Wen Tong set his foothold in Xuwen. Qiwei had already received a letter from Dongzhu Guo, asking him to entertain this "shopkeeper Wen". Because he heard that shopkeeper Wen didn't like the noisy city, Qiwei's Leizhou branch came to
A new house was built in a sugar cane farm outside Xuwen County. It was tidied up inside and out, and even the furniture was newly made. I originally planned to find a few servants to serve, but Guangzhou had already made preparations and used mules.
The car was delivered. The person in charge who made the score was very tongue-tied - the behavior of these big shopkeepers was really extravagant.
Wen Tong took people to live in this sugar cane farm, which is just a more elegant farmhouse courtyard. In addition to the house, there is also a huge yard specially used to stack harvested sugar cane. The sugar cane house is right next to the village wall.
Outside: It’s another building where several cows are raised.
After a night's rest, Wen Tong inspected the property. Originally, Wen Tong thought that such a village should have stewards, craftsmen and the like, but when he asked, there was no one there. Even the sugarhouse in this village was the private property of a certain farmer, and the cultivation
, juicing, and sugar making are all handled by this family. After buying it, no one will handle it.
Wen Tong felt a little troubled. Without local people, he had no idea about the local situation. Besides, the sugarcane industry is typically labor-intensive and requires a lot of manpower input during the harvest season. In another time and space, it was easier, because it was all sugarcane farmers themselves.
For door-to-door delivery, the sugar factory only needs to weigh and purchase it. Now he still has his own land, and the sugar cane has not been harvested yet, so he needs to find short-term workers to organize harvesting, cleaning, and bundling. This matter can only be done by finding a professional landowner or a long-term foreman.
, I am just a sugar factory director, how should I deal with it?
Looking at the few people from the Qiwei Escort Agency around him, they all looked at each other with big eyes and small eyes. It was obvious that they were all amateurs. Chang Shide saw that his face was full of embarrassment and asked: "Is the matter difficult to handle?"
"Without local help, everything is dark." Wen Tong sighed and called over Zhou Shizhai's young apprentice Li Biao. This boy 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 so, please come to Zhuangzi. I have something to ask."
"Okay, let's go now."
Looking through the land deed, it was found that the entire sugarcane field owned by Zhuangzi was equivalent to only one hundred acres in modern times. This scale could be said to be pitifully small. Wen Tong went to see the Tangliao again.
Wen Tong had visited the local sugar house in Leizhou Peninsula in the past and knew that the sugar production process here was "pulling sugar cane with stone pullers, boiling sugar in pots and stoves, and dividing honey in earthenware pots." Although it was very backward by today's standards, it was still very backward at that time.
Relatively advanced technology.
The entire sugar house occupies a very large area and is used to store sugar cane and bagasse to be processed. The main buildings are a conical shed and a large thatched house. The entire structure can be said to be crude and rudimentary. The materials are not only bricks and tiles, but also wood.
Not much at all. It's the so-called "Grass Watts Wall".
The bottom of the thatched house is about fifty feet and the height is about thirty feet. The interior is supported by Ma bamboo, and the roof is made of thatch, straw, or sugar cane leaves. It is the place where sugar cane is pressed. Inside the sugar boiling house is a Kongming cauldron, which is used for boiling sugar.
place. There are various types of equipment listed inside, including wooden pulleys, cauldrons, stoves, earthen jars, etc.
Because it has not been used for several months, it is full of dust, the ground is mud, and there are all kinds of cane leaves, cane peels, cow dung, firewood and other garbage everywhere. The house is leaking everywhere, and rat droppings can be seen everywhere. There's even a pot 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 it is really difficult to start a business.
Seeing Shopkeeper Wen's brows furrowing, the people accompanying him knew that he was dissatisfied, but they were puzzled: all the sugar houses in Leizhou Prefecture were similar, so what was it that made him unhappy?
After walking out of the sugar-pressing room, I found a clean stone outside the yard and was about to sit down when a young man in green clothes and a small hat came out next to me. He took a chair and quickly opened it and stuffed it under his butt:
"Master, please sit down." The young man lowered his head and said softly.
Wen Tong was shocked. There were not many locals who could speak Mandarin: "Who are you?"
Liao Dahua, the powerful semicolon shopkeeper here, hurried over and reported: "This is specially sent by Guo Dongzhu from Guangzhou to serve the shopkeeper. His name is Wenxiu."
"Wenxiu? Such a girly name." Wen Tong commented casually.
The boy servant immediately blushed and lowered his hands without saying a word.
"This is a transvestite." Chang Shide took a look and saw that the man looked about sixteen or seventeen years old, with fair skin, red lips and white teeth, and handsome eyebrows, which gave him a somewhat feminine appearance. But the hat on his head was quite female. Strange, like a small melon-skin hat, but much larger in size—could it be that the Jianlu style has spread here?
"What kind of hat do you have?"
"This is the Liuheyi Unification Hat." Liao Dahua quickly explained, "It is made by the Taizu of this dynasty——"
"What? Zhu Yuanzhang invented the melon-skin hat?" Chang Shide muttered. This was a surprise to him. He always thought that this kind of clothing that perfectly matched the pig tail was a pioneering work of the Qing Dynasty.
Seeing him openly shouting Taizu's name, Liao Dahua and Wenxiu, who could understand Mandarin, were eclipsed. Liao Dahua quickly said: "Master Chang, be careful! Be careful, this is the name of Taizu of this dynasty, and you shouldn't pronounce it like this. --"
"It is said that it is, but I don't know the details. I told you about it in Eshui." Wen Tong said, and suddenly discovered something, "Why don't you move a chair for Master Chang?"
In order to make it easier to address him outside, Chang Shide's name is Wen Tong's master. In order to avoid being too big-headed and confusing the natives.
"Wen Qing has moved Mr. Chang's chair. I'm going to take a look." Wenxiu was a little too lazy to pay attention to this big black guy with a black face and a slight beard - in his opinion, this big black guy was probably Wen Tong's leader. People like the chief foreman who came here, in this time and space, people with dark skin are often regarded as inferior people. Chang Shide learned this many times in Lingao.
After a while, I saw Wenxiu and another young man coming out. In addition to carrying a pile, they also brought a tray with two cups of tea on it.
Chang Shide sat down comfortably, took a sip of tea, and suddenly said to Wen Tong: "It seems that it's better to come out, so corrupt! I wonder if there are any maids?" He looked around.
"Master, I have no maids. I only hired two servants to cook and wash clothes." Wen Qing replied respectfully.
"Xiao Guo really doesn't know how to do things. How can he do it without a maid?" As he was talking, he suddenly noticed that the two servants were covering their mouths and laughing. He realized that his words were not careful enough and his image was greatly damaged.
Wen Tong didn't have this idea, so he asked Liao Dahua to send people out to find people who used to work in the sugarhouse. If they are willing to come back and continue working, they can come back - and the wages will be favorable. Liao Dahua agreed. Order people to go out and search.
Two groups of people went out. During this period, Wen Tong and Chang Shide sat face to face under the clear sky of the 17th century, smelling the smell of rotten cow dung, sugar cane and sugar brought by the power, drinking tea, and surrounded by more than ten people. , one by one stood breathlessly. It made the two of them a little uncomfortable. Finally, they finally persuaded Liao Dahua to sit down too, while the others still stood.
"I was originally asked to go on a business trip, but I was a little scared." Chang Shide's eyes were shining, "I wanted to always stay in Lingao and be safe, but I didn't expect that after I came out, I would behave like a big landlord. If I had known better, I should have applied to become a Intelligence agent or something like that. Guo Yi, that guy, probably has his little wife to please him, and he has at least four or five girls who have intercourse with him!"
"You can just complain about it." Wen Tong was not interested in this topic: he was worried about his own burden.
An hour later, both groups of people arrived. Three workers from the Tangliu came. After Wen Tong asked through a translator, he found out that these three were not skilled workers. According to them, the entire Tangliu was full of workers. There are five people: a sugar cook, a sugar cane press, a cattle manager, a fire cook, and a handyman. The farmers who originally grew sugarcane were their own people who cooked the sugar and pressed the sugar cane.
"If my boss wants to make sugar, he needs to hire a good sugar cook to take the lead." The person in charge of lighting the fire reported, "Otherwise, it's hard to control the heat, and you won't be able to eat as much ash as you add, and the amount of sugar will make a big difference."
Wen Tong nodded and asked them what the entire production process was like. Can they give a live demonstration? The fire maker said that it was possible, but they were not sugar cooks and the sugar they produced might not be usable.
"Just tell them to just do it," Wen Tong told the translator, "Don't worry about whether the candy is good or bad."
The three of them murmured for a while, then took action. They also hired two bodyguards to help, and they brought a cow from the cowshed and transported several bundles of sugar cane. Liao Dahua knew that Shopkeeper Wen thought the Tutang House was unclean, so he hurriedly Then he led his men to clean up the entire sugar house and wash the utensils. Then he started making sugar.
Workers first cut the sugar cane, bundle it into a load and place it next to the wooden roller. This wooden roller is made of lychee wood and is extremely hard. One person puts the sugar cane into the roller, and another person drives the cattle to drive the pressing roller to rotate. The first roller is pulled first. The wooden teeth drive the second reel. The wooden reels squeeze each other and squeeze out the cane juice three times in a row.
When squeezing for the third time, the workers have to adjust the pulley inward and clamp it more tightly to squeeze the bagasse more dryly. The squeezed sugarcane juice flows down the base groove along the pulley and flows into the large tile jar through the bamboo tube to settle.
Wen Tong looked very carefully. The pressing force of this wooden pressing wheel seemed to be very strong, but in fact it was not as good as the Qing Dynasty pressing wheel he saw later. At least it was made of stone and was much harder. He twisted it with his hands.
Remove the sugarcane bagasse - after three pressings, there is still quite a lot of cane juice left in the bagasse.
After pressing like this for almost 40 minutes, the buffalo used to pull the pressing roller was sweating all over and slowing down. It seemed that it took a lot of effort. The workers started to change the cows. Wen Tong asked about the time of each pressing.
Hou has to press four bundles of sugarcane. He needs to change cattle thirty to thirty-five times a day and night. No wonder this sugar house has to raise four or five cows.
He asked someone to weigh each bundle of sugar cane, and then calculated it silently in his mind. This kind of processing method, which does not stop day and night, only processes nearly 2,000 kilograms. And according to the workers, sometimes the wood is pressed.
The rollers often get damaged and have to be stopped for repairs. This consumes a lot of time.
"Are there any stones used for pressing the press?" Wen Tong asked.
The workers all said that they had never seen it before. There were not fifty but thirty sugar houses in the local area, and they had never heard of it being made of stone.
Wen Tong nodded. It seems that this technological improvement appeared in the Qing Dynasty. The stone pressing wheel can process 2,500 kilograms every day and night, and the efficiency improvement is much greater.
The squeezed sugarcane juice, after preliminary precipitation, was hastily skimmed off the fragments of grass stems and the like, and then poured into a large iron pot for cooking. Three large pots were arranged in a Z-shaped pattern. Wen Tong did not notice it.
What positive significance does this arrangement have for the production process or efficiency? The only thing that comes to mind is that this method can concentrate heat?
The sugarcane juice was boiled until it was slurry, and when it was still boiling, the worker who was originally lighting 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 over and sprinkle it in.
"Lime?" Chang Shide was surprised.
"It is used to clarify the sugar liquid." Wen Tong explained that in order to remove the mixture in the cane juice and obtain cleaner crystals, an important process is to filter and remove the incompatible materials before adding a clarification agent, which is commonly used in modern sugar factories.
Lime is included in the clarifier, and this was naturally the case in ancient times. Lime is much easier to obtain than other clarifiers such as sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and superphosphate. In some places, plant ash is used to make local sugar, and the effect is similar.
"But doesn't the lime dissolve into the sugar water? So all sugar contains lime?"
"No, it is actually neutralized and decomposed with various impurities in the sugar cane juice -" Wen Tong explained tirelessly, "Whether it is white sugar or brown sugar, there is no trace of lime in it."
"I feel relieved now."
At this time, the sugarcane juice has turned yellow. Several workers worked together to pour the sugarcane liquid in the pot into the second pot, slowly evaporating the water in it, and at the same time repeating the process in the first pot.
After waiting, move the cane juice with higher sugar content into the third pot and add some oil. Wen Tong asked: "What did you add?"
The worker hurriedly replied: "It's peanut oil."
"Peanut oil?" Wen Tong wondered. He remembered that it was said in sugar industry books that the earliest decolorization process was to add milk. The method used by the Chinese was to use egg whites from chicken and duck eggs. The principle of action is to use protein to remove impurities inside. Does oil count as protein?
?
Confused, he decided to continue reading. After the sugarcane liquid was boiled into a thin paste, it was taken out and poured into the "Wa Liu". The text was the same as the actual thing he had seen in the Qing Dynasty. Now it seems almost exactly the same: cone shape, big at the top and small at the bottom.
, about 1 foot high, with a small hole at the bottom and tip. Plug it with grass and place it on a large earthen jar to let it slowly crystallize. The sugar liquid containing a lot of impurities will flow through the small hole below the thatch.
It slowly flowed out, and finally only pure crystal sugar remained in the "Wa Liu". Wen Tong asked about it and found out that one Wal Liu can produce 10 kilograms of brown sugar.