Chapter Nine Finding Gold Mine According to Travel Atlas
() David is prospering in Europe, and Liu Fu is also becoming famous in Taiwan. My father is fine, but my cheap mother is not in peace. Every time I come home, I want to find all the seven aunts, eight aunts, and all kinds of officials.
When his wife came to watch Liu Fu, the theme was one thing: it’s time for Liu Fu to find a wife. Liu Fu himself also knew that in this era, 15
, the golden age of officially getting married at the age of 6, it is natural for my mother to be eager to handle this matter for herself. However, Liu Fu has no intention of following the local customs, relying on his being an idiot, and he does not have to follow the conventional behavior.
My mother basically ignored all the explicit and implicit suggestions, neither agreed nor refused, pretending that she didn't know anything.
Regarding the matter of being an idiot, Liu Fu was grateful from the bottom of his heart to the person who made up this rumor. Ever since he survived the shipwreck, he had a reputation in the governor's office as a brain-dead person due to injuries. It slowly spread from the government to the outside. Now it is estimated that
Well-informed people all over Taiwan know that the governor's third son injured his head in a shipwreck. He can't even read. He shaves his head like a monk all day long, wears foreign clothes, and lives in a foreign country.
Liu Fei bought a lot of widows with children on his big iron ship and kept them in the farmyard. At that time, she was a mentally ill person. Let alone looking for a wife, no one wanted to make friends. Liu Fu was originally afraid that it would take a long time.
Now, if you do something like this, it will actually help you. If you do anything outrageous, others will say: Look, the governor's stupid son is out to ruin the family again.
As for making crazy money by opening pharmaceutical factories and pharmacies, both Liu Fu and Liu Mingchuan have adopted the attitude of blocking information. Except for a few parties, others only know that the governor's relatives are involved in the pharmacies. You can guess how much exactly. Anyway,
is a normal person
, would never have guessed that the governor's silly son had anything to do with this kind of Western medicine. When Liu Fu heard his rumors, he was neither happy nor sad on the surface, but he was very happy in his heart. In this era, no one wants to
What a happy thing it is for a fool who pays attention.
With money in hand, the next step is to implement the plan. Liu Fu plans to open a school to try it first. It will be small, with 100 students. The students are all children of orphans or widows, aged between 5 and 10 years old.
There are not so many in Taiwan, so go to the mainland to buy them. There is only one teacher in the school, Liu Fu himself, and his main function is
The lessons are to recognize words and numbers and tell some brainwashing stories; Liu Dagui is the dean and physical education teacher, responsible for discipline and training, and recites "Ode to Love" twice a day; daily life is led by two widows from two pharmaceutical factories.
A new widow is in charge, and 10 children from the former pharmaceutical factory also join the school and officially attend classes.
In addition to misleading dozens of children every morning, Liu Fu spends the rest of his time drawing maps. There are several tourist atlases on the ocean-going fishing boats, which have brief introductions to Taiwan's history and attractions, including railways and mines. Railways are
Liu Fu's father Liu Mingchuan built it, so Liu Fu won't care about it for now. The mines include iron ore, copper mine, manganese mine, gold mine and coal mine.
, Iron, copper, and manganese need to be mined and refined. Liu Fu will not play in the short term, so he will put it aside for the time being. Gold mines and coal mines are both obvious. The tourist book marked Jinguashi near Keelung and Jiufen area as a gold mine.
There are rich silver and copper mines; there is also a place called Badouzi on the seaside northeast of Keelung. The map says that coal is produced there. It happens that the two places are not too far apart, so let's do it together.
The approximate locations of these minerals are marked on maps, but these maps cannot be shown to contemporary people. Liu Fu could only use relatively transparent paper to cover the maps, and then slowly trace them with a pen. It should be that the place names of that era could be used.
Yes, shouldn’t be there and unclear
Cancel the place names. Although tracing the map is not a difficult technical task, Liu Fu, who has no drawing foundation, still spent several days and wasted a lot of paper before getting a few pictures that were barely in the right proportions and had clear lines.
A simple map of.
Look at the railway signs on the tourist atlas. Badouzi Coal Mine, Jinguashi and Jiufen are all to the south of the railway. They are not too far apart. If you want to open a mine, you will need to build a road to connect it, so that it will be convenient to transport to Keelung in the future.
.Now that Liu Fu has money in his hands, he will start building roads and prospecting together.
When Liu Mingchuan heard that his son wanted to build roads and explore for mines, he raised his hands to support him and immediately sent 10 green camp soldiers and 5 government officials to serve as Liu Fu's subordinates. Forget about the money, it would be very benevolent not to confiscate the money from selling medicine.
If you want to build roads or open mines, the most convenient, most affordable, and strongest thing is to use cement. In this era, cement has been mass-produced, but it seems that there is no such thing in the Qing Dynasty. It is too expensive to buy it from foreigners. Liu Fu asked foreigners,
The price of rice shipped from Europe has almost caught up with the price. Although I have money, I can't pave the road with rice.
Foreigners sell it more expensively, so why can’t you burn it yourself? Liu Fu’s answer is: You really can’t. Cement sounds very simple, but the ratio of various substances and the fineness of grinding have very high requirements, let alone no
Even if they have the machinery and equipment, Liu Fu can't burn it. He can't just dig some soil and throw it in. Liu Fu doesn't have the cement formula. Who can carry the cement formula around with him? It's not possible for someone who is not a professional to do this.
A few of them have no problem memorizing cement recipes.
Since we can’t count on cement, we’ll build a stone road first. Since Keelung is mountainous and rocky, using square stone piles 1 meter long and 30 centimeters thick and tightly packed into the soil will make it very high-end and strong. Liu
Fu once heard the tour guide explain in the Qingxi Mausoleum that the mausoleum
The corridors in the tomb are all laid out in this way. They will not deform for a hundred years and have no load capacity. However, this design was also rejected by Liu Fu. Not to mention the extremely high cost and extremely slow construction period, this construction method can only be used by the royal family.
To use it and others to use it is a serious crime of beheading and confiscating the property.
Since the court does not allow this method to be used, then large stone strips should be laid out in staggered patterns, bei
Chang'an Street in Jing was paved with large stone strips in the 1980s. Of course, we don't require the stones to be so smooth. The stone textures are all the same, and they are almost flat. The main thing is that the thickness of the stones should be enough, and the load capacity should not be too much.
, it fell apart. After all, this road will be used to transport coal and ore in the future. Liu Fu could not find any other reason besides the high cost and slow construction period.
To stop the third young master from burning money like this, he can only follow the instructions. The labor is not conscripted, but hired. The masons are paid on a monthly basis, and the small laborers are all nearby labor. The wages are based on daily wages. From the masons to the small laborers, the wages are the same.
Twice the usual rate, this further solidified the third young master's reputation as a fool and a prodigal, making the people around Taipei secretly worried about Liu Mingchuan.
Leaving aside Liu Fu's intention to build roads, Liu Fu sent out 15 of his new subordinates. Each of them was given 2,000 taels of silver to buy land in the Jingua area marked by Liu Fu's hand-drawn map.
The nearby unowned mountainous areas are all
Buy it, including the valleys and rivers, not the flat land, but also the inhabited mountains. If you don’t have enough money, come back to get it. Each person will be rewarded with 100 taels after completing the task. If the land price is too high, come back and think about how to die more happily.
The readers have asked, why don’t you go with yourself? In many novels, the protagonist takes the lead in exploring various places. What I want to answer is that Liu Fu was born as a small businessman in the city. Firstly, he has never practiced martial arts. Secondly,
I’ve never been a special forces mercenary, and thirdly, I’m not a professional archeology and geology player. That’s all.
With a small body and professional knowledge, let alone exploring the mountainous areas, even when I went hunting pheasants near Zhangjiakou in my previous life, I couldn’t even climb two small dirtbags that were not mountains. Therefore, I’d rather let others do it and be responsible for spending money at home.
It's just about making money. Anyway, it's a burden to go there by yourself, which does a lot of harm but no good.
As the saying goes, money can make a fool of himself. Within 10 days, 15 soldiers and government officials from the Qing Dynasty came back, holding several land deeds in their hands. All the land marked on the map within a radius of dozens of miles had been bought up, except for the flat land.
As for the price, it’s basically just a few dozen taels of silver.
The person who spent the most spent less than 1,000 taels. This was probably because he encountered two small mountain villages with dozens of families, so it cost a little more to move. Before the Sino-Japanese War of 1888-1894, Taiwan's population was less than 3 million.
Most of the mountainous areas are undeveloped and full of barren hills.
After buying the land, it was time to prospect for the rest. Liu Fu didn't know this professional skill, so he still used the old method, letting his subordinates take the money to find people to prospect for. Whoever finds it first will get a bonus. Gold, silver, and copper mines have become
, as long as it has development value. Prospecting is a very time-consuming activity, and results cannot be achieved in a few days.
The mining business has been temporarily suspended, and we can free our hands to deal with the coal mine. According to the tourist brochure, this coal mine called Badouzi was built by Shen Baozhen, the previous governor of Fujian, but it happened to be blown up by Liu Mingchuan during the Sino-French War.
, and later large-scale mining resumed during the Japanese occupation.
Since there is a ready-made coal mine, we don't even have to do prospecting. I went home and discussed it with my father. This mine will be mined through a cooperative partnership between the government and businessmen. The government will not provide funds but only provide policy support. The coal that comes out every year must be supplied with water at a fair price.
The division had 5,000 tons, and the rest was burned or sold by Liu Fu as he pleased.
Liu Fu was building roads and was very busy all day, so he couldn't count on it. He couldn't count on the 15 Qing Dynasty soldiers and government servants who were prospecting for minerals in the valley with professionals. Liu Fu still didn't know how to dig coal.
Yes, Dad doesn’t have ready-made talents available, so he can only ask the pharmacies in Guangzhou to look around and hire professionals at high prices to come to Taiwan to help.
