People in the Three Kingdoms: Starting from Preaching

Chapter 126 Steel
No one expected that in the end, the Yellow Turbans would become the final winners in the chaotic situation in Youzhou.

After the great battle, the officers and soldiers were severely injured, and it was unknown how much time it would take Gongsun Zan to regroup.

For him, the most painful thing about a defeat is the blow to his own prestige. Once local tyrants question his ability, it will not be easy for him to gain enough support later.

As for Zhang Chun and Wuhuan, if the Yellow Turbans had not interfered, they would have already broken through the obstruction of the government soldiers and started looting in You, Ji and Qingzhou.

However, the hateful Guangtou Xu's move disrupted their plan, and they could only run back to the frontier in shame.

Now Zhang Chun, with more than 10,000 remnant soldiers, had a hard time protecting himself and dared not return to Youbeiping. In the end, he could only flee to Liaoxi with the Wuhuan people and hide there, not daring to even look at the Yellow Turbans again.

Xu Chen was also frank and straightforward. With a wave of his hand, he ordered Wang Dang to lead his troops eastward to occupy the vacant land of Youbeiping.

The Yellow Turbans occupied the new territory and still used the same strategy of fighting the powerful and dividing the land, and established effective governance in a very short time. The bad news was that due to a round of destruction by the Wuhuan people, the most important spring plowing season in Youbeiping had been missed, and local agricultural production was severely damaged.

But even so, the labor force could not sit idle. Taking advantage of this time, Xu Chen immediately launched a large-scale production campaign.

Whether in Yuyang or Youbeiping, each village started a vigorous movement to reclaim wasteland, build canals and water wheels, and so on. These reclaimed wasteland were eventually distributed according to households, which greatly increased the enthusiasm of farmers.

The level of land development during the Han Dynasty was actually not high. Whether now or for a considerable period of time in the future, Xu Chen does not have to worry too much about the problem of too many people and too little land. The land in this era still has great development potential.

And another reality, although a bit cruel, is also a huge factor in alleviating food pressure, that is, population reduction.

With fewer people, there seems to be more land.

If Xu Chen can eventually complete a round of reshuffle of the existing land, the production enthusiasm of the entire peasant group will be unprecedentedly mobilized. As long as there is enough newly developed land, food production will be able to meet population growth.

As for the long-term future, Xu Chen is not worried about whether the population may grow to the point where the land can no longer support it.

Exploring new continents, technological development, and industrial production are all answers to this problem.

As long as unification is achieved, the ideological liberation of the entire civilization is realized, and the scientific foundation is laid, it will only take a century for the land conflicts to be quietly replaced under the huge wave of industry, and what will emerge at that time will be another form of annexation.

The mass production movement over the past few months has confirmed Xu Chen's idea. With the reclamation of land, Yuyang Youbeiping has begun to suffer from population shortage.

Originally, a large amount of land belonging to wealthy and powerful families was divided up, which made the farmers' fields surplus. Now there are a lot of new lands being reclaimed, and the increasing amount of fields has made it difficult for them to take care of them.

Even so, it is still a long way from the limit of land development.

Xu Chen needs population, the more the better. He not only needs population for agricultural production, but also population for handicraft workshop production.

Due to the huge military demand, Yuyangguang now has more than ten iron smelting and coal smelting factories and mines, and there are already four to five hundred people working directly in these factories.

These people have completely separated themselves from agricultural production and are fully employed by the Yellow Turbans in centralized industrial production in handicraft workshops. They can be considered workers in the true sense of the word.

Today, whether it is the weapons and equipment needed by the Yellow Turbans or the metal farm tools and daily necessities needed by the people, they all come from the efficient production of these coal and iron factories.

After a year, Xu Chen's education of the first batch of craftsmen has begun to show results.

"Master, our factory now produces about 200 kilograms of iron per day per furnace. In total, we have opened six furnaces in factories across Yuyang. We plan to open four new furnaces before the end of the year. By then, the total iron production will be 2,000 kilograms per day, which should be enough to meet the needs of the military and civilians in Yuyang and Youbeiping."

In the stuffy workshop, Xu Chen was followed by a large group of people. These people were the craftsmen from the Engineering Institute that he had trained in the past year.

When there is no war, the top priority of construction and development is industrial and agricultural production. Agricultural reclamation is in full swing, but Xu Chen will not relax on the industrial side and will go to various factories to inspect the production situation.

The inspection is also to test the work results of the Institute of Engineering, and these core craftsmen will inevitably follow Xu Chen at this time.

The person who was explaining was a middle-aged man with dark skin. His name was Ma Tie. He was originally an ordinary blacksmith in Yuyang. After being summoned to the Institute of Engineering, he successfully stood out from a group of craftsmen with his satisfactory results and several technological breakthroughs.

There are only a few craftsmen in the first batch of the Engineering Institute who have been promoted to higher grades. Ma Tie is one of them. He has made great contributions to the improvement of iron smelting efficiency. Xu Chen looked forward and saw that the workers were busy with their own work. Some were pushing and pulling the bellows beside the furnace, while others were adding ore and chalk to the furnace. The holes under the furnace were constantly flowing with molten iron, which eventually filled up the small channels formed by the wrought iron bars below.

Whenever one furnace is filled, the craftsman next to it will immediately replace it with another wrought iron bar to receive the molten iron. This cycle repeats endlessly, with iron being produced all the time. Such a furnace can produce about 200 kilograms of iron a day.

The iron produced will finally be heated and hammered by the blacksmith according to the demand for iron parts, either under the hydraulic forging machine next to it or on the workbench himself. Finally, it will undergo a series of quenching processes to form iron parts, or steel parts, of different shapes.

Seeing this production scene in front of him, Xu Chen felt very at ease.

He knew that the flowing molten iron would eventually become armor and weapons for the soldiers, farm tools and iron plows for the people, and that the clay pots and clay stoves used in daily life could also be turned into iron pots and iron stoves.

Such a furnace produces nearly 200 kilograms a day, which is certainly not worth mentioning compared with later generations, but in the Eastern Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period, it was already an incredible efficiency.

Iron smelting technology had begun to develop rapidly in the Han Dynasty, but this seemingly not very advanced iron smelting factory actually had many techniques that were far ahead of their time.

For example, the piston bellows is a technology that only appeared in the Ming Dynasty. The coke fuel obtained by traditional methods also only appeared in the Song and Ming Dynasties.

Not to mention the steel-making method of pouring molten pig iron into wrought iron, which is much more efficient than the steel-making method of hammering out steel hundreds of times with a hammer in the Han Dynasty. Today, the production efficiency and quality of this iron smelting workshop are achievements that crush the times, and there is still much room for improvement.

"Not to mention the four new furnaces added before the New Year, the existing six furnaces alone should produce 220,000 kilograms of iron in half a year. This can almost meet the armor and weapons needs of 10,000 people."

Xu Chen made a brief calculation in his mind and came up with the result. On average, each soldier would need to use about 21 kilograms of iron.

Twenty-one pounds is definitely not enough to build a full set of equipment from weapons to armor, but the Yellow Turbans now have two thousand sets of heavy armor for the vanguard battalion, which means that there is actually only a demand for eight thousand sets of weapons and armor. This calculation is almost enough.

Not to mention that there are plans to add more furnaces before the New Year, so the output will be more than enough.

Of course, having said that, Xu Chen would not really use all of his output to make weapons and armor. Agricultural production also requires a large amount of iron tools. Only when the people have more iron plows and iron farm tools can the efficiency of agricultural production be improved. Only through intensive farming can more grain be output.

After these iron parts were produced, they were almost equally distributed between military and agricultural use.

After Xu Chen said this, many craftsmen laughed. They were all proud to have made achievements for the Yellow Turbans.

Afterwards, Xu Chen walked into the finished product warehouse of the factory. It was divided into different areas, some of which were filled with iron plows, some with spears and armor.

He looked around briefly, picked up a ring-handled sword from a place at random with his left hand, and stretched out his right hand to his side. Ma Tie next to him very sensibly handed him a caliper.

Xu Chen measured the thickness and width of the ring-handled sword in his hand, then took out another one from somewhere else, measured it again, and nodded with satisfaction.

Seeing this, Ma Tie breathed a sigh of relief, then laughed: "Master, don't worry, our production process is a division of labor and cooperation. The workers may not be able to skillfully make the entire product, but the control of each process is very strict, and we have quality inspection procedures at every link, so there will definitely be no problems with quality and standards."

Xu Chen nodded. Thanks to his indoctrination-style education, standardization had been engraved into the bones of these craftsmen in the Engineering Institute, and this ultimately achieved the result he wanted.

When the quality of the final product became stable and controllable, Xu Chen began to consider longer-term issues.

He tapped the blade of the ring-handled sword with his fingers, and a crisp golden sound echoed out.

He turned his head and looked at Ma Tie: "It's great that you can efficiently produce steel parts, but I still hope that you can produce higher quality steel. If this kind of steel is cast into a cylinder, it needs to be able to withstand extremely strong pressure, and it needs to withstand this pressure continuously for a long time without deforming or bursting."

"This..." Ma Tie was stunned for a moment, and then a look of embarrassment appeared on his face: "Master, it is possible to develop new steel, but without clear standards and specific requirements, how can I know what is considered qualified? What is this steel cylinder you are talking about used for?"

Xu Chen smiled and said, "I am interested in developing a cannon. This thing is in the shape of a cylinder, and the bottom can be filled with gunpowder. The gunpowder is ignited and exploded to generate strong pressure, which pushes the shells to fire long distances."

Ma Tie remained silent upon hearing this, obviously not quite understanding what Xu Chen was talking about.

Xu Chen just smiled and said, "This is not a one-time achievement. You don't have to be the main person in charge. You can just do research on the side."

(End of this chapter)