Chapter 31: Treasures Hidden in the Mountains

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The government office is one of the most filthy places in the world. To a certain extent, brothels and brothels are cleaner than the government office. Just like the first impression of many ordinary people in the 21st century about the government compound, it is not that the people inside are working hard, but that the people inside are scheming and flattering the low.

The county government office of this era is no different from the government compound of the 21st century. None of the people inside are clean.

Take Lushan County as an example. When Yue Wenhai first took office, he fought with the then chief clerk and the registrar for a while. Relying on his position and skills, he finally flattened the entire county government office and was not placed in the main hall as a puppet. This is not only because Yue Wenhai is the county magistrate, but also because he is scheming and has means.

Without these, no matter how great Yue Wenhai was, he would still be manipulated by the chief clerk, the registrar and the yamen runners of the entire county government. He could only be a decoration who could not make decisions in Lushan County. Of course, Yue Wenhai's teachers also had corresponding standards.

Therefore, to be an official, one must not only be good at writing eight-part essays, but also be flexible and have a plan in mind.

This was the scene played out in the Lushan County government back then.

In a county government, from the county magistrate, to the chief clerk and the registrar, to the clerks, the head of the police and the ordinary yamen runners of the three classes and six rooms, everyone is part of the "power", and everyone is trying their best to grab more power. Until everything is settled, the entire county government will become very "harmonious".

Therefore, Lushan County is the place where Chen Ming really experienced himself. As long as he can get along well here, then Chen Ming can be familiar with the rules and regulations of the current world of the entire Qing Dynasty.

And the people in the county government, like the corrupt officials in the 21st century, will be wronged if they are all killed, and some individuals are not guilty of death [but they are not innocent]; if you kill one by one, there will definitely be fish that slip through the net.

There, the county magistrate fights openly and secretly with the petty officials below, and the intrigues among the petty officials in the three classes and six rooms. Even the most innocent child will become gray and gloomy within a year. You have to compromise with the environment under the big environment!

Want to be alone? Haha, being arrogant is the choice of the strong. Little yamen runner, what right do you have to say "no"? You can't do anything. If you don't want to die, and don't want to be driven out of the yamen like a dog, the only way is to be in the dust, go with the flow, and blend in.

The patriarch of a powerful family never needs a gentleman.

The Chen family was born as a yamen runner, and was engaged in the smuggling and selling of salt and iron. If a gentleman really took charge of the family, I am afraid that it would take only a few years for the Chen family to go to hell.

Since they were evil from the bottom of their hearts, it would be a joke to think about whitewashing it? Of course, Chen Ming would never have thought that because the Chen family made a fortune by selling private salt and iron materials and the main branch was a hereditary soap family, in the era of the rise of the Internet more than 200 years later, countless keyboard angry youths in Europe sprayed it as a "greedy and despicable smuggler family, whose social status can only be ranked with prostitutes and beggars."

Xiaonan Mountain is seventy miles to the west.

Among the green mountains and clear waters, on a mountaintop that is not too high, but with cliffs on both sides, a well-maintained mountain village is crowded with people. Chen Ming happily patted the iron cannon next to him that was still emitting thick smoke, and looked expectantly at the foot of the mountain ahead.

This is the small cannon that the Chen family has just cast. It uses the iron mold casting method that is absolutely unique in the world at that time. Compared with the traditional mud mold, the advantages of the iron mold are self-evident [in many novels, the iron mold casting method is a magical tool]. But this does not mean that it is really that magical.

The disadvantage of the iron mold is that from the perspective of metal casting and metallography, the heat dissipation of the iron mold is too fast, which makes the pig iron liquid have a large degree of supercooling when cooling. The cementite in the iron liquid has no time to precipitate (graphitization has no time to proceed) and the graphite has solidified. Therefore, the cementite in the iron mainly exists in the form of iron carbide, that is, white cast iron. Of course, due to the large degree of supercooling of the iron liquid during the solidification process, the metal crystal particles on the surface are relatively dense and the barrel is relatively smooth;

But compared with the Western iron cannons mainly made of gray cast iron, it really does not have an advantage.

The only advantage of the iron mold is that it speeds up the production rate, and there is no need to wait for several months like the mud mold casting cannon. However, the iron mold cast cannon is very white. Due to the fast cooling speed, although it is relatively smooth, it is almost entirely white iron, which increases the brittleness of the cannon and reduces the performance of the cannon. In order to increase the tensile strength, the only way is to pile up the quality with quantity, that is, to increase the wall thickness.

The current two-pound cannon, in terms of the weight of the shell, can be said to be at the same level as the three-pound cannon in the West. The weight of the cannon alone has reached 220 jin [clear jin], which is close to 270 jin in terms of market jin. I don't know how much heavier it is than the three-pound cannon in the West.

Chen Ming is very clear about the defects of this iron cannon, but he has no way to improve it. With his level, it's okay to read it by heart, but it's better to forget about it. With the current conditions of the Chen family, the internal mold water cooling technology cannot be fully mastered. The only thing Chen Ming can use is pig iron refining.

This is the way the British make iron cannons.

First, pig iron is smelted in a blast furnace and cooled into white iron ingots. Since there are many impurities in iron smelting, the iron ingots must be smashed and put into a reverberatory furnace for refining (without stirring, otherwise the pig iron will be decarbonized. Without hot blast technology, the furnace temperature cannot reach the melting point of wrought iron, 1538 degrees, and wrought iron with a gelatinous substance will be produced). After melting, the surface slag is removed, so that the iron liquid after the second smelting is purer. In addition, the British iron cannons use iron, and their pig iron must be smelted with charcoal to reduce the addition of impurities such as sulfur and phosphorus (the British iron for casting cannons must be charcoal iron, the cost is high, and domestic forests are almost cut down), or the iron ore itself contains almost no sulfur and phosphorus (such as Sweden's high-quality iron ore), which is difficult for the Chen family to achieve completely now. Although there is no shortage of wood in Funiu Mountain, the Chen family opened private mines and built stockades in the mountains, and also cut down a lot of wood. In addition to building stockades and houses, most of the remaining logs are used for charcoal burning. How much material can be used in the mine?

Anyway, Chen Ming tried his best to provide the best conditions for the bell-casting craftsmen. The two-jin cannon was still heavy, which made him frown. Fortunately, he was very satisfied with the range. The point of the last cannon was estimated to be one mile away.

In this uninhabited Funiu Mountain, the Chen family began to transfer people to the mountains little by little since last winter, including singles and families. The two private mines of the Chen family originally had only 300 workers, but now they are close to 1,000. Excluding the two or three hundred women and children, the number of workers has more than doubled. Moreover, the Chen family also selected people from them to organize a 200-man mining protection team.