On May 20th, Li Zhi, with 500 bodyguards and 100 honor guards, stood on horseback on the grass on both sides of the road in Liaodong Province, watching the driver of the transport carriage pushing and pulling the carriage with difficulty.
This is 30 miles north of Jinzhou and is a key part of the transportation artery of Liaodong. Today, the food in Liaodong is not yet mature. More than one million land reclamation laborers, farmers and slaves in Liaodong Province all rely on the food supply in the pass. Every month they spend
Li Zhi had a huge amount of money and grain.
However, it is not easy to transport grain from the customs to Liaodong.
After several years of development, Dagu Port in Tianjin has now become a grain transshipment base under Li Zhi. It is connected to the Bohai Sea, and grain from Taiwan and the coast of Shandong can be transported by sea; it is connected to the Hai River, and grain can be transported to Tianjin Wei by tanker.
City and Beijing City. All the food for the more than one million people in Liaodong comes from Dagu.
The grain was loaded onto a ship in Dagu. The ship crossed the Bohai Sea and transported the grain to Jinzhou, where it was then transferred to horse-drawn carriages to distribute the grain to various places in Liaodong.
However, the roads left by the Qing Dynasty were really poor. The Jurchens started out as fishermen and hunters, always thinking about looting and looting, and had no habit of building infrastructure. The Tatars occupied Liaodong for more than 20 years, and transportation in Liaodong still relied on the Liaodong Town of the Ming Dynasty.
The dirt road left behind.
There was a light rain a few days ago, and the road to the north of Jinzhou turned into a quagmire. The carriages transporting grain waited until today, and waited until the road was basically dry before getting back on the road. But even so, from time to time, carriages got stuck and were still wet.
Can't get out of the mud.
In front of Li Zhi, there was a carriage stuck in the mud. Seven or eight carriage drivers gathered over, shouting and pushing the carriage, which weighed more than a thousand kilograms.
"Hi ho!"
"Hi ho!"
"Hi ho!"
After shouting and pushing more than a dozen times, the carriage was finally pushed out and returned to the hard road. The carriage drivers were all sweating from exhaustion. They gathered together and squatted in a group, lit a dry cigarette, and took turns smoking.
After resting for ten minutes, they each returned to their carriages and began to drive the horses.
Li Zhi took a breath and said, "I didn't expect that food transportation in Liaodong would be so difficult."
Zheng Yuan, the governor of Liaodong, stood beside Li Zhi on horseback, shook his head and said: "My lord, the difficulties are still to come. In less than two months, the dry fields in Liaodong will be harvested."
Zheng Yuan pointed to the uninhabited prairie and said: "Liaodong is thousands of miles away, and the fields we allocated at the end of last year totaled 12 million acres. Some of these fields have high yields, and some have low yields. On average, there are seven bushels of land.
Harvest. Excluding next year's seeds, Liaodong can harvest about 6.5 million shi of grain this year."
"There are currently 600,000 Liao people and 400,000 Tatar slaves in Liaodong. One million people consume about 3 million shi of grain a year. The excess 3.5 million shi of grain must be transported into the customs. According to the current food price,
This excess grain is worth seven million taels."
Zheng Yuan added: "You have also seen it, Mr. Guo. When the Tatars ruled, they only wanted to plunder and plunder, and basically did not build roads. The roads left in Liaodong Town are now in a mess. Every place in Liaodong is about ten kilometers away from Jinzhou Seaport.
It’s a day’s journey. I’ve calculated that if we rely on carriages to transport this grain back to Tianjin, it will take 20,000 carriages to transport it back and forth for a year to load all the grain on the ship.”
"If we hire these 20,000 carriages at a price of 4 taels a month, the freight for this year will be 1 million taels, which is close to 1.5% of the price of grain!"
Hearing the astonishing figures calculated by Zheng Yuan, Li Zhi couldn't help but be moved. If the freight is so high, the food in Liaodong will be discounted a lot. The income of the tenant farmers, service teams and landlords who work in Liaodong will suddenly drop by 15%.
Zheng Yuan took a breath and said: "This is still the first year. Now there are 500,000 strong laborers working on land reclamation and water conservancy projects. Next year, at least 12 million acres of abandoned dry land can be built, and the canals and water trucks can be installed.
Turn these abandoned fields into fertile fields that can be farmed by machines. By then the grain output in Liaodong will double, and the freight cost for land transportation will cost three million taels a year."
Most of the grain in Liaodong is cultivated using Li Zhi's agricultural machinery, and the per capita yield is extremely high. The grain grown in this way has exceeded the scope of small farmer economy and can be said to be commercial agriculture. For commercial agriculture, transportation is a big problem.
Today's Liaodong is facing such a problem. Millions of stones of grain have to be transported to the pass every year. The muddy roads left in Liaodong Town decades ago simply cannot carry such transportation.
Zheng Yuan bowed his hands and saluted Li Zhi and said: "So, Mr. Guo, I suggest that we start building cement roads in Liaodong. We strive to build cement roads in every small town with a thousand people. Single-horse carriages are on the dirt roads.
It can only tow 1,300 kilograms of cargo, but it can haul more than 2,000 kilograms of cargo on cement roads, so the travel expenses can be reduced by half."
"Although the initial investment is larger, once completed, millions of freight can be saved every year."
Li Zhi looked at Zheng Yuan and felt that his uncle's abilities were pretty good now. Although he was born in a poor family, he now held such a high position as the governor of Liaodong, or the "Captain of the Liaodong Wasteland Reclamation Brigade", without any stage fright. Half a year after taking office, he
I began to think about solving the infrastructure problems in Liaodong.
Li Zhi looked at the slowly advancing grain transport convoy in front and said: "Concrete roads can be repaired as a basic road network. However, even if cement roads are built, it will still not be able to solve the increasingly heavy transportation problems in Liaodong."
Zheng Yuan was stunned and asked: "What should we do?"
Li Zhi thought for a while and said: "We can try to build a railway in Liaodong!"
Zheng Yuan was confused after hearing this, and even more confused: "What is a railway?"
Li Zhi said: "The so-called railway is to lay smooth rails on the ground and use the advantage of low friction of the rails to reduce the forward resistance of trucks. In this way, the goods that originally required five horses can now be dragged by one
A horse can pull it."
Zheng Yuan thought about it for a while and said, "It will cost a huge sum of money to build such a road, right? Our crucible steel costs five cents of silver per pound. How much silver does it cost to pave it on the ground?"
Li Zhi smiled and said: "It's not possible to use crucible steel. The output alone is not enough. We have to come up with cheap steel."
Zheng Yuan looked at Li Zhi and said: "Crucible steel is already much cheaper than steel in other parts of the Ming Dynasty. How can the Duke produce cheaper steel?"
Li Zhi smiled and said: "This new steelmaking method is not complicated. It just oxidizes and separates the carbon in the pig iron and turns the pig iron with high carbon content into steel."
Li Zhi took another look at the slowly advancing grain carriage team and said, "When we return to Tianjin this time, let's start building a new steelmaking converter!"
