Jin suppressed his excitement and carefully considered what to do next. This place is located in a remote place. The first task is to mine and transport the coal. The first task is to open a way into the mountain.
There is no way out of the mountain, otherwise these treasures will be difficult to use, and these require a lot of manpower and material resources to complete.
However, Su Jin is most indispensable in terms of manpower. Whether it is Huanqing in Yanyan or Qinfeng in Jingyuan, after the war, a large number of manpower was needed to establish a coal mining or kerosene refining mine to gain energy.
To solve the people's livelihood problems, in the words of later generations, these two enterprises will solve a large number of employment problems.[
Su Jin is not worried about funds. Although he has been spending money like water lately, half of the three million guan embezzled by the bank has been spent on horse food and the construction of horse farms, but manpower is low these days, and the remaining more than 1 million guan
Should be more than enough.
The only thing that gave Su Jin a headache was that he was completely new to coal mining. Once the surface coal seams were exhausted and it was necessary to dig underground, he knew nothing about the construction of mine tunnels, ventilation, safety and other issues. If a large-scale casualty incident occurred,
That is something I absolutely cannot tolerate.
That night, Su Jin discussed these issues with Chao Chao, Mahan and others. Chao Chao gave a good suggestion: "Master, we don't know how to do it, but there are people who do. We can go to Shanxi, Henan and other places with dense mines to hire people to help."
We, we offer a higher price, but we are afraid that people won’t come.”
Su Jin was awakened by the words. It was indeed a good way to recruit people to find new jobs. He had never thought of this. He went to other mines to recruit a few skilled talents and under his command, the problem would be solved.
Su Jin immediately divided the work and ordered Wang Chao and Mahan to go to Shanxi, Henan and other places the next day. They must hire technicians with high salaries, while he rushed back to Qinfeng Road, Jingyuan, and immediately signaled the people to come to build work sheds and open up the mountain.
road.
Half a month later, a large number of idle workers from the Northwest Fourth Road, nearly ten thousand people, rushed to the barren mountain named Baoshan by Su Jin. They set up rows of work sheds at the mountain pass and began to build roads; tens of thousands of people took axes and iron picks to cut.
The scene of cutting through mountains and roads is extremely spectacular, like a foolish old man moving mountains.
Su Jin required that the road be three feet wide, at least to ensure that two large carriages could drive towards each other. In the future, this would be a two-way, two-lane avenue. This would greatly increase the difficulty of construction, although many places have
It follows the windings of the mountain and takes advantage of the situation, but there are still many dangerous points to navigate. Not only do you have to avoid steep and dangerous slopes that are prone to landslides, but you also have to fill the valley with a large amount of rocks and soil. The amount of work is astonishingly huge.
the point.
In early July, more than ten mining technicians hired with high salaries from two major mines in Tongji, Shanxi and Hebi, Henan, arrived in Baoshan. After looking at the mineral belts of the Baoshan open-pit coal mine, the old people who had been in the coal mines during this period came to Baoshan.
The fried dough sticks couldn't help but marveled at the fact that the quality and reserves of carbonite here are of the highest quality. The name Mr. Su gave to this mountain Baoshan is indeed worthy of its name.
At the same time, the construction of the road is making people anxious and the progress is quite slow. Although tens of thousands of people work hard and sweat profusely, in the past month, the more than ten miles to the coal mine can only be completed by dozens of people every day.
Moving at a speed of 1,000 feet, the mining time was seriously slowed down. The roads were impassable and the required wood and masonry could not be transported in, and mining could not begin.
Su Jin was anxious. Looking at the tired and dusty faces of the common people every day, he also understood that everyone had tried their best. The dog days of July were the hottest time. Every day, they nested in the valleys of the wind, under the sun.
The feeling of being shot for five or six hours can be imagined; Su Jin could only worry about it besides giving them some extra wages and giving them some good food.
One evening, Su Jin went to inspect the construction site. When he reached the end of the road ahead, hundreds of people were worried about a rock more than ten feet high that stretched in front of them. It would take at least 100 years to cut through this huge rock.
It took ten days, and a passage had to be cut out from the middle. It was useless even if there were many people. All the people lamented, sighed and cursed.
An old man with white hair and beard sat on the rock and shook his head and said: "It is too difficult to drill through this stone wall. It would be great if a god came and used the magic of splitting mountains and rocks to break it into pieces with one palm. Alas,
Mr. Su was anxious, we are not gods, what should we do?"
Su Jin had just walked up to them, and when he heard these words, he was suddenly enlightened. He secretly cursed himself for being stupid and at the same time felt happy. The old man's words reminded Su Jin that the fastest way to open a mountain road is to use explosives to blow up the rocks.
Yes, gunpowder these days is not very powerful, but it is always stronger than human power.
Su Jin immediately took people to Yanzhou and Yinzhou to purchase hundreds of barrels of gunpowder for making firecrackers and fireworks from the private sector as well as gunpowder from the government warehouses. After having the explosive mountain, progress will be natural.
Greatly accelerated, at the end of July, with the efforts of everyone, a wide winding mountain road that ran through the oil valley's coal mines and directly to the outside of the mountain was finally completed.
The next small-scale leveling and repair work was enough for more than a thousand civilians. The other civilians were divided into two parts. One part was responsible for transporting supplies from outside the mountain, and the other part started in the oil valley and the coal mine.
The site was dug and leveled, and various facilities such as houses, work sheds, derricks and other facilities were built using the excavated square boulders and imported materials.
After nearly two months of preparation, the Baoshan Mine has begun to take shape, the roads are clear, the sites of the two mines have been leveled, and the building construction has been completed.
When Su Jin, who returned to Qinzhou to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival and handle Qinzhou affairs, returned to the mine, everything in front of him had changed drastically. On September 10th, Baoshan Coal Mine took the lead in starting construction, and ten coal mining surfaces started construction at the same time.
, nearly a thousand coal diggers started digging enthusiastically; at the same time, three oil refining furnaces enlarged and made based on simple distillation devices were also transported to the Oil Valley and stood on the bluestone platform on the west side of the Oil Valley.
On September 18, ten loads of newly excavated coal were transported to the Oil Valley. Su Jin gave an order and the oil distiller was ignited for production. Two barrels of kerosene were produced that day, which was a good start.
As the mining of coal becomes faster and faster, the amount of coal required for oil refining has been far exceeded. Su Jinming made a large amount of coal into the shape of honeycomb briquettes, and designed a furnace specifically for burning this briquettes, which was shipped to various places.
For sales in big cities, the first to be accepted are several state capitals in the northwest. Winter is approaching, and there is no need to stock up on large amounts of charcoal and wood for heating. Instead, you only need to purchase a cart of briquettes produced in Baoshan and place them under the eaves to keep warm throughout the winter.[
The use of coal cakes allowed the people of the Song Dynasty to experience speed and convenience. A piece of coal cake could burn for half a day, and the price was much cheaper. As word spread, the reputation of Baoshan coal cakes was quickly known to the northern states.
.
A group of clever wives and concubines of the Su family actually ingeniously added spices to the coal cakes to make a fragrant cake that burned fragrantly and had a heating function. It was equipped with a small copper hand stove and a small charcoal stove for incense. Su Jin was amazed.
Ashamed of myself.
/
In order to expand his influence, Su Jin traveled thousands of miles back to the stable, and gave the several carts of fragrant cakes and hundreds of special stoves he brought to the court dignitaries to take back and experience, which caused a sensation in the stable; Ouyang Xiu was chatting with friends
He admired this fragrant cake greatly when he was a child. He wrote a passage between himself and Cai Xiang and Cai Junmo, one of the four admonishers, in his diary "Guitian Juan": "Someone gave me a box of fragrant cakes.
When Mo heard about it, he sighed and said: The fragrant cake came late, so I can use it to polish my pen. The fragrant cake is made of charcoal, which is used to burn incense. The fire of one cake will not be extinguished all day long."
Because Su Jin did not agree with Fan Zhongyan's reform, although Ouyang Xiu accepted Su Jin's gift, he had a grudge after all, so he did not mention that it was a gift from Su Jin in his diary, so that later generations of researchers did not know about the fragrant cake.
It comes from Sujiabao Mountain, which has to be said to be a historical regret.
High-quality charcoal has eased the fear of severe cold in winter in the city that is suffering from fuel shortage. In the past, most of the winter heating for the million people in the city was firewood, because the smoke of raw coal produced in Shanxi, Henan and other places was too strong and choked the mouth and nose.
Since the Taizong Dynasty, the imperial court has repeatedly issued edicts prohibiting the cutting of mulberry and jujube for fuel. Charcoal has also been considered as a substitute for cooking and heating. However, during the reign of Zhenzong, inferior coal caused dozens of households to be poisoned and wiped out.
No one dared to use it, so it could only be used as fuel for ironmaking and kilns.
It was not until the high-quality coal mined by Su Jin was tried in the stables that the people of the Song Dynasty vaguely felt that the era of burning firewood would be gone forever, and in the future, fuels such as Su Ji Baoshan coal cakes would gradually replace them.