A Good Landlord in the Tang Dynasty: Emperor Yuan Cong

Chapter 1031 Recalled to Chang'an
Luzon.

Wu Huaiyu still hasn’t returned to Yazhou.
He had suddenly had the idea to fake his death by causing a shipwreck. Then he stayed in Luzon, changed his identity and went to Mindanao to personally open the route to the Spice Islands. He would stay there and never return to the Central Plains. .

But later he thought about it carefully and felt that there were too many loopholes. Even if the Wu family secretly had a substitute who looked very similar to him, and no matter how real the shipwreck was, who was the emperor Li Shimin?

I'm afraid I can't hide it from the emperor at all.

He was worried that this would anger the emperor, and the consequences would be disastrous.

After giving up this idea, Wu Huaiyu was not in a hurry to return to Yazhou. Since he had been away for so long, the emperor had sent an imperial doctor to Lingao, but he recalled him after not seeing him, which shows that the emperor knew that he was here. , but don't care.

Of course, he didn't care about this, it just allowed him to slip in occasionally, so he just took a long vacation here.

Luzon State was newly established and the system was established. There were indeed many general directions that needed to be grasped by him personally. It is inconvenient after all if people are not here.

Today, Wu Huaiyu came to Luzon Mint,

It's noisy here,
Copper Kaiyuan, Silver Kaiyuan, and Gold Kaiyuan are all busy here. Countless workers are busy working nervously. Minting money is a very tedious and technical job.
Although the coins minted in Luzon were privately minted in imitation of the official mints of the imperial court, their appearance was almost the same. Except for the crescent mark, even the quality of the materials used was the same.

A group of stewards from the foundry accompanied Wu Huaiyu and his son on their inspection.
The general manager explained to them seriously, "The sand casting method used in our Luzon foundry is far more efficient than the Shaozhou Qianjian, which has the largest minting volume in the Central Plains today, and our costs have been reduced a lot."

Wu Huaiyu looked at the sand casting process,

The processes are very complicated.

Moreover, the new coins minted by the Wu Family Luzon Mint are subject to strict quality inspection. Sample coins are used to check the new coins. All coins that do not meet the quality standards will be returned and exchanged and will never be leaked out. There is even a strict reward and punishment mechanism for internal management. Penalties will also be imposed if the number of unqualified products exceeds the standard.

But in terms of casting technology, Luzon is now ahead of the imperial court in casting money.

Then comes warehousing.

Wu Huaiyu looked at the broken coins, which were strung together by skilled workers with money sticks. After filling a basket, they were sent to the next process.

Wu Huaiyu was not surprised when he heard the figures he reported.

Wu Huaiyu knew that the manager had something to say, which was that the money cast privately by the Wu family was not only exquisite and of good quality, but the profit from the casting was even higher than that cast by the government.

But assembly line operations are indeed very efficient.

The Wu family directly introduced new craftsmanship in Luzon.

Make a wooden frame, put the tin money on it, apply fine charcoal dust on the surface, fill it with release agent, then put in sand to compact and smooth it, and turn the mold over...

I couldn't help but think of the scene I had seen before when old craftsmen melted cans and cast aluminum pots at the market. It was similar to this.

The new technology of the Luzon Mint was brought out by him. Of course, it was not researched by him, but the Shaozhou Money Supervisor was created from scratch. It was also established with the support of Wu Huaiyu. Now 90% of the coins of the Tang Dynasty are minted there in a year. copper coins,
Countless craftsmen and workers gathered together,
Wu Huaiyu invested money to set up a reward and proposed a new direction of money casting technology, allowing those craftsmen to conduct targeted research and brainstorm, and the effect was good.

After passing the quality inspection, these coins are then sent to be stringed into strings, one string for every hundred coins, and ten small strings for one large string.

After placing the upper and lower molds, insert a round rod as the casting port.
After making the mold, you need to prepare the materials, blast and melt them. After casting and cooling, you can get a money tree.

"Little Marquis, please see, any pot used to cast money and smelt copper is made of extremely fine soil and charcoal. There are ten liang of materials in the pot. The soil is seven and the charcoal is three. The charcoal ash is warm in nature and mixed with the soil to make it easy to change. . The jar is eight inches long and two inches in diameter. Each jar contains about ten kilograms of copper and lead. The copper is melted first, then the money is put in, the furnace fan is closed, and it is poured into the mold..."

The money must be broken off one by one from the money tree and then sent to be polished.

"These Kaiyuan Tongbao cast by us in Luzon are more exquisite and of better quality than those cast by imperial officials."

In the past, money casting mainly used clay molds, stone molds and copper molds to cast coins. However, the Wu family in Luzon used a new technology and adopted the mother-money recasting process. The Wu family used the official Kaiyuan coin as a sample coin and cast it into a tin mother coin. Then they used the tin mother coin as a model and used the sand foundry process to cast it on a large scale.

The windmill grinds, the waterwheel washes,
After passing through the windmill and waterwheel workshops, it is sent to the next workshop where it is wiped, ground and polished with rough bran chips and silk fabrics.
In the end, I got a piece of finished product money.
The money must also undergo final quality inspection to ensure that its texture, shape, text, and color all meet the standards of regularity, fineness, and beauty.

Because of the adoption of new technologies, efficiency is higher, costs are lower, and profits are naturally higher.

"Is there anything else you need help with at the foundry?"

"Yes, we are recruiting more and more workers now. Many workers have become skilled workers after training. Our production capacity has increased, but now we are running out of copper materials."

Because many processes at the Luzon Mint are assembly line operations and the processes are split up, there is no need for so many master craftsmen.

The conditions for recruiting workers in the foundry are quite good. After all, this is a place where money is made. The benefits are very good, so there is no need to worry about not being able to recruit people.

The main material that can be minted is copper.

This thing is a controlled thing in the Central Plains. If the Wu family can use some in the Central Plains, there will be no problem, but going to sea is more restricted.

At present, the Luzon foundry mainly receives copper materials mined locally, as well as copper materials supplied by the Wu family's fleet to Linyi, Goguryeo, Japan and other places for trade.

But it still cannot keep up with the increase in production capacity of the foundry.

The profit from minting is still quite large. Not to mention the business manager, Wu Huaiyu can't see him failing to pay. The simplest solution is to smuggle copper materials from the Central Plains. In recent years, the imperial court has relaxed its policy on mineral mining. In the past, when you mined things like gold, silver, copper, and iron, you would first take a physical lesson, and then buy them all. Whatever comes out must be sold to the imperial court, and the imperial court has the final say on the price.

Doing this will severely dampen the enthusiasm of the miners. If the court is more ruthless, then everyone can only drink some soup. If there is no strong backer, you will not be able to drink the soup in the end.

No one is stupid. If you can't eat meat, then who will work hard to mine.

A few years ago, Wu Huaiyu took the lead in advocating that minerals should be appropriately relaxed. After all, the development of a large country cannot be separated from various mineral resources, whether it is copper and lead for making money, or gold that can be directly used. Silver, as well as iron, which military industry and people's livelihood are inseparable from,

Government-run mineral mining alone is not enough.

Only when it is profitable for everyone will they invest in mining, and only when it is appropriate to benefit the people can everyone have meat to eat.

His proposal was quickly passed, mainly because in recent years many wealthy families have begun to engage in mining. Only Shaozhou's copper, lead and silver, and Guangzhou's iron smelting, I don't know how much they produce each year. profit.

Who is willing to let go.

Of course everyone hopes that the court can be more relaxed.

So there were new regulations later. The imperial court still had to collect physical mineral resources, but the rest was sold to the imperial court in half, that is, half must be sold to the imperial court, and the other half can be freely traded in the market.

Since free entry into the market means market-oriented prices, it is not the imperial court that has the final say, and metal minerals such as gold, silver, copper, and iron have a huge market demand.

Where there is demand, there will naturally be profits.

Now in the mainland of the Central Plains, although metals such as gold, silver, copper and iron are also controlled, it is still possible to operate within the regulations, but it is difficult to go overseas.

Of course, there are still people who do it, smuggling.

If you take risks, smuggling is highly profitable.

"I will consider this,"

Wu Huaiyu did not directly agree to the manager, because this matter was really big and he had to be careful.

In fact, the output of copper in ancient China has always been very low. Nowadays, the amount of coins minted in the Tang Dynasty has skyrocketed. It is not that copper output has skyrocketed after the relaxation of mining policies, but that the imperial court used the pig iron leaching method and used natural bile springs to process pig iron into copper. This thing can be said This is the key to increasing the mintage of Zhenguan copper coins tenfold.

Turning pig iron into copper sounds magical. In fact, it is not alchemy. It is just a technology discovered as early as the Han Dynasty. First, there must be a large enough natural bile spring, and second, there must be enough pig iron. , can enough copper be leached out.

In Chinese history, even in the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was always a serious shortage of copper mining. Basically, all dynasties had insufficient coinage and more or less money shortages. The copper material for minting coins in the Ming and Qing Dynasties mainly came from small towns. day.

Even starting from the Ming Dynasty, China used a large amount of silver as its main currency, and copper coins became auxiliary coins. However, there was actually less silver produced in China, but a large amount of silver flowed into the Ming Dynasty through sea trade, and it became a silver empire.

But later, a serious silver shortage occurred in the late Ming Dynasty, and Spanish treasure ships no longer transported large amounts of silver from the Americas to the Ming Dynasty. The silver shortage accelerated the pace of the Ming Dynasty's demise.

Luzon has a lot of copper resources. Like gold, it has a lot of resource reserves, but it is not easy to mine and production cannot increase too fast.

The copper mine resources in Xiaoli are very rich. If we can import more copper materials from Xiaoli, it will alleviate the urgent need.

Nowadays, Datang and Japan also have trade, but because they are separated by an ocean, the direct trade volume is not large. It is mainly merchants from Silla and Baekje who trade with them. Many Tang Dynasty goods change hands through Baekje and Silla.

Even Goguryeo merchants had to change hands.

Luzon now has direct routes to Liuqiu Island and Ludao Island, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to develop a route that passes through Liuqiu Island, Xiaoliuqiu Islands, and then to Xiaoriu Island.
As long as this new route is opened, the Wu family can develop maritime trade with Xiaoli.

Although the country is still relatively backward now, it has a large population and abundant resources. It is a very good trading target for cutting leeks.

After coming out of the mint, Wu Huaiyu went to the shipbuilding yard.
Luzon is a large island in the sea, so it must have its own shipbuilding industry.

"Alang,"

"Letter from Chang'an."

Wu Huaiyu took the letter and couldn't help but be a little surprised after taking a look at it.

The Chinese New Year is about to come, and the emperor summons Wu Huaiyu to come to Beijing for a meeting this year.

The letter was not written directly to him by the emperor, but from his wife Fan Xuanfu. Zhang Anan had visited the Wu family not long ago, saying he was going to see Xuanfu's newborn boy, but in fact he was conveying the emperor's intention to return to the capital.

Fan Xuanfu's letter also said that after he returned to Beijing, he would hold a hundred-day banquet for her fifth son, Chengxun, the 22nd eldest son in the family.

Xuan Fu also told him a happy event in the letter.

It was a great joy for the country and the family. Fan Xing defeated the Tubo in Songzhou and beheaded more than 5,000 people. The Tubo returned in defeat. The Tang army took advantage of the victory and pursued them all the way to Zishan. Along the way, they killed more than 8,000 people and captured cattle and horses. There are tens of thousands of miscellaneous animals.

Dangxiang, Bailan and other Qiang people all surrendered to the Tang Dynasty.

(End of this chapter)