New craftsmen who have not demonstrated their craftsmanship and are recognized can only be paid according to the minimum standard.
Even so, the great craftsmen who had just arrived and received two taels of silver and four buckets of grain before even starting to work were still in awe!
I learned that this was only the salary for junior craftsmen in the base area. Every time they advanced to a higher level, their wages would increase by five cents or even one tael of silver.
If you are rated as a great craftsman, the salary you can get is as much as the salary of a seventh-rank official in the imperial court.
After seeing the housing prepared for them, receiving the advance monthly payment, and learning about the treatment in the base area.
These great craftsmen who were originally full of resentment became calm and began to show their talents the next day, hoping to be impressed.
The first thing Huang Yi did after returning was to check out the research and development and production progress of artillery and flintlock guns.
The second thing, of course, is to instruct the jeweler to make a few telescopes and the master craftsman to make colored glaze.
Using the right people can indeed avoid detours. Huang Yi, a layman with only theory, data, and drawings, was complemented by a craftsman with rich practical experience, and the golden finger was opened quite smoothly.
There are still impurities in the fired glass, and it will take time to study the formula and improve the process, so it cannot be used as lenses for the time being.
The craftsmen who are good at processing jewelry and jade are all first-class and ingenious people, and there is no pressure to grind the lenses with natural colorless crystal.
Three months later, when the ice and snow were about to melt, with Huang Yi's participation, three fixed telescopes were finally assembled. The effective magnification should be 32 times.
Compared with binoculars, monoculars are simpler and more convenient, so Huang Yi made ten monocular telescopes, all eight times the distance.
It is impossible to make more because the natural colorless crystal sent by the Geng family has been used up.
What we need to do in the future is to make the glass produced in the base meet the quality requirements.
In the past few months, the base area has been sending coal and some industrial products to Zhangjiakou.
The most popular products are briquette stoves and iron molds used to produce briquettes.
The industry in the base area has just begun to be laid out, and the goods that can be sold are limited. The money obtained from selling the goods is far from enough to cover the purchasing expenses. It has always been possible to survive by consuming the captured gold and silver treasures.
Accumulation is really not as fast as robbery, so Huang Yi will have to fight a few battles soon. Fortunately, the Karaqin Tatars snatched back a lot of gold and silver treasures from the capital of the Ming Dynasty last year.
Otherwise, Huang Yi, who is rapidly expanding his army, may be unable to make ends meet!
There were a lot of things bought back, not only daily necessities such as dishes, pots and jars, but also saltpeter, sulfur, honey, and liquor. The bulk was still grain, cotton, and cotton cloth.
"Build the wall high, accumulate food widely, and become king slowly!" is the golden rule for success.
It is the consensus of the Han people to not panic when there is food at home.
It is estimated that, including the farmland reclaimed this spring, the total number of acres will exceed 130,000 acres.
However, these lands are newly reclaimed and most of them are thin fields. According to the upper, middle and lower Ming dynasties, more than 90% are lower fields.
This takes time to accumulate, and the fertility will definitely get better year by year in the future.
Some acres with the best water and soil conditions are planted with wheat, striving to achieve an average yield of more than one stone per mu.
The rest are planted with potatoes and sweet potatoes. After last year's experiments, it was found that potatoes are more suitable for the sufficient sunshine here and the yield can reach nearly 800 jin.
There is also barley and highland barley, which is relatively cold-tolerant and salt-alkali tolerant, and has a yield second only to wheat.
Then there is the oatmeal that likes cold weather, tolerates drought, salt and alkali, and has a short growing season.
Planting corn in sunny and leeward mountainous areas not only yields corn kernels, but corn stalks are also good feed.
Anyway, the staple food varieties grown cannot be single, because the land needs to be rotated to ensure yields and fertile fields.
In addition to potatoes and sweet potatoes, which can achieve a yield of more than 800 kilograms per mu, the average yield of wheat, barley, highland barley, and oat is about one stone, and it is not too small if it reaches 120 to 150 kilograms.
It should be noted here that a stone is a unit of volume and is measured with a measuring tool rather than weighed. It is unscientific to generally say how much a stone weighs.
It should be stated how many pounds one stone of rice weighs, how many pounds one stone of millet rice weighs, how many pounds one stone of wheat weighs, etc.
Wheat is lighter than rice, so one stone is not more than 150 Ming Dynasty market jin, but more than 120 Ming Dynasty market jin. Converted into 500 grams of jin, it should be more than 150 jin.
If the harvest in the base area is decent this year, it is expected to harvest 150,000 to 200,000 shi of grain, enough to feed 50,000 people.
However, the population in the base area has been growing. Geng Zhanghua, who is not short of money, considers taking in refugees and disaster victims to the base area as a good deed.
Of course, this is also related to Huang Yi's boast that the base area needs more people in Haikou, the better.
Geng Ruchi also supports transporting refugees and disaster victims out of the country.
Because more and more refugees are coming to Shanxi and Xuanda from Shaanxi, and if we try every means to get rid of the refugees, the fragile Shanxi will also be affected and become flooded with refugees.
In fact, this is the case in history. First, people in Shaanxi were in dire straits, and then there were refugees in Shanxi...
But now it has changed a lot.
Because the officials of Xuanda found that there were refugees in the territory, they gathered together and gave each person two bowls of porridge every day. When they gathered 300 people, they sent two yamen to Xuanfu to guide them.
Local officials are not opposed to doing this kind of thing, because the Geng family servants will compensate the grain used for soup porridge according to the population, and they can save money and earn some money for running errands.
According to relevant records, the population during the Ming Dynasty was...
Forehead! not sure.
Some think it is at least 300 million, some think it is more than 200 million, and some say it is 150 million.
Huang Yi didn't think or guess. He just made sure that there were no illegal households in the base area's sphere of influence and that he could count the population with a basically accurate count.
History has destined that Shaanxi and Shanxi will be in chaos, and it is also destined that with the assistance of Governor Xuanda, the base area can attract a large number of people.
Maybe before the snow falls next winter, the Han population in the base area will exceed 80,000 and reach 100,000 or more. Coupled with the heteronymous population gained from the continuous annexation of the Haraqin tribe, the food problem will still be a problem.
Huang Yi would not feel at ease unless he accumulated enough grain to keep people in the base from starving to death even if there was no harvest for a year.
Construction of the high wall in the current base area has begun. Concrete floor beams and ring beam foundations have been poured, and gravel, gangue, and slag have been filled. The wall will be twelve meters high when completed. The base is seven and a half meters thick and the top is five meters wide.
This kind of city wall cannot collapse even if it is bombarded by the heavy artillery of this era for three days.
Guangji Liang is in progress and has completed thirty concrete silos, each of which can store no less than five thousand shi of grain.
It's a pity that the grain storage is not enough to fill the granary. It has just reached half, and it can barely be maintained until the autumn harvest. This is when the population no longer increases.
