Chapter 167: Timber and Cement

The Crossing Faction's early "Two-Two" fleet has now expanded into a "Three-Four" fleet: three full crews of sand ships, four vessels per crew. One crew rests and reorganizes at Tangzhuang, another at Dayuan, and one crew is always at sea sailing the Zheng route.

The current situation has already reached the limit of what Tangzhuang can accommodate. Handling the throughput and turnaround of four sand ships within the deadline has consumed Tangzhuang's entire reception capacity — this is the outskirts of Hangzhou City, where Three Mountains Heavy Industries cannot install its crane arms.

Unless we continue expanding the docks on a massive scale, widening and deepening the Tang River, and building the rest of the supporting facilities, this is as far as it goes. And all those projects I just mentioned would be a terrible investment for the Tang River — this place never had the geography for a medium-sized port to begin with: the water is shallow, and there is no natural harbor.

So finding a new site to build a port completely under the Transmigrators' control has become the next key objective for Hangzhou Station.

In the river bend at the entrance of Tangzhuang, a row of four large sand ships was unloading cargo. Stripped to the waist, with nothing but a cloth pad draped over their shoulders, the laborers bent over like shrimp, carrying sacks of red bricks and large wooden crates down from the ships.

The largest pieces of wood had already been unloaded earlier and were now stacked there, waiting for their owners to haul them away.

And Comrade Chu Maosheng, Vice President of the Tangzhuang Freight Station, former bandit and Third Master of Pingfeng Stronghold, was currently standing under the long bamboo awning, beside the neat stacks of timber, ahem... arguing with someone.

"Chu San, this old man has heard that you were once a man of your word, a true hero. How is it that after coming down the mountain and setting foot in Hangzhou City, you've switched careers to swindling?" A gaunt old man dressed in ingot-patterned silk, dripping with jade and jadeite ornaments, was slanting his triangular eyes and looking down on Third Master Chu with undisguised contempt.

"Guild Head Diao speaks the truth!"

"Right to the heart of the matter!"

"We absolutely cannot let this sort go back on their word!"

After the old man finished, the cronies beside him all nodded in agreement, everyone glaring at Chu Maosheng with expressions of utter disdain, as if the man had just shown up begging for money to raise a son.

Comrade Chu Maosheng, whose figure had grown considerably more prosperous since coming down the mountain, leaned back against the timber stack, rolled his eyes, and with a pained smile explained to the old man: "Master Diao, the share of goods we agreed on that day was calculated based on three ships. This fourth ship's cargo is for Tangzhuang's own sale. Where is the swindle in that?"

"What slick talk!" The old man's eyes now bulged with fury, his beard and hair bristling: "When was any number of ships ever fixed that day... Absurd... Preposterous..."

All of this still goes back to that first ship of timber.

Everyone inside Tangzhuang was a group of sea merchants from foreign parts — the local merchants all knew this. So when Xiong Dao and his people wanted to do business in Hangzhou, there were certain trades they couldn't touch, like money shops — Scholar Huang could run one, but Xiong Dao could not.

The grain, cloth, and silk trades were the same. Xiong Dao could spend silver to buy them, and everyone was good friends, but if he tried to stick his hand in and run the business himself, then an overwhelming saturation strike would come at once. Xiong Dao could not possibly gun down every single gentry shopkeeper and yamen runner.

So all along, Tangzhuang had simply produced gleaming silver to buy grain and sundry goods. In the eyes of many merchants in Hangzhou City, Xiong Dao maintained a decent image: a sea merchant with money, who honored his word.

When that first shipment of timber from Dayuan arrived at port, Xiong Dao very shrewdly sold the entire cargo wholesale to the wood merchants led by Master Diao.

If Xiong Dao had set up shop at the entrance of Tangzhuang and sold the timber directly, a crackdown from the local wood merchants would have been inevitable. Again, that same point — Xiong Dao could not possibly wipe out every single merchant in the Wood Merchants' Guild. This was commerce, not a triad turf war.

Master Diao was the Guild Head of the Wood Merchants' Guild. When he learned that Tangzhuang had several shiploads of timber and that Xiong Dao was willing to sell the whole lot to him at the trade's internal wholesale price, he naturally smiled and accepted the goods — a quick internal allocation within the guild, and it was effortlessly handled.

After this, Master Xiong, who "understood reason and knew the trade rules," smoothly and logically joined the Wood Merchants' Guild.

From that point on, things spiraled completely out of control.

First, there was the rarity.

Taiwan was the place with the largest camphor tree and camphor output in the entire world — the title "Kingdom of Camphor" in later generations was not an empty boast. In the 17th century, Taiwan was covered in thousand-year-old trees. Over half of the Transmigrators' first batch of timber consisted of intensely aromatic camphor wood beams, along with beams of fragrant yet understated, dense-grained Taiwan incense cedar, hard ring-cupped oak beams, black ebony beams...

In short, these precious timbers, which should have been carefully cut down and made into furniture piece by piece, had been brutally hewn into structural beams by a certain faction.

Since the late Ming period, large timber resources across various regions had been exhausted. The timber used in the Jiangnan region was mostly fir, nanmu, tung, and pine from the Qingshui River basin in Guizhou, as well as fir and cypress produced in the four prefectures of Yan, Ting, Shao, and Jian in Fujian.

As for these uniquely-species "luxury" beams the Transmigrators were hauling in, some wood merchants who hadn't been in the trade long had never even laid eyes on them before.

Furthermore, all this timber had already been kiln-dried.

Timber transport in the Ming Dynasty followed two routes: for provinces like Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, the timber was rafted all the way down rivers and lakes along the Yangtze waterway, then turned north at Yangzhou via the Canal to the Capital.

For provinces like Yunnan, Guizhou, and Fujian, river and sea transport were combined — the timber rafts would ultimately gather in Fujian, then be shipped by Fujian vessels along the coast to the Ningbo area for sale.

Regardless of the method, once the timber finally reached its destination, any large pieces required at least a year or more of air-drying. In the humid regions of the south, this time was even longer.

But the timber produced by Tangzhuang was different. Tangzhuang's seagoing ships could not possibly tow a string of timber rafts in a zigzag pattern through wave-tossed straits, so this timber was transported inside the ship's holds, and it was already fully kiln-dried — you could carry it home and use it immediately.

The wood merchants quickly discovered the secret advantage: goods bought in the morning could be sold by noon. This effectively saved them a huge string of costs — storage yards, compound guards, fire prevention and maintenance, and so on.

The timber produced at the Kiln Area Base had another benefit: because some of the cabins had to be modified to stack the timber, all the timber from the Kiln District was pre-cut into rectangles or squares.

In the southern regions during the Ming Dynasty, the cross-section of house beams was mostly round — it saved labor and material. This trend would only slowly reverse in the Qing Dynasty. Of course, wealthy and powerful households never cared about saving a few taels of silver.

The industrial timber was of rare species, top-grade appearance, already kiln-dried, and more geometrically stable. On top of that, all this timber had been brush-coated with wood creosote, making it rot-resistant and moisture-proof. So the first batch sold out completely within a few days — it didn't even need to go to Suzhou; Hangzhou Prefecture itself absorbed it all.

After this, facing the swarm of big timber merchants rushing in, Master Xiong naturally started throwing his weight around. First, he held back ten percent of the goods for self-sale, then twenty percent... There were always old friends and untouchable gentry stewards who came directly to Tangzhuang to pick up goods. These were all connections, all resources, and Master Xiong naturally would not let them slip away.

When the proportion of timber sold directly by Tangzhuang reached thirty percent, the Wood Merchants' Guild, led by Guild Head Diao, began to struggle against the good-citizen-oppressing Master Xiong. Yes, the tables had now turned — the Wood Merchants' Guild had become the weaker party. The sales channels were open, the reputation had spread, and Tangzhuang's fleet could from now on simply unload its timber at Ningbo. Customers here could pay up, then go to Ningbo to pick up their goods themselves. The Hangzhou Wood Merchants' Guild would be utterly helpless.

This was the reason for the opening scene, with Master Diao and his group besieging Chu Maosheng: although the bugle call of a buyer's market had already sounded, for at least the next eight or ten years, the industrial goods the Transmigrators produced still could not satisfy the market. So the man who held the goods was still that damn awesome.

Master Diao and his group of wood merchants were now out of their league — they could only haggle and wrangle for goods with Tangzhuang's Vice President Chu Maosheng. Master Xiong was very busy these days, having to entertain many guild heads every day.

Once the timber on the upper deck of the sand ships was unloaded, the cement in the middle layer and the red bricks in the bottom hold would also be carried out one after another by the laborers.

The cement would be moved into the large new red-brick warehouse Master Xiong had built by the Tang River. As for the red bricks... just stack them out in the open; they'd be sold off soon enough anyway.

At present, due to the lack of suitable packaging, the cement was first packed into straw bags, then placed inside large camphor wood chests for the journey to Hangzhou... Transporting it this way in the 17th century was not a loss.

The camphor wood chests produced in the Kiln District used timber half a fen thicker than ordinary Ming Dynasty chests. These chests were all "plain ware" — meaning semi-finished products that had not undergone the subsequent series of processes like lacquering, carving, or installing copper handles.

So now, in the freight yard in front of Tangzhuang, quite a few owners of woodware shops were also gathered: they only needed to buy the camphor chests back, have their own craftsmen give them a beautiful decorative finish, and these thick-stock camphor wood chests would become high-end furniture, filled with silks and brocades, and turn into essential items for the dowries of young ladies from wealthy families.

As for the cement inside the chests... When this stuff first appeared in Hangzhou, the local construction industry big shots from all sides took notice of this miraculous commodity. And after the Huizhou Merchant Liu Yaozu, Master Liu Daye, had the bluestone slabs in front of his own house pried up and replaced with a road surface raised twenty centimeters off the ground, smooth as a mirror and completely seamless — in those days, the people shuffling their feet along the road in front of the Liu Family home were packed shoulder to shoulder, and at night, quite a few even laid out bedrolls on the concrete road surface...

Cement exploded in popularity just like that.

Construction industry people from all sides swarmed in — this was the reason Master Xiong had to entertain so many guild heads, cabinet heads, and master craftsmen every day.

To protect the reputation of its own commodity, Tangzhuang promptly launched a Cement Construction Training Course, charging a training fee of 80 taels of silver per head, with a certificate issued upon graduation; and for future courses on laying floor tiles and wooden flooring (which could not be produced at the moment), trainees would even get a 5% discount by presenting their certificate.

Training was absolutely necessary: for cement to become qualified concrete, there were quite a few steps involved — the ratio of clean water and other aggregates had to be correct, the mixing had to be uniform, there were many points requiring attention during construction, and the curing of the cement after construction was also very important. These techniques could only be learned through training and hands-on practice.

The 80-tael tuition fee did not scare off those cabinet heads and master craftsmen — in the medieval era, a craftsman learning a skill earned it by being exploited, beaten, scolded, and emptying chamber pots for his master. Now, paying 80 taels of silver to learn several sets of concrete formulas and secret construction methods — this was no loss at all.

The large new red-brick warehouse at Tangzhuang was built precisely this way, relying on the trainees. These trainees brought their own rations, their own tools, worked tirelessly without complaint, and all had excellent memories — many were illiterate, so these people memorized data like cement formulas purely by rote.

Of course, Tangzhuang did not take their silver for nothing: stewards who came to Tangzhuang to purchase cement would all receive a copy of the trainee roster, which listed the names of the craftsmen currently qualified to use cement for paving roads and laying walls.