Salt production is definitely a money-making project. This can be seen from the wealth of salt merchants in Lianghuai Salt Fields and Changlu Salt Fields. It should be an uncontroversial issue, but the salt fields in Liaodong are almost at a loss. Well, this is worth investigating.
Of course, Gao Wuzhi doesn't have time to delve into it now, because in his opinion, salt production can almost make a loss for two reasons: first, there are too many loopholes in the management system, and second, the salt production technology is outdated and backward.
We are all Han Chinese of the same origin, so we can’t say that the Liaodong people are extra lazy, right? We must know that the living environment in Liaodong is even worse, so how can we be even lazier? Obviously not.
Therefore, the difficulty in opening a new salt farm in Liaonan is not where to open it - not to mention the entire southern Liaoning, Yingkou alone is already a "hundred-mile silver beach". As long as there are money and people, there will be no big business anywhere. Coming to the salt farm?
The difficulty lies in the management system and technical system.
In terms of management system, although Jinghua has no experience in opening a salt farm, the general direction of corporate operations is similar. Most of them can be copied, and at most they will make some relevant technical changes. Therefore, there is no need to be pragmatic or troublesome in this aspect.
But the technical system needs to be upgraded.
After Gao Jingshi asked his uncles Zhang Siwei and Zhang Sijiao to help provide several salt-making masters from Changlu Salt Field, after exchanges and understandings, it was confirmed that there is considerable room for improvement in Daming's salt-making technology.
China's salt-making technology developed to the Ming Dynasty. The raw materials were mainly four types: seawater, pond brine, well brine and mineral salt. Different raw materials, of course, also have different salt-making methods. Specifically, when it comes to seawater salt-making, there are two main methods: Sun-made salt and boiled salt.
At first, Gao Pragmatic did not consider the option of boiling salt at all, because boiling salt requires fuel.
Burning charcoal to boil salt has been popular in Chinese dynasties in the past. This is obviously a very expensive method of making salt. Although boiling salt does not require a large fire and the energy consumption is not particularly high, the price of charcoal is not low after all. Still not worth it.
Later, coal was started to be burned to boil salt, and the cost began to decrease. This was good news for Gao pragmatism, because he really had no shortage of coal.
Jinghua's current coal mining capacity is almost explosive compared to the amount used - mainly due to the large number of mines. Hebei, Henan and Shanxi, the famous coal province in later generations, are the main spheres of influence of Jinghua. In addition to the fact that Jinghua has already advanced In addition to the occupied Kailuan Coal Mine and Mentougou Coal Mine (on the outskirts of Yanjing), there are many large mines in Gao Pragmatic's hometown in Henan and his "uncle's family" in Shanxi. As long as Gao Pragmatic gives orders, production capacity will not be a problem at all.
Even if transportation costs are high these days, Yingkou can at most use coal shipped from Kaiping to support it. However, as a business group, Jinghua must have lower costs, so Gao Pragmatic did not plan to boil salt at the beginning. Use your brain.
The first thing he considered upgrading was the sun-curing technology.
According to the master craftsman of Changlu Saltworks, there are currently four methods of drying tobacco in the Ming Dynasty, namely the border sun-salting method, the beach-tank salt-sunning method, the kanjing salt-sunning method and the wooden plate sun-salting method. [Without going into details, I will introduce a paper to those who are interested: "The Development of Salt Production Technology in China and Europe from the 15th to the 19th Century", written by Xu Baozheng and Wang Liandi. ]
At this time, Europe had no technical exchanges with East Asia, especially the Ming Dynasty, in salt production technology (there is currently no evidence in the historians), but there was a strong convergence. The differences were only in some minor issues, but there was one item in which Europe was ahead. During the Ming Dynasty and even later, there were many Tatar and Qing dynasties, which were brine extraction equipment.
Europeans had developed a "brine extractor" as early as 1437 (Erhard Han of France), which was replaced by the Heinz water pump in 1507. Later, it developed faster and faster, and finally in the steam engine era As a matter of course, steam brine extraction equipment was developed.
In addition, long-distance brine pipelines are also an advantageous project in Europe. However, this project is related to the division of Europe (especially the Holy Roman Empire) and is different from Gao Pragmatic's environment, so it has little to do with it.
The first technology that Gao Pragmatic plans to upgrade at present is the brine extraction equipment, which can significantly improve the efficiency of salt production. Especially after the adoption of this technology, salt boiling can also be included in the upgrade scope - referring to the final stage of salt production. The key to boiling and processing in order to speed up the production of salt is that the amount of coal required is not large, and the requirements for the coal itself are also very low. Some types of coal that are not very useful can be used (there are many types of coal).
For Jinghua, to a certain extent, it is close to the utilization of waste.
For these two major upgrades, apart from the initial cost of manufacturing the brine extraction equipment, the rest only requires some shipping costs for coal, but they can increase the efficiency of salt production by two to three times. Gao Pragmatic feels This is worth doing.
Gao pragmatically left these two matters to the Kaiping side and left them to Gao Rui, who was responsible for contacting the Jinghua Craftsman School in the capital, to jointly handle them. The Beiyang Fleet was simply responsible for transportation.
Then Gao pragmatically went to learn from a certain great man of later generations and went to the seaside of Yingkou to "draw a circle."
The "institutional advantage" of feudalism was undoubtedly demonstrated at this moment. Gao Bingxian went to Shuyi first, and without even waiting for approval, he went to Yingkou to take a look, and with a stroke of his pen, he took a look at some of the salt fields of the guard station that had long been abandoned. The nature was changed, and the original guard post Yanding was dismissed and returned to the guard, and the Bingxian Yamen paid this year's salary - this money was Gao's pragmatic personal subsidy, but it would be shared with Zhu Yijun in the end.
The various health offices did not have any special reaction to this. Instead, they all asked Gao Pangshi to report to the court, asking whether they should be exempted from the salt requirement since they were no longer exposed to salt.
Gao Pragmatic was very courageous, so he agreed directly and sent away the doubtful representatives of the guards.
In fact, he had discussed this issue with Zhu Yijun before. The original two million kilograms of salt per year for the 25 provinces and 2 free prefectures in Liaodong would be fully borne by the future Jinghua Salt Farm, and the quality and quantity would be guaranteed to the provinces and prefectures. , and Jinghua Salt Farm will increase this amount by 10%, which means that it will actually pay 2.2 million kilograms of fine salt.
This is also the reason why Gao Pragmatic is not afraid of being scolded: It used to be said that there were two million jins of Liaodong salt, but in reality, even the gods couldn’t tell how much it was. Now that Jinghua has taken over, it has not only increased it from two million jins to two hundred Two hundred thousand kilograms, and the standard of coarse salt has been raised to the standard of refined salt. There is a lot of premium in this.
In fact, his move is like a "contracting system", and he has personally contracted all the "salt" in Liaodong in the past. In the future, the court will not need to go one by one when the output of salt in Liaodong is insufficient. You only need to find a person who is highly pragmatic to check and make reminders. In terms of administrative efficiency, it has increased by at least twenty-five times.
If you still get scolded for this, it only means that the other person is not doing it right at all, but just for the person.
Gao Pragmatic's memorial was sent to the capital, which really caused some controversy.
However, the focus of the controversy is not actually the "contracting system" of Gao pragmatism - the salt industry in the Ming Dynasty is actually a contracting system, but in other areas it is contracted through the form of "salt introduction". For example, the Zhang family controls the long-term contracting system. Most of the salt in the Lu Salt Field is imported, which almost monopolizes the salt field.
And Gao Wuchen's current approach is just a contracting system that does not require salt introduction, and the main reason why he does not require salt introduction is because he eats the entire Liaodong salt supply - anyway, he is the only one in the family, and the specific amount of salt introduction does not matter. As long as he can hand over the 2.2 million kilograms of fine salt he promised, everything else is easy to talk about.
Because for the court, sitting like this allowed them to get rid of a lot of bad debts and dead debts.
The real controversial issue is the resettlement of the salt soldiers who were sent back to the defense by Gao pragmatism.
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