Cultivation of chastity

Chapter 14 Down Jacket and Heated Kang
On the second day, people were sent to issue a notice in the name of Yue Wangfu to recruit refugees to build a school.

In fact, the refugees have been entrenched in Chang'an for so long, and most of those able-bodied people who can be used as labor have been scooped up by wealthy families of all sizes.

Most of the remaining people are the old, the weak, the sick, or the big family members.

The aristocratic family wants them to become a labor force immediately, not to support a group of them in vain.

So even though some of them are strong and strong, but they can't let go of their families, but they don't want to go to a wealthy family to be servants or tenants.

In fact, even Li Tai doesn't accept everyone, for example, even the elderly, but as long as they don't have children, they don't accept them.

On the contrary, there are some families with children, and Li Tai is more than happy to accept them.

After all, these people can still take their children while fleeing disasters, which in itself has certain ethics and morality.

On the contrary, those who really have nothing but themselves alone, really can't guarantee their minds when they really use it.

After these laborers came, Li Tai was in charge of planning, and Ma Zhou was in charge of execution. They began to build houses in the Gaoling area while organizing manpower to cultivate and plant winter wheat as much as possible.

The reclaimed fields naturally belonged to the agricultural institute, but the grain grown on these fields was divided fifty-fifty with them, and the agricultural institute was responsible for their corvee.

In the future, if they settled down in the Agricultural Institute, the Institute could rent land to them. In other words, these refugees became tenants of the Agricultural Institute.

Li Taihuai thought that the feudal era would fall into the inevitable vicious circle of land annexation anyway, so instead of waiting for other aristocratic families to annex farmers' land, it would be better to let him annex it.

If he succeeds in seizing the heir, then he will find a way to solve it. If he falls into the street, he will not be able to escape the law of historical cycles anyway, then I will just treat him as a monster.

For the refugees, most of the people here are old, weak, sick and disabled. Finally, there is someone who is willing to adopt themselves and others, and the conditions are acceptable to them. After all, the [-]-[-] food is their pure income.

The corvee has been contracted by the agricultural college, so the deal, to be honest, they are quite acceptable.

The most important thing is that Li Tai takes care of the food. For them as refugees, it has been too long since they have had enough.

They also want to survive, want to survive this winter, and finally have a place to stay, so they come naturally.

With hot meals and even the occasional egg and chicken, the refugees felt alive again.

For the sake of the Agricultural Institute at least giving them enough food, they are also willing to reclaim land for the Agricultural Institute.

To be honest, the land that was reclaimed in the first year should have been planted with a batch of beans first, and then corn for another year.

Slowly let the reclaimed fields become mature fields before planting wheat. Otherwise, directly planting winter wheat will not only produce low yields, but also tend to produce empty grains, so directly planting wheat is really unreasonable in terms of arrangement.

So normally, the first three years of land reclamation basically need to lose money.

This is also the reason why many landowners are not willing to reclaim. They prefer to directly acquire mature high-quality acres through their rights or wealth.

This is more efficient. After all, making money according to the rules in any era is the most labor-saving.

But Li Tai understood that if the winter wheat was not planted in autumn, beans and corn would not be able to be planted at this time.

The fields reclaimed in this way will be abandoned for the first half of the year, and grass will grow again, so thank you!

So even if Li Tai knows that next year's winter wheat harvest will definitely be poor, he can only continue to implement it, and harvest a little bit.

And after Li Tai planned plans such as reclaiming acres of land and building new water conservancy projects, Ma Zhou, a future figure, also began to show extraordinary scheduling skills, and he was able to effectively adjust Li Tai's plans.

In addition to Ma Zhou's own extraordinary talent, every time Li Tai's plans are formulated based on the existing funds, instead of drawing a circle in vain, and then letting Ma Zhou create something out of nothing.

This allowed Ma Zhou to execute the plan with ease.

Building thatched huts for refugees, buying enough food, and exchanging tools for land reclamation and cattle... Ma Zhou arranged everything in an orderly manner, and even Ma Zhou himself occasionally took time to drink some wine, watching happily A new city built little by little under his own hands.

With Ma Zhou in full charge of managing the Agricultural Institute, Li Tai did not put too much thought into the reclamation work.

At this time, Li Tai can put his mind on more other things, such as making money!
Now it's just the beginning, and Li Tai realizes that the money really doesn't need to be spent!

And my own agricultural school wants to carry out various agricultural experiments and promote the achievements of agronomy, so it can't do without money.

So after Ma Zhou took over the land reclamation, Li Tai began to think about how to make money.

The first step is to allow several duck and poultry shops under his name to start accepting slaughtering business.

I don’t need money, I just keep the internal organs and feathers of chickens and ducks for myself, which is the cost of slaughtering.

Of course, despite Li Tai's arrangement, not many people actually came to the duck and poultry shop on their own initiative.

After all, now that the small-scale peasant economy is the mainstay, it is not difficult for individuals to slaughter a duck or poultry.

But there are also many people who are willing to take the ducks and poultry they raise these days to slaughter in order to save trouble.

Therefore, after all, a lot of poultry viscera and feathers have been collected, and these viscera and so on are naturally used to supplement nutrition for the reclamation people.

In contrast, after the duck feathers are collected, they are sorted according to size, then degreased with plant ash or alkaline ore, deodorized with multi-layer steamers, and then dried in the sun to be collected again... It can be regarded as a preliminary material.

To be honest, there are still a lot of things that can be done with duck down. Among them, Li Tai thinks that winter is coming, and maybe he can sell down jackets to make a fortune. After all, down jackets are the warmest clothes to wear outside.

Of course, those long and big feathers must be picked out, and they will be prepared to make quills for them in the future.

After all, it is a school, at least it should teach students literacy and arithmetic, and if all the things like pen, ink, paper and inkstone are used, Li Tai said that it is too expensive, and he really can't afford it.

So it's better to directly equip them with a sand table and a quill. One can be reused, and the other can be done by labor for Li Tai without spending money. This is the most important thing.

As for the chalk, Li Tai really couldn't get it out for a while.

Because this thing needs gypsum, but Li Tai's current industry has nothing to do with gypsum, so he will just use sand tables and quill pens to teach, and wait until he finds a mine.

Of course, when quill pens are developed in the future, some people should be willing to buy quill pens for a penny!

Li Tai couldn't guarantee it, but for Li Tai, he was really short of money and red-eyed, so in addition to the quill and down jacket, his eyes were fixed on the coal mine again.

After Li Tai bought the coal mine, he began to ask the people below to study the kang. For this reason, he even dispatched some craftsmen from Jiangzuofu, who was good at making ground fires.

The cooperation with Jiangzuofu last time was quite pleasant, so after Li Tai asked Li Shimin for instructions, soon a craftsman from the subordinate Zhenguan Office came over. His name was Mo Gong, but he was ordered by the Zhenguan Office of Jiupin, so generally Call him Mo Ling.

"Mo Ling." Li Tai looked at the man with dark fingers and nails that were almost falling off, and said, "Is my plan for this kang complete?"

"Compared to letting the flames form an insulating layer in the wall to insulate the cold, if you just heat the bed, it is indeed safer and saves more firewood under the same firewood! King Yue's idea is quite amazing!"

Mo Gong's fingers couldn't help gesticulating, as if thinking of something subtle, he danced.

Although there is no heated kang in this era, many related technologies have been quite perfect, and at most it is just a matter of thinking.

In the Northern Wei Dynasty, people usually baked under the ground, and set up a flue, and equipped with smoke exhaust facilities, so that the flue was underground, so as to heat the ground, but it was not easy to exhaust the gas from the flue.

So in general, the study of this craftsman is called the ground fire craftsman, and they are used in Li Tai's artificial hatching.

"Mo Ling, remember that it's best to leave a hole in the design to wipe the dust, otherwise this thing will burn for a whole winter, and it won't be warm when you use it next year!" Li Tai instructed Mo Gong.

Mo Gong recorded Li Tai's requirements one by one, and then Mo Gong proposed the materials needed to build this kind of house.

Li Tai was also not polite, and with a swipe of a pen, he built a brick factory and a tile yard on the spot. Although there was no such bonding material as cement, there were still things like triadic clay in this dynasty.

Of course, Mo Ling also proposed a high-grade adhesive such as glutinous rice mortar. Li Tai looked at its ingredient list and found glutinous rice, so he could only reluctantly give up this kind of thing, because he really had no money.

Then Mo Gong took the lead, and the refugees participated in the construction of houses with kangs.

Although the first room was the slowest to build, a row of flat and orderly rooms began to be arranged in an orderly manner at the back, making the originally uninhabited land begin to be populated, and these refugees really lived in these houses built by themselves. inside.

Li Tai asked Ma Zhou to register these people one by one. These people are more or less civilians.

These houses built by themselves are counted as their property.

It can be said that when they heard the news, these people couldn't believe it. Some people cried bitterly while holding their three or four-year-old children who were still at a loss, some knelt down and kowtowed to the registration officials, and some were full of faces. Numb, but if you look closely, they have tears streaming down their faces.

It can be said that they really have their own house, they are no longer homeless under the city wall, even if it is only such a small house, it is their first property here.

However, Li Tai also said, "If they sell the house here, they will no longer be from Gaoling."

Hearing Li Tai's words, everyone was both terrified and excited.

Li Tai knew that they had a house here, so they should feel more at ease, but it was far from enough.

Because they have a house, they can be regarded as civilians at most, but what Li Tai really hopes is that they can become good family members.

Of course, there is still a difference between a commoner and a good family, and the biggest difference is in the land.

In feudal society, if you want to be a good family, apart from not breaking the law or having moral problems, the biggest difference is whether you have arable land under your family name.

At this point, just like modern society, if you want to take root in a city, the best way is to own a house of your own.

Once you own a house, you will find that the local people's attitude towards you will change a lot.

At least few people will continue to look at you from the eyes of outsiders, basically you can integrate into this city after a while.

Because if you own a house, you are truly rooted in this city.

To this city, you are no longer a traveler who can work when there is labor and becomes a passerby when there is no labor.

At the same time, the local neighbors around you will also be willing to communicate with you, such as notices from the neighborhood committee, and the benefits of the street. They may even take the initiative to ask you to go out for drinks and play mahjong when they are free, and even singles will enthusiastically introduce girls.

One of the very realistic points is that you own a house in this city, which shows that you have fetters to this city.

In the past, who knew that you might disappear in a few years. In such a cold society, why bother to invest your feelings in vain on a person who is likely to disappear at any time.

In the Tang Dynasty, unless it was a house in the city, the house in the field was basically worthless. What was really valuable was the land that could be cultivated.

When you reclaim the land locally, the people around you will take the initiative to draw you into the local society.

Because owning the land, even if it is only an acre, means that you really have a foothold in this place.

However, Li Tai didn't intend to give the land near Gaoling to these common people.

It's not that Li Tai is reluctant, but that these people really can't hold it.

Gaoling is located at the intersection of Weihe River and Jinghe River, where the land is fertile and water conservancy is convenient.

If it wasn't for this locust plague, which caused a catastrophe here, it would not only stop the pace of land reclamation, but even cause a lot of the originally reclaimed fields to be barren. Gaoling would not be Li Tai's turn to establish an agricultural school. .

Because the land here is not reclaimed, it is fine, as long as it is reclaimed, it is basically considered good land.

The dignitaries don't like to reclaim the fields by themselves, because it takes too much time and effort. It takes three years to cultivate the mature fields. It is not good to do other things with this time.

But these fields were reclaimed by the people painstakingly, and the dignitaries began to use various means to obtain these fields.

Even without resorting to any means, as long as there is a disaster year, the vast majority of the people will be unable to support themselves, and then they have to sell the ten acres of land that they have painstakingly cultivated all their lives to the dignitaries at an extremely low price.

Li Tai came back to his senses, and saw that the workers under Mo Gong's command became more and more skilled, showing a satisfied smile.

Of course, Li Tai didn't expect them to make money now, he only planned to train a team of workers for making heated kangs first.

First spread the effect and word of mouth this year, and see the effect, and then you can promote it next year if you want to come.

And I am also waiting for the coal mining industry to research honeycomb coal. When it is combined with the kang, it may have a wonderful effect. For example, when repairing the kang, the matching honeycomb briquette may be sent, and the sales of honeycomb may be opened.

(End of this chapter)