After leaving the palace, Shulot strode forward, heading east. Bertard calmly escorted him. Everyone faced the warm morning sun and walked quickly to the place of divine enlightenment.
The boy was obviously in a good mood. With a warm smile on his face, he nodded slightly to the nobles and warriors who saluted respectfully along the way.
Not long east of the palace area is the majestic Great Temple. Shulot looked up, his eyes focused. He keenly discovered that the Rain Temple, one of the twin pyramids, was being renovated.
Beside the rain god's fluttering curtain, the war god's curtain is unfolded at the same time, and is above it. Most of the wind and rain symbols symbolizing the God of Rain were removed and replaced with carvings of hummingbirds symbolizing the God of War. Although he could not clearly see the statues in the inner hall, the young man was sure that there would also be changes there.
This is part of the New Year's preparations of the priesthood. Starting from this year's sacrificial ceremony, the main god will gradually take over the agricultural priesthood of the rain god. The priests will also use prepared myths to explain, and use a buffer time of several years to allow the people to gradually accept the ascension of the main god.
After the great temple is the chief minister's palace where the elders live in seclusion. Shulot looked from a distance. The front of the palace was deserted and solemn. The elder guards were still as solemn as sculptures, but the old man who spanned centuries could not be seen. After passing the temples and palaces, he continued eastward and soon arrived at the busy shrine.
Looking at the name written by his own hand, the young man's heart fluctuated slightly. In the towering palace, are the elders' calm eyes looking at the future here?
After a while, Shulot came back to his senses. He no longer thought about it and went directly to the southern area where the folk craftsmen were. The first thing to look at is the engraving and printing that he is most concerned about.
The study of woodblock printing is located in a side hall on the east side. In the exquisite and gorgeous side hall, various thick wooden boards, blue and black ink, and pure white paper are piled up. When the young man entered the side hall, he smelled the fragrance of pine wood, the fragrance of ink, and a faint pungent smell.
Shulot's eyes swept over and paused slightly. He took a few steps closer, stared at the paper as white as snow, and pondered silently.
Upon noticing His Highness's arrival, Aquila immediately put down the carving in his hand, knelt down and saluted. The young man raised his hand to signal the senior middle-aged jade craftsman to stand up. He stretched out his hand and pinched the white paper in front of him. It was evenly thick and of high quality. The faint pungent smell also came from the white paper.
"Equila, is this paper sent from the craftsmanship center?" Xiulote was a little confused.
"Your Highness, this is the latest refined paper completed by the Shenqi Institute Papermaking Department? It is more suitable for engraving and printing. It is the invention of a young craftsman. They are in the house not far next door."
Aquila looked calm and told the truth.
Shulot nodded? It seems that the papermaking department has indeed discovered a new process. I have to ask carefully later to compare it with the memory in my mind and see what else I can find. Then, he looked at the calm and composed middle-aged jade craftsman.
"Was the engraving of the engraving smooth? How was the printing effect?"
Aquila bowed and extended his hand.
"Your Highness? Everything goes well. Please let me demonstrate it for you."
As he spoke, Aquila took out a carved thick wooden board with the thousand-character inscription left by His Highness on it. The reverse characters on the engraving are carved into raised embossed characters, and the remaining blank parts are eliminated from depressions. The boy stretched out his hand and felt that the ridges were only slightly protruding from the surface, but the edge of the nail was only slightly protruding by 1-2 millimeters.
Then, the middle-aged jade craftsman carefully used a brush to apply even blue ink to the engraving. This ink is the most commonly used Mayan blue in the Mexican Union, and is made from a mixture of plant indigo extracted from wild green tree leaves and mineral binder extracted from palygorskite clay. Maya blue has a high yield and can be used to smear the entire body of the sacrifice.
After observing the degree of inking, Aquila carefully covered the board with white paper and covered it with another flat board for stability. Soon, he took the paper off the printing plate and placed it on the wooden table in the shadow of the corner of the room to dry in the shade.
Shulot looked carefully and saw that there was already a piece of paper that had been dried in the shade. The Chinese characters on it were as big as a thumb. The handwriting was clear and accurate. There are also some papers with majestic depictions of gods, and the alliance's calendar sun stones are extremely detailed and equally lifelike.
"Aquila, how many pieces of paper can you print in a day? How many times can a printing plate be printed?" the young man asked eagerly.
Aquila thought for a while and answered cautiously.
"Your Highness, as long as there is enough paper, according to the speed I just set, a printer can print more than a thousand sheets a day. If he is busy day and night, he can print up to two thousand sheets. The number of times the engraving plate is used depends on the material of the wood board. I have not used one out yet. Secondary engraving. Judging from the degree of wear and tear, I think it will be there after thousands of times."
Hearing this, Shulot was very satisfied. Printing and books will be the most powerful ideological weapons that will complete the religious reform and completely reshape the spiritual world of the Mexica people!
The priesthood has compiled a concise teaching of several thousand words, which it calls the Book of Amakholi, or simply the Book of Ali. In the Nahua language, "Amakoli" means book, revelation, reading book or scroll.
The Ali Sutra is generally a scripture that praises the supremacy of the Lord God and describes the creation myth of the Lord God. It is based on the form of a thousand-character script and is used as the most basic enlightenment book, just like the European Bible.
Now that the engraving is practical, the next step is to print tens of thousands of Ali Sutras and distribute them to every community military school. When the literacy education of the first batch of priests is completed, they will go to every town and village in the alliance with new religious ideas. They will teach the will of the Lord God to every fifteen-year-old boy, completely changing the next generation of the alliance and establishing the supreme kingdom of God on earth!
Thinking of this, Shulot's heart heaved. In addition to printing scriptures, engravings can also depict majestic temples and complete mythological stories. In the form of albums, they can leave revelations from the Lord God to ordinary people who are illiterate. It can also print prayer rituals, legal provisions, calendar knowledge and agricultural illustrations to guide daily life and production.
All in all, printing and religious books will drastically reduce the difficulty of spreading religious ideas and quickly promote the monotheistic religious reform. From the current perspective, papermaking and printing technology must be strictly kept secret, and paper production and book printing can only be carried out in the capital.
It is related to the great cause of the Mexica people. It will take at least two generations to maintain the absolute monopoly advantage of the core of the alliance in cultural communication and form a cross-dimensional cultural blow to the states where writing has not yet been formed.
Shulot thought quickly and made a decision. All craftsmen must be closely monitored, registered, and even isolated from society. Book printing will become a taboo for the priesthood. Anyone who dares to get involved in this area, whether they are civilians or nobles, will only die!
Thinking of this, he looked at Aquila calmly and indifferently. The middle-aged jade craftsman suddenly felt a chill in his heart. He quickly lowered his head and saluted, not daring to look directly.
Then, Hulot continued to think about the development of movable type printing in Europe. The religious reform it brought about would determine the fate of the Spanish Empire, the great enemy of the Aztec Alliance.
About forty years ago, in 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing in the Holy Roman State. Today, this technology has been introduced to all major European countries, and is still spreading rapidly, giving birth to opportunities for the new religious reform.
More than thirty years later, almost at the same time when the Spanish invaded the Aztec Empire, the flames of the Reformation would first be ignited in the HRE countries, and then Britain would break with the Roman Church and establish the Anglican Church. The flames of Protestantism would gradually burn across Europe.
After conquering the Americas, the Spaniards would possess wealth that surpassed that of other European countries and reach a golden age of prosperity in history. Due to religious differences, the pious Kingdom of Spain was hostile to the Kingdom of England. The British then supported the Dutch in their war of independence from Spain and privately raided Spanish fleets in the Americas.
In the dual hostility between religion and royal power, the Kingdom of Spain finally sent out an invincible fleet in an attempt to conquer Britain, and then unexpectedly ended the war. The Armada was defeated in the Battle of Graveland. Coupled with the strong reverse south wind, it was forced to drift northward. In the end, it lost more than two-thirds. More than a hundred large ships were sunk, and it lost effective control of the Americas. .
What followed was the brutal and unusual Thirty Years of Religious War, which completely announced the decline of the Spanish Empire and the end of the Golden Age. Finally, fifty years later came the War of Spanish Succession. Spain lost almost all its territory outside the Iberian Peninsula, and the empire came to an end.
Looking at the paper with thoughts printed on it, Shulot fell into deep thought.
The development of history is a dynamic process with various clues complicated and entangled. Important events in history are only records and manifestations of violent conflicts in dynamics. The printing press gave birth to the general trend of the Reformation. The flame of Protestantism could not be extinguished by the Roman Church, and the centrifugal force in England was also driven by the general trend.
Regardless of religion and culture, purely from a diplomatic perspective, the Kingdom of England after the Protestant Reformation and the pious Spanish Empire had always been hostile and were natural allies of the Alliance. In the distant future, this will be an important opportunity.
After thinking for a long time, Shulot shook his head and took his thoughts back from the history that had not yet happened. He again considered the technology and feasibility of movable type printing.
Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing process consisted of two parts: the casting of lead movable type, and the wooden printing press.
The wooden printing press here is just a screw-type wine press that rotates with threads and levers to steadily apply pressure to the wooden board below for printing. This technology had been invented before BC and was not uncommon in the Chinese dynasty. In fact, the printing press has never been the decisive factor in the application of movable type printing, movable type casting is!
Gutenberg's movable lead type casting technology came from the goldsmith's casting, and the technological innovation lies in the steps of Yin and Yang mold casting. He first used a hard metal to make a yang character mold, and then used the yang character mold to carve on the soft metal to create a yin character mold. Finally, the yin character mold is used to cast low melting point lead and tin to produce a large number of repeated yang character grains for layout and printing.
This technology also has no technical bottleneck for Chinese goldsmiths. The copper plate banknotes of the Song Dynasty already used metal movable type to print different anti-counterfeiting font sizes. However, metal movable type was never popular in the Celestial Dynasty. The root cause lies in the essential difference between the Chinese writing system and the Latin alphabet system.
There are more than 10,000 Chinese characters in the Chinese character system, and there are thousands of commonly used characters. The Latin alphabet only has 26 letters, and Ancient Latin even only had 21. The two movable type libraries are not on the same quantitative scale at all, and the difference is two orders of magnitude. This huge difference in production costs determines whether the technology is practical or not.
In terms of the training of printing workers, Chinese character movable type workers must know thousands to ten thousand Chinese characters, understand the pronunciation and rhyme, and understand the position of each character on the thousands-character plate. They must also prepare a plurality of high-frequency commonly used characters. As for the movable type workers of the Latin alphabet, they only need to be able to spell 26 letters, and an ordinary apprentice can get started in a few days.
Shulot thought silently, and finally nodded and decided.
The writing system of the Celestial Dynasty has gone through the precipitation of history and completely chose engraving and printing. The metal movable type is at best a digital anti-counterfeiting. The Mexicans who embraced Chinese characters were bound to use woodblock printing. The characteristics of woodblock printing are low cost, low craftsmanship, long-term preservation, and low cultural requirements for workers, which is also in line with the current situation of the alliance.
Block printing would remain the mainstream of the Alliance until the technological advancements brought about by the Industrial Revolution made metal movable type extremely cheap.
In a matter of moments, Shulot set the technical path for the alliance for a century. He continued to look at the ink printed on the engraving.
Metal type does not stick to water and requires the use of ink, which is to add animal and vegetable oils and turpentine to the ink. Since he decided to use wooden engravings, the boy only cared about the ink used on the wooden boards.
The Alliance currently has two types of ink, one is natural black ink made from natural coal, and the other is blue ink made from plant dyes and mineral clay.
Shulot pondered slightly. Natural coal was scarce in Union-controlled areas and was used only occasionally for black paint. The main source of these paints is the Zapotec people in the south, proving that there must be open-pit coal mines of unknown size there.
According to the boy's memory, the land of the dogs in the north, close to the future Texas, not only has a large amount of oil, but also stores large-scale coal mines formed together. These key mineral deposits are critical areas that must be occupied and are also the driving force for future industrial development.
In addition to natural charcoal, a common method of making ink in China was to burn wood and obtain smoke. Xuelote recalled the production process of Hui ink and analyzed every picture in his impression. The Ming Dynasty's top-secret production process in this era will be freely circulated on the Internet in the future.
Unfortunately, he thought about it for a long time, but he only remembered that it was burning pine wood, taking out the pine smoke on the surface, and then adding gum to bond it. It seemed that there was also a process of gold tracing and engraving? The young man shook his head, and according to the current thinking, he would arrange for craftsmen to trial-produce it later.
The middle-aged jade craftsman Aquila lowered his head and waited for a long time, then quietly raised his head and saw His Highness shaking his head. He fell to the ground again in fear, his head pressed tightly against the ground, making a slight sound from the collision.
Schlott shifted his gaze and landed on Aquila on the ground. He smiled with satisfaction and promised loudly.
"Equila, you have done a good job! From today on, I will appoint you as a master craftsman of engraving, which is equivalent to the military noble of the alliance! You will have rewards of gold, silver, gems and Chinampa land! You can promote two The children are royal warriors and my followers!”
Hearing this, Aquila raised her head in disbelief, with shock and surprise on her face. Then, he lowered his head vigorously again and kowtowed deeply to the ground, making a fierce sound.
Shulote's eyes were deep for a moment, and then he spoke slowly.
"Starting from tomorrow, I will send two warriors to protect you personally. The technology and crafts here will be listed as top secrets of the alliance. I will send you a special apprentice. From today on, you will be the exclusive craftsman of the priesthood. !”
After saying that, the young man looked at the middle-aged jade craftsman calmly for a moment, observing his expression of joy and piety. After a long time, he nodded with satisfaction, turned around and headed towards the papermaking place.
