New Shun 1730

After linking the development of well salt with the country and the people, and being loyal to the emperor and protecting the country, it can be regarded as adding a layer of protection to this development model.

After adding this layer of protection, it was decided that the official share offering would be held on the first day of next month, and the people from the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce also hurried to get busy.

Before the end of the month, including the prefectural governor Niu Congyun, the defense envoy Ma Haochuan and others, together with businessmen from Shaanxi and Sichuan who were interested in investing, went north along the Xiqin Guild Hall to visit a salt well that had decided to invest.

A well that was initially modernized by the people from the Academy of Sciences.

This well is very legendary. Even without the use of steam engines, it is still a legend here.

Or it can be said that it is the root of attracting a large amount of capital from Shaanxi and Sichuan here.

This well is seven or eight miles north of the Xiqin Guild Hall. From a distance, you can see the overhead crane, which is nearly seven or eight stories high, standing high on the wellhead, which is the original crane.

When you get close, you will see dense bamboo pipes arranged in batches, and various barrels for turning and diverting are placed every ten meters.

The excavation of this well is quite legendary.

The owner is a brother who made his first fortune by smuggling salt to Hubei.

How should I put it? Basically, the first pot of gold is not clean from a legal point of view, even if it is the Dashun Law of the feudal dynasty.

But under Liu Yu's idea of ​​"transforming smugglers into businessmen", it is easy for smugglers in Jiangnan and Sichuan to clean up their crimes.

The brothers made their first pot of gold by smuggling Sichuan salt in Hubei, so they thought it would be better to do a one-stop production and sales.

They simply bet all their wealth, dig a well, and produce salt by themselves, wouldn't it be wonderful?

Then it took several years to dig this well, and now it is calculated that the well is more than 300 feet deep, which is more than 1,000 meters deep in later generations.

It was said before that the deeper the well is dug, the better the brine. But it is just a rumor, and it is hard to say whether it is true or not.

Well digging is actually similar to playing poker.

For example, if you have dug 500 to 600 meters and still haven't found any brine, and you have already invested tens of thousands of taels, should you "follow" or "not follow"?

If you follow, you will get rich if you bet right.

If you don't follow, all the previous money will go down the drain.

And how much heart and courage do you need to follow, and how much do you bet?

The earth is tens of thousands of miles deep, and this thing has no end.

The two brothers made up their minds and thought that they had already dug nearly 200 meters. If they withdrew at this time, they would lose everything.

They gritted their teeth and stamped their feet, bet all their belongings, and continued to dig.

Another 300 meters.

However, there will be a day when the financial resources will collapse. Even in the future, with such advanced machines, ordinary people can't afford to dig a thousand-meter well.

In the end, the two brothers have actually collapsed.

Determined to break up, they are not destined to get rich, so they might as well go smuggling.

As luck would have it, the workers were about to leave, so one person was left to keep watch. After all, there were still some equipment and other things, and if there was no watchman, they were afraid that they would be stolen.

The watchman had a friend who came to see him that day and said that he got a box of cigarettes that were said to be military cigarettes. It was said that they were military supplies that were resold during the war in western Sichuan. Out of curiosity, he lit a cigarette to taste the smell of the military supplies, and then suddenly, a fire came out of the well.

The watchman immediately understood that the well was going to be drilled through, and quickly told the two brothers who were about to go bankrupt.

The brothers sold their last property and made a last attempt, but they were really just a few feet away.

The brothers were lucky to get through these few feet.

Because, when the well was drilled through, the brine gushed out directly, more than two feet high.

This well not only has gas, but it is also a brine self-flowing well.

The well has been drilled like this, can there be a lack of subsequent capital? Is it possible to not borrow money?

Before, when we couldn't dig out brine, all relatives and friends hid away. What's the point of borrowing money and paying it back? It's a bottomless pit.

Now it's self-spraying, and all relatives and friends have appeared. There's no doubt about borrowing money. Just tell me how much you want to borrow.

It's very simple to separate brine and natural gas.

To build a brine pipeline, there is ready-made technology and ready-made excellent pipes - Sichuan bamboo.

To build a natural gas pipeline, there is even more ready-made technology and ready-made pipes.

At this time, there was no concept of natural gas volume. It was known that the natural gas spewed out from this well could supply nearly a hundred pots of salt boiling at the same time.

At the beginning, the brine spewed out more than 100,000 stones every day due to the huge underground pressure.

Basically, it's almost the same as a money printing machine.

A few thousand taels of silver a day, 200,000 to 300,000 taels a year, and this is the profit after the transformation and no longer smuggling.

However, the self-spraying did not last long. After the pressure was released, it still relied on cattle to pull.

But it was enough to spray for a while, and all the previous investment was returned.

It took 90,000 taels of silver to dig a well, and then another 30,000 to 50,000 taels to buy pipes, hire workers, etc.

It was equivalent to an investment of 120,000 taels. In the first year, it made 240,000 taels. In the future, it can make about 180,000 taels every year, with an average annual return rate of nearly 150%.

The news naturally attracted a lot of capital to come here to dig wells.

In Dashun, a 20% return rate is a threshold. If it is lower than this, capital will not invest a penny, it is better to buy land and collect rent. Liu Yu has been working in Songjiang Prefecture for so long, using both soft and hard methods, and has only managed to reduce the threshold to 15% in Songjiang Prefecture. If you want to reduce it further, you can only go up the mountain and raise the flag to equalize the land.

Although the rent has not dropped here, it is still 150%. No matter where it is, capital will definitely invest.

This led to two things later.

One is the huge contradiction between capital and landlords.

The rent soared.

Originally a place that was not worth much, now there is no way to talk without a deposit of several thousand taels of silver, and the salt production in the future will basically be divided into 50-50. The contract is signed for a maximum of 20 years. Only a fool would sell the land.

The relationship between landlords and capitalists here is different from that between landlords and tenants. Landlords are not easy to go bankrupt, and they also have capital turnover. Who has nothing to do to sell land? Isn't that a prodigal son? Buying land from landlords is much more expensive than buying land from small farmers who are half self-cultivated and half tenanted. Even if it is not salt well land, it is the same for ordinary cultivated land, not to mention this is a salt well field.

Another reason is the location here, and the previous development of Guizhou's transportation by Dashun's casting of coins and transporting copper, which made it easy for the court to decide that Sichuan salt would enter Guizhou and Sichuan salt would enter Chu in the future.

This proves that there is indeed enough salt here to support the demand for Sichuan salt to enter Guizhou and Chu.

If there was no well, who would have thought that as long as you are brave enough, the output of drilling a thousand-meter well would be so high?

Of course, this also means that the salt well has become a model of Dashun's "capital-intensive" industry.

Even if small handicraftsmen and ordinary people sell their wives and children, can they get a fraction of the money to dig a thousand-meter well?

And the high price of deep well drilling can only be afforded by the Shaanxi capital group that made a fortune in the Northwest War and was driven away after losing the competition in Lianghuai.

The owner of this well, or the owner of the model well that Xuzhou Prefecture attracted capital, has known the people on the Academy of Sciences for a long time.

Because when Liu Yu came back from Europe by land, he considered developing a simple oil field to rub kerosene in the future in Tianbao Prefecture.

This thousand-meter-deep well is a model to learn from.

Therefore, the Academy of Sciences has sent people here to learn well-drilling technology, and the owner of the well is also happy to interact with Liu Yu because of his previous identity as a private salt dealer, hoping to get close to him and clear his criminal record in the future.

This is also the first batch of salt wells that the Academy of Sciences has tried to transform. The direction of transformation is still very simple, because there are not many technologies that can be applied, and the main focus is on extracting brine.

As for the slightly more complicated ones, such as natural gas pipelines... To be honest, the current technology of the Academy of Sciences is far inferior to natural bamboo.

There is no danger in using natural bamboo to transport natural gas; and the current technology of the Academy of Sciences is to make the pipeline with artificial mechanical beauty as seamless as bamboo, and the cost is skyrocketing.

From a historical perspective, this salt well is very absurd.

The chimneys and boiler rooms with black smoke, the roar of the steam engine, and the pulling of the rope.

It looks romantic.

The symbol of the new era.

In addition, the remaining technologies would not feel out of place if they were thrown into the Qin and Han dynasties or even the pre-Qin period.

It seems that two thousand years of history have merged into one at this moment.

Why do you need a high-end one-way valve for the brine bucket? Just use some quick-cooked cowhide, half-paste it, and when it sinks, the pressure of the water will push the cowhide inwards to fill the brine; when it is pulled up, the gravity of the brine will naturally press the cowhide down tightly, without any leakage.

This is the technology used by Li Bing when he was the governor of Dujiangyan.

There is no difference between the cowhide two thousand years ago and the cowhide now.

And now, the Academy of Sciences has no technology that is more convenient, more effective, and cheaper than this.

The mortise and tenon structure overhead crane is more than 20 meters high, without a single nail, and is all mortise and tenon structure.

There is a fixed pulley that changes direction but does not save effort on it, allowing the rope to extend downward from the fixed pulley to lift the brine.

The Academy of Sciences cannot make a low-cost pure steel structure overhead crane derrick now. This wooden mortise and tenon structure, which looks incompatible with steam engines, is the best solution now.

The brine collected from the well is gathered in the brine pool, and then transmitted to different places through bamboo tubes with bamboo joints in the brine pool.

The natural gas from this well cannot meet the needs of boiling all the brine. The excess brine must be transmitted along the bamboo tube to the coal-fired salt-boiling room below.

Bamboo is straight.

What if you want to make these pipes turn?

What kind of golan or universal valve is needed.

Get a big pottery jar and dig a few holes.

The hole for brine in is on the top and the hole for brine out is on the bottom. Connect the bamboo, which direction can't go? As long as the radius is larger, only consider the plane and not the height, you can even turn around and go back to the starting point.

The brine that cannot be boiled by natural gas flows down the bamboo tube to the boiling room below. Inside is the "prison basin" that was basically finalized when Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty monopolized salt and iron.

The difference may be that firewood was burned at that time.

Now, coal or natural gas is burned.

The chimneys and rumbling steam engines of the new era; the prison basins that had been finalized in the Han Dynasty; the mortise and tenon frames and tanned cowhide one-way valves that had been finalized in the pre-Qin period; the pottery jars that could be made before the Shang and Zhou dynasties; the bamboo that has grown naturally here for tens of millions of years; the natural gas and coal blocks buried underground for hundreds of millions of years... Putting all these together, it is the first modern salt well of Dashun, a representative work of Dashun's capital-intensive industry.

Magical and chaotic.

Smell the smell of coal smoke wafting from the tall chimney; witness the "iron ox" that does not need to rest, constantly rolling up the rope; listen to the sound of the brine barrel being poured; glance at the light blue flames of natural gas combustion; watch The naked upper body muscles of the salt workers stirred the boiling brine; endured the harsh squeaking sound of the coal carts running over the railway tracks; and the rhythmic chants of the hired workers pushing the coal carts.

Ma Haochuan grabbed a handful of freshly boiled snow-white salt and couldn't help but exclaimed: "This is a truly amazing scene in the world!"

Niu Congyun looked at the black smoke coming out of the chimney, nodded slightly and said: "When we were in southern Jiangsu, the locals knew that Xingguo Gong had eccentricities. When it comes to beauty, they don't understand the beauty of the garden and the pride of plum snow."

"At that time, someone in southern Jiangsu said: In ancient times, the king of Chu was fond of thin waists, so many people died of starvation in the palace. Today, Duke Xingguo is curious about the skills, so he used the smell of sulfur to press the fragrance of flowers, and the soot to reflect the green water. I'm afraid that one day in the future None of the stone lions in front of the Zhumen below are clean, they are all covered in soot."

"Now that I have seen all this, I know that the Duke of the State has no eccentricities. This kind of scenery is a hundred times better than the beauty of sick plums."