Lin Gao Qiming

Chapter 265

Wen Tong set his foothold in Xu Wen.Qiwei had already received a letter from Guo Dongzhu, asking him to entertain this "Wen Treasurer".Because I heard that shopkeeper Wen didn't like the noisy city, Qiwei's Leizhou Branch built a new house in a sugar cane farm outside Xuwen County. It was tidied up inside and out, and even the furniture was newly made.Originally, I planned to find a few servants to take care of them, but Guangzhou has already prepared them, and they will all be delivered by mule carts.The head of the troubled score is very tongue-in-cheek-the behavior of these big shopkeepers is really extravagant.

Wen Tong brought people to live in this sugarcane farm, which is just a more elegant farmyard.In addition to the house, there is also a huge yard, which is specially used to stack the harvested sugar cane.Tutangliao is just outside the village wall: it is another building that raises several cows.

After resting overnight, Wen Tong inspected the property.Originally, the author thought that such a Zhuangzi should have stewards and craftsmen, but when I asked about it, there was no such person.This Zhuangzi Liantang Liao is the private property of a certain farmer. Planting, juicing, and sugar making are all done by this family. After buying it, no one will handle it.

Wentong felt a little bit tricky. There were no locals, so he had a dark eye on the local situation. Besides, the sugarcane industry is typically labor-intensive, and a large amount of manpower is required during the harvest season.Another time and space is easy, the sugarcane farmers deliver the goods to their door, and the sugar factories only need to weigh and buy them.Now he still has his own land, and the sugar cane has not been harvested yet, so he needs to find short-term labor to organize harvesting, cleaning, and binding.This matter needs to be settled by a professional landlord or long-term foreman. I am just the director of a sugar factory, how should I deal with it?

Looking at the few people from Weiwei Escort around him, they are all staring at each other, obviously they are all laymen.Chang Shide saw his face full of embarrassment, and asked, "Is it difficult?"

"With no help from the locals, my eyes are dark." Wen Tong sighed, and called Zhou Shizhai's young apprentice, Li Biaodi, who had already learned fluent Mandarin in Lingao.

"Go to Zhuangzi and ask around. Are there any sugarcane farmers nearby who send sugar cane for processing? If there are any, please come to Zhuangzi. I have something to ask."

"Okay, let's go."

Looking through the land deed, the entire sugarcane field owned by Zhuangzi is equivalent to only one hundred acres in modern mu. This scale can be said to be pitifully small, and Wen Tong went to see Tangliao again.

Wen Tong visited the Tutangliao on the Leizhou Peninsula in the past, and he knew that the sugar production process here is "pulling cane with a stone reel, boiling sugar in a pot and stove, and separating honey with pottery". Although it is very backward by today's standards, it was also More advanced technology.

The entire sugar house occupies a large area and is used to stack sugar cane and bagasse to be processed. The main buildings are a conical shed and a large thatched house.The whole structure can be said to be rudimentary, not to mention bricks and tiles, not even wood.Is the so-called "Grass Watts Wall".

The bottom of the thatched house is about [-] feet, and the height is about [-] feet. The interior is supported by hemp bamboo, and the roof is made of thatch, straw, or sugarcane leaves. It is a place for pressing sugarcane.Kong Ming Ding is arranged in the sugar cooking house, which is the place where sugar is boiled.There are all kinds of equipment listed inside, nothing more than wooden reels, cauldrons, stoves, earthen jars, etc.

Because it has not been used for several months, it is full of dust, the ground is muddy, and there are all kinds of garbage such as sugarcane leaves, sugarcane skins, cow dung, firewood, etc. The house is leaking everywhere, and rat droppings can be seen everywhere. There are even pots for boiling sugar.

Wen Tong knows that even in a modern sugar factory, the environment cannot be said to be clean, but the current situation is too bleak.It seems that starting a business is really difficult.

Seeing shopkeeper Wen's frown, the accompanying people knew that he was dissatisfied, but they couldn't understand: the Tangliao in all counties of Leizhou Prefecture are similar, so what makes him unhappy?

Walking out of the sugar mill, I found a clean stone outside the courtyard and was about to sit down when I saw a young man in a green coat and cap jumping out beside him, took a high chair, quickly opened it and stuffed it under his buttocks:

"Sir, please sit down." The young man lowered his head and said softly.

Wen Tong was taken aback. Locals who could speak Mandarin were rare: "Who are you?"

Liao Dahua, the shopkeeper of the semicolon, who was acting up here, hurried over to report: "This is the one specially sent by Dongzhu Guo from Guangzhou to serve the shopkeeper. It's called Wenxiu."

"Wenxiu? Such a girly name." Wen Tong commented casually.

The boy servant immediately blushed and dropped his hands in silence.

"This is a hypocrite." Chang Shide took a look. This man looked about sixteen or seventeen years old, with fair skin, red lips and white teeth, delicate eyebrows, and a bit of a woman's appearance.But the hat on his head is quite strange, like a small melon skin hat, but much larger in size-could the Jianlu fashion have been spread here?

"What kind of hat is this?"

"This is the six-in-one unified hat." Liao Dahua hurriedly explained, "It was made by the Taizu of this dynasty—"

"What? The melon cap was invented by Zhu Yuanzhang?" Chang Shide muttered, this was too unexpected for him, he always thought that this kind of clothing that perfectly matches the pig's tail was a pioneering work of my Qing Dynasty.

Liao Dahua and Wenxiu, who could understand Mandarin, were eclipsed by seeing him blatantly calling Taizu's name, Liao Dahua hurriedly said: "Master Chang, be careful! Be careful, this is the name of Taizu in this dynasty, it should not be pronounced like this ——"

"It is said that it is, and I don't know the details. Yu Eshui said it." Wen Tong said, and suddenly found something, "Why don't you move a chair for Master Chang?"

In order to be easy to call outside, Chang Shide's name is Wen Tong's master.Lest the mind be too big to confuse the natives.

"Master Chang's chair, Wenqing has moved it. I'll go and have a look." Wenxiu was a little too lazy to bother with this big black guy with a black face and a slight beard—in his opinion, this big black guy was probably Wen Tongdai In this time and space, people like the foreman who came here, with dark skin, are often regarded as inferior people. Chang Shide has been taught many times in Lingao.

After a while, I saw Wenxiu and another young man come out. Besides moving a pier, they also brought a tray with two cups of tea on it.

Chang Shide sat down comfortably, took another sip of tea comfortably, and suddenly said to Wen Tong: "It seems better to come out, this corruption! I wonder if there are any maids?" He looked around while talking.

"Returning to Master, there are no maids, only two maids are invited to cook and do laundry." Wen Qing replied respectfully.

"Xiao Guo really doesn't know how to do things, how can he do without a maid—" As he was talking, he suddenly noticed that the two boy servants were covering their mouths and snickering, realizing that his words were not careful enough, and his image was greatly damaged.

Wen Tong didn't have his thoughts, and took care of Liao Dahua, asking him to send someone out to find people who used to work in this sugar house. If they are willing to come back and continue to work, they can come back-the wages are favorable.Liao Dahua agreed and ordered people to go out and look for it.

Two groups of people went out, during which Wen Tong and Chang Shide sat face to face under the clear sky in the 17th century, smelling the smell of rotten cow dung, sugar cane and sugar sent by Weifeng, drinking tea, surrounded by more than a dozen people , one by one stood breathlessly.The quarrel made the two of them a little uncomfortable, but finally persuaded Liao Dahua to sit down as well, while the others remained standing.

"I was originally asked to go on a business trip, and I was a little scared." Chang Shide's eyes were shining brightly, "I wanted to stay in Lingao for safety, but I didn't expect to act like a big landlord after I came out. If I knew it, I should have applied for a job as a landlord." Intelligence agents or something. That kid Guo Yi, probably the little wife has been flattered, at least he has four or five housekeepers!"

"You just have to ask for something." Wen Tong was not interested in this topic: he was worried about his own worries.

An hour later, both groups came.Three workers from the sugar house came. Wen Tong found out through an interpreter that none of these three workers were skilled workers. , fire, handyman.The farmers who originally grew sugar cane boiled sugar and squeezed cane by themselves.

"The master wants to make sugar, so he has to hire a good sugar cooker to take the lead." The person in charge of lighting the fire reported, "Otherwise, it's hard to control the temperature of the fire, and you can't eat it with ashes, and the amount of sugar produced will make a big difference."

Wen Tong nodded and asked them what the whole production process was like?Can you show it live?Those who burn the fire say that the performance can be done, but they are not sugar cookers, and the sugar they produce may not be usable.

"Tell them to just do it," Wen Tong told the translator, "Don't worry about whether the sugar is good or bad."

At that moment, the three of them murmured for a while, then started to move, and invited two bodyguards to help them, brought a cow from the cowshed, and brought a few bundles of sugar cane.Liao Dahua knew that shopkeeper Wen thought the Tutang Liao was not clean, so he hurriedly led his staff to clean up the whole Tutang Liao and cleaned the utensils.That's when I started making sugar.

The workers first clean the sugarcane, bundle it into a load and place it next to the wooden roller, which is made of lychee wood and is extremely hard.One person puts the cane into the reel, and the other drives the oxen to drive the reel to rotate. The first reel is pulled first, and the second reel is driven by the wooden teeth.The wooden reels squeeze each other, and the cane juice is squeezed out three times in a row.

During the third squeeze, the worker has to adjust the reel inwards and clamp it tighter to make the bagasse drier.The squeezed cane juice flows down the base groove along the reel, and flows into the large tile vat through the bamboo tube to settle.

Wen Tong looked at it very carefully. The squeezing force of this wooden press reel seemed to be very strong, but in fact it was not as good as the Qing Dynasty press reel he saw later. At least it was made of stone, and its hardness was much higher.He twisted the bagasse with his hands—there was still quite a lot of juice left in the bagasse after three squeezes.

After pressing like this for about four to ten minutes, the buffaloes used to pull the rollers were already sweating and their pace slowed down.It seems that the energy consumption is very large, and the workers began to change cattle. Wen Tong asked, and each time they crushed, they had to squeeze four bundles of sugarcane.It takes 10 to 35 times a day and night to change cattle.No wonder this sugar house had to raise as many as four or five cows.

He had someone weigh the weight of each bundle of sugar cane, and then he did some calculations in his heart. This kind of processing method, the non-stop processing of the whole day and night only processed nearly 2000 kilograms.Moreover, according to the workers, sometimes the wooden press reels are often damaged and have to be shut down for repairs.Quite a lot of wasted time.

"Is there any stone for the reel?" Wen Tong asked.

The workers all said that they had never seen it before. There are not fifty or thirty local sugar houses, and they have never heard of it being made of stone.

Wen Tong nodded. It seems that this technological improvement appeared in the Qing Dynasty. The stone press reel can process 2500 kilograms per day and night, and the efficiency improvement is much greater.

The squeezed sugarcane juice, after preliminary precipitation, skimmed off the fragments of grass stems and the like on it, and then poured it into a large iron pot to boil. The three large pots were arranged in the shape of a character. Does this arrangement have any positive significance on the production process or efficiency? The only thing that comes to mind is that this method can concentrate heat?

The sugarcane juice was boiled to a slurry, and when it was about to boil, the worker who was originally burning the fire began to use a large spoon to remove the foam and debris on it, and then wrapped some lime with sugarcane leaves from the lime bag Come here and sprinkle it in.

"Lime?" Chang Shide was quite surprised.

"It is used to clarify the sugar solution." Wen Tong explained that in order to remove the mixture in the cane juice and obtain cleaner crystals, an important process is to add clarifier after filtering to remove incompatible substances, which is commonly used in modern sugar factories. Lime is included in the clarifying agent, and it was also the case in ancient times. Lime is much easier to obtain than other clarifying agents such as sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and superphosphate.In some places, plant ash is used to make soil sugar, and the effect is similar.

"But wouldn't the lime just dissolve into the sugar water? So all white sugar contains lime?"

"No, it's actually neutralized and decomposed with various impurities in the sugarcane juice—" Wen Tong explained tirelessly, "Whether it's white sugar or brown sugar, there is no lime in it."

"I'm relieved of that."

At this time, the sugarcane juice had turned yellow, and several workers worked together to pour the sugarcane liquid in the pot into the second pot, slowly evaporate the water in it, and repeat the process in the first pot at the same time.

Wait until then move the cane juice with higher sugar content to the third pot and add some oil.Wen Tong asked, "What do you add?"

The worker hurriedly replied: "It's peanut oil."

"Peanut oil?" Wen Tong wondered. He remembered that it was said in the sugar industry books that the decolorization process was first added to milk. The method used by the Chinese is the egg white of chicken and duck eggs. The principle of action is to use protein to remove impurities in it. Does oil count as protein? ?

Puzzled and puzzled, he decided to continue reading. The cane juice was boiled into a thin paste, then taken out and poured into "waliu". , about 1 foot high, with a small hole at the bottom tip, plugged with grass, placed on a large tile vat, and allowed to slowly crystallize.The sugar solution containing a lot of impurities will slowly flow out along the thatch from the small holes below, and finally only pure crystal sugar remains in the "waliu".Wen Tong asked and found out that one tile can produce 10 kilograms of brown sugar.

(End of this chapter)