At six o'clock in the morning, on the rocky beach, a group of cavalrymen, one man and three horses, stopped.
Zhang Geda got down from his horse tiredly.
This is the dam construction site.
At this time, the rocky beach was densely covered with small villages that were uniformly planned and built. These villages were connected together by gravel roads like beads threaded through threads.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees were transported here to clear the land, collect rocks, and build dams.
Zhang Geda hasn't been here for a while, and there are big changes every time he comes.
Riding on the horse along the way, I saw that the villages passing by had their outer earth walls and fences repaired, and they were now small closed villages.
There are simple fences built into the rammed earth walls of the camp to separate residential areas.
There are militiamen standing guard at the entrance of the village and the entrance of the community.
Along the road, at the entrance of every village, there are two militiamen armed with long guns and wearing uniforms to interrogate strangers who enter the village. Hanging on the simple door is a wooden board with the words "Production Brigade" written on it using a red-hot iron rod.
Zhang Geda never quite understood what a production brigade was, so he simply thought of it as a village. In fact, it was Yang Fan's name that he came up with on a whim due to his bad taste.
Yang Fan considered that after the dam was repaired, hundreds of thousands of acres of paddy fields would be developed here. Therefore, natural villages were divided according to land plots in advance. There was one village for every 500 people, and a certain amount of land was allocated around it.
Now hundreds of thousands of refugees are scattered across this plain. Every day, a steady stream of refugees are transported from outside Zunhua City, and new villages are constantly being built.
There are currently more than 380 villages on this land with a population of nearly 200,000.
There are many thatched and adobe houses built inside the village walls and fences. A small square is reserved in the middle of the village as a place for village gatherings and for issuing notices and orders. It is also a place for weddings, funerals, culture and entertainment.
At the north end of the square, there is a simple four-cornered pavilion with a rammed earth platform about one foot high. This is the place where orders and speeches are issued. If a theater troupe comes to perform in the future, it will also be used as a stage.
Surrounding the square are various reserved functional building locations. For example, the location of the future village office, police station, granary, small inn, cattle and horse stables, mills, medicine shops, canteens, schools, various shops, and workshops with front shops and back factories.
In the residential area, there are pressurized water wells and public toilets and public bathrooms.
Although they are all adobe and thatched houses, they are very simple, but they do not affect their functionality.
Yang Fan attaches great importance to hygiene and forces everyone to take a bath and clothes must be boiled in a large pot once a month. It would be no joke if so many people gather here to cause a plague.
Boiled water for drinking is provided in the kitchen of the public canteen.
Yang Fan is strictly prohibited from drinking raw water. Everyone can also get one liter of hot tea every day.
Yang Fan ordered the lowest quality tea from Fujian and shipped it to Beitang for delivery. When these tea leaves arrived, they had basically fermented into black tea in the cabin. Black tea contains a lot of vitamins.
Although the most inferior large pots are used to boil tea leaves, sometimes even red dates are boiled in water, and fried barley is boiled in water, there is still some cost in purchasing in bulk from this era. These are unplanned additional expenses.
But Yang Fan has no choice. There are not many vegetables to eat in autumn and winter in this era. Yang Fan can now transfer a large amount of old grains rotated from the grain depot, which is enough to feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees. However, if he does not eat vegetables for a long time, he will still suffer from vitamin deficiency. questionable.
Although the refugees have been wandering around after losing their land and can no longer imagine a life of three meals a day, there are still big problems with their nutritional structure.
The refugees are all satisfied and obedient, and everyone from adults to children to the elderly work hard. The few scoundrels inside had long been driven out by the veterans who managed them.
They cherish their current life very much. Even when they have land of their own or can rent land for farming, they can never eat pure grain rice for a day. Basically, it is porridge cooked with limited rice grains, porridge and wild vegetables.
It's late autumn now, and Yang Fan has already bought up all the vegetables available around him, which has even affected the vegetable supply in several surrounding cities.
Yang Fan used all these vegetables to make pickles. It can barely last until the beginning of next spring.
The vegetables of this era were very poor, like Chinese cabbage, which grew sparsely and weighed less than a pound or two. The reason was that this era did not know how to tie up the cabbage to make it grow dense. In later generations, a cabbage weighed five to five pounds. Six or even ten pounds is common.
In the early morning, the refugees all got up to eat at dawn, and each village had a group of 500 people. It is managed by a veteran of the group training. Every morning, families line up to go to the village square to get meals.
The current management model of the village is indeed exactly the same as that of the production team. There is no salary, and rewards and materials are exchanged for materials by accumulating work points at the end of the year.
Everyone eats in the canteen together and distributes benefits such as horses and firewood for heating.
In the village canteen, there are several large pots lined up under the stage, in which are cooked high-concentration crushed corn crumbs and kidney bean porridge. The reason why they were fed corn ball porridge was mainly because corn is the cheapest among old grains. In addition, kidney beans are rich in trace elements and calcium that the human body can directly absorb. These are all ways to deal with the lack of vegetables.
Baked cornmeal pancakes at noon.
Dinner is multigrain rice.
There are basically no dishes, and only pickles are given out with each meal. Boiled wild vegetables are only served as a side dish every few days.
There will be no room to dig wild vegetables this season, and non-staple food will soon be cut off.
The strong labor force of these refugees has been transferred to the construction of the reservoir, mainly digging diversion channels and diversion tunnels in the mountain.
The remaining people in the village are women, the elderly, and children. After eating every day, they take corn cakes and bamboo kettles (with tea in them), carry bamboo baskets on their backs, and go to clear the land with five-tooth rakes, hoes, and shovels. You can't go back to the village for dinner until dark.
After dinner, go home and sleep.
They lined up in a row, led by the team leader, and went to the field to turn over the soil with a rake, picking up all the stones within a foot of depth. In this way, when the land is plowed in the future, the stones in the ground will not damage the plowshare.
These are all strenuous physical labor, and it’s impossible to keep up with nutrition.
Yang Fan finally purchased a large number of fishing nets from Hyundai, sent people to the surrounding rivers to trawl the nets in small boats, caught fish quickly while it was not frozen, and then marinated it into salted fish for storage.
As for experts saying that salted fish is a first-level carcinogen, they don’t care.
Trawl fishing can basically ensure that no fish slips through the net.
Yang Fan deliberately enlarged the mesh to prevent the fish resources from being wiped out by the Juehu net.
In this era, there were still a lot of fish in the river, and the people could not afford to eat fish, mainly because of the lack of efficient fishing methods.
When the shipyard in Beitang is renovated, fishing in the sea can be done to improve the supply of meat. Seafood is richer in nutrients and more beneficial to human health.
Zhang Geda and others led their horses into a village next to the dam construction site. The dam headquarters is located in this village, and there is a communication station with hundreds of fast horses. Commander-in-Chief Song Yingxing also lives here.
The five hundred people in this village are all raising their families, and there are basically no single men and women. Among them, there are about a hundred strong laborers.
This morning the veteran captain was organizing a meal for the refugees. Each village is a brigade and is managed separately. The veterans select 30 people as the backbone militia to maintain local security. In the camp, families build thatched and adobe houses to live in.
The militiamen standing guard in front of the village office saw Zhang Geda coming and quickly saluted and stood at attention.
"Is Commander-in-Chief Song here?"
"Reporting to the regimental envoy, Commander-in-Chief Song is having breakfast in the main hall."
