Chapter 319: Water Management

If you went by recognizability alone, then the two transmigrators Liang Le and Mi Shuo were probably the people the immigrants knew best.

Because most of the people who came from the Ming state were illiterate farmers, and at the start they were usually kicked into agriculture or infrastructure to work, so they often saw the two of them out in the fields and on the land.

So when the electric three-wheeler came driving over from a distance, word immediately spread across the busy construction site: "The Blue-headed Mule is here!"

Very soon, the foreman who got the message came running out of the simple work shed.

The foreman's surname was Zhang, in his forties, a rare Ming-state craftsman who understood mathematics, so after he came to Dayuan he very quickly became a foreman... and in his spare time he brushed up on middle-school geometry.

This position already counted as a mid-level cadre in the Construction General Company, so he definitely knew Liang Le and Mi Shuo. Seeing the two bosses climb down from the Blue-headed Iron Mule, Foreman Zhang hurried forward to greet them: "Lord Liang, Lord Mi, you two have arrived! Please come inside, please come inside."

Liang Le gave a grunt, then gazed out ahead while asking: "Is the Old Chief here?"

At the base of the lush, green, boundless hills, several mirror-like great lakes dotted the land. Large numbers of construction workers were busy on the low-lying ground between the lakes, the chugging coal-gas forklifts serving as the main force reshaping nature, and with every scoop a handcart was filled with earth.

Looking at the bustling scene spread out before him, Liang Le could not help sighing repeatedly: "Reservoirs really are a hell of a lot of work!"

The Tainan Plain had abundant water, with many permanent and seasonal large pools and lakes, especially in the hilly region near the mountains, where wetlands, swamps, and lakes were everywhere.

This highlighted the importance of water management: if you wanted to turn the plain into a granary, you absolutely had to do the water-engineering projects well.

In later generations, the Jiayi area had seven large reservoirs. The most important of these was the Wushantou Reservoir series of projects, designed and built by the Japanese engineer Hatta Yoichi in 1920.

Wushantou Reservoir was located in the Jiayi region north of Dayuan, in the remaining veins of the Central Mountain Range, and was the largest irrigation project in Asia at the time, taking seven years to fully complete.

The core structure of this project was the "Chiayi Dam." The entire embankment, once completed, was 1,273 meters long and 56 meters high, with a storage capacity reaching 150 million tons.

During construction, Hatta Yoichi not only mobilized large numbers of workers, but also used steam excavators, pressure water jets, sand-and-gravel transport vehicles, and a whole series of engineering machines that counted as advanced for the time.

After the reservoir was built, it immediately turned 150,000 hectares (2.2 million mu) of downstream farmland into land guaranteed a harvest in both drought and flood... and this very reservoir was likewise the ultimate Tainan project that the transmigrators could never stop thinking about.

In fact, from the very moment the Great Office was established, the power-holders, deeply aware that food is the people's heaven, took the Tainan photocopies from Google Maps and threw them at the construction department: "Go survey the condition of these reservoirs."

The results were quickly reported back: apart from a few small reservoirs, the rest of the large-scale projects like Wushantou Reservoir could not be built without five years of industrial development.

This conclusion was scientific: medium and large reservoirs required excavating enormous volumes of earth and rock, and also required vast amounts of concrete, steel bars, engineering machinery, and construction workers. With the pitiful production capacity of the Kiln District Industrial Park at the time, it simply could not meet the requirements.

So the matter was temporarily shelved; after all, everyone had only just arrived here then, and the Kiln District had not even built a cement kiln yet — never mind large reservoirs, even small reservoirs were beyond their strength.

However, after more than a year had passed, when the time came to July of 1628, the violent mountain floods and torrential rains promptly gave the people from the 21st century a taste of the 17th century's wildness.

And then, having learned from the pain, after the rainy season the Great Office swiftly, immediately, and with a touch of neurosis ordered the Construction General Company to begin building reservoirs.

Still, as the saying goes, reservoirs are not so easy to build.

The Construction General Company, having carelessly taken on a huge job, after grimacing through an assessment of their existing engineering capabilities, could only nervously tell the bigwigs on the stage: for now, they could only first widen the canals, streams, and rivers everywhere, and then pick an opportunity to build one or two small reservoirs for practice.

And so the "1628 Tainan Comprehensive Water Engineering Project" was rushed into action just like that.

What had worn out Liang Le and the others, making them travel dozens of kilometers today to inspect, was the core project of this water engineering plan: Mirror Reservoir.

Mirror Reservoir was a small reservoir in later generations, its water source mainly coming from the Zengwen River and the Cailiao River. Among the seven reservoirs, Mirror was the smallest one.

The original site of Mirror Reservoir in the 17th century consisted of a series of wetlands, forests, and large lakes in the hilly region. After surveying, the construction company found that the construction conditions here could barely meet the requirements, so they decided to clear and deeply dredge these lakes, then connect them together, and finally build a dam body to finish the job.

What Liang Le was seeing now was the construction crews carrying out deep-excavation work in the middle of several lakes.

A large force of nearly two thousand people was divided into over ten groups, each group working around one piece of engineering machinery.

Some of these groups were following behind the tree-felling machines cutting down forests, others were following behind the excavators draining the lake water and building temporary embankments, and the largest number were pushing carts, waiting around the forklifts to haul away the excavated earth.

Large numbers of people and machines were scattered between the mountains and waters, like swarms of black ants — the coal-gas engineering vehicles, using freshly cut local timber as fuel, belched thick black smoke.

After standing on the embankment and watching the construction site for a while, Liang Le and Mi Shuo turned around and walked toward the command post.

The command post was a few wooden huts built from logs, with a camphor-wood signboard hung at the door, showing raw white wood grain and giving off a fresh fragrance, on which were written in crooked, ugly ink characters the words "Mirror Reservoir Engineering Command Post."

Glancing at a clay pot bubbling with chunks of meat on a mud stove by the door, Liang Le and Mi Shuo exchanged a look, burst out laughing, and barged into the command post.

The conditions inside were very crude: this godforsaken place had no electricity, nor the diesel generators that were essential on later-generation construction sites. The tables, chairs, and benches were all newly made from locally sourced camphor wood, crudely crafted, constantly giving off the smell of camphor material, and still covered with bark.

This kind of disposable furniture was very popular on construction sites: wood that had not been kiln-dried would warp after a while. But by then the project would be finished anyway, and together with the command post, everything would be thrown into the coal-gas furnace as fuel.

After entering, Liang Le immediately spotted the person drowsing on a chair, so he shouted: "Hey! Still daring to eat clay-pot stewed meat — the Safety Supervision Bureau is here!"

The fear rooted deep in his bones made the person in the chair flip over and sit up in an instant.

Ma Ming, former contract foreman, currently Vice President of the Construction General Company and the person responsible for the Mirror Reservoir project.

When the stubble-faced Ma Ming came to his senses, he immediately cursed laughingly at the guffawing Liang Le: "So it's you, you brat!"

"It's me, Captain Ma." After cracking this joke, Liang Le sat down and directly asked about business: "How's the engineering progress?"

"Tch, still early — didn't you see when you came, the pits aren't even dug yet." After saying this, Ma Ming stretched, then half-reclined on the chair again: "My Junior Grand Secretary lord, if you two want to wander around, go wander — I need to sleep a bit more. Last night two idiots chased a deer into the wetlands and wore me out half the night."

"Come on, chat a bit more — if you sleep, won't the meat in that clay pot go to me and Mi Shuo?" Liang Le threatened while pulling out a Dazhongjiu and handing it over.

"Ah, I knew you coming here meant no good!" After lighting the cigarette, Ma Ming no longer slept.

"If you're still digging pits now, then when will the dam body be closed?" Mi Shuo, sitting to the side, asked the question he cared about most.

"It'll take at least half a year, I'd say." Ma Ming exhaled a puff of smoke, hiding his face, looking very mysterious: "We're half manual and half mechanical here, the efficiency is painfully slow."

"In that case, what do we do about next year's rainy season?" Mi Shuo sounded a bit worried upon hearing this.

"The rainy season's no problem — it's December now, it'll definitely be finished before next July."

"However..." Ma Ming drew out his voice here: "I advise you not to pin your hopes on this place."

"This reservoir's area isn't large at all, it can't really play much of a flood-control role, at most it can release water in advance and then intercept a few flood peaks."

At this, Ma Ming straightened up, stretched out his arm, and drew a big circle to the north: "In the era we came from, just near Jiayi there were seven large reservoirs, and that's not even counting the ones near Kaohsiung. If you're counting on this one here, you're just farting at a lamp to blow it out."

"We're mentally prepared for that." Liang Le nodded with an unpleasant look: "Looks like we still need to put major effort into strengthening the irrigation system."

"Exactly, relying on no one is better than relying on yourself." Ma Ming chuckled and lay back down on the chair.

"Then what about the large reservoirs? When can construction start?" Mi Shuo, unwilling to give up, asked another question.

"Don't know." Ma Ming shook his head like a rattle-drum: "Our technical conditions are actually the same as the Japanese back then — steam excavators and coal-gas excavators aren't much different."

"But the Japanese ability to concentrate resources was way stronger than ours right now; our current foundation is too thin." Ma Ming started counting on his fingers: "Enormous amounts of concrete, steel bars, giant stones, equipment... a kilometer-long dam is nothing in later generations, but starting it now would be a Great Leap Forward. Just roughly calculate the earthwork volume yourselves and you'll know — we can't even supply the raw materials."

"So we can only build these small reservoirs?"

"Right!" Ma Ming did not hesitate at all: "Within three years, first build a series of small reservoirs. Once the construction crews are trained up, then we'll look at the supply situation for machinery and raw materials. If it's enough, we build; if not, we still have to wait."

"Ah, then that's all we can do." Liang Le and Mi Shuo looked at each other, and both saw helplessness in the other's eyes.

"In that case, there's nothing else for today. We'll leave after we eat." Liang Le checked the time and saw it was just about noon, so he directed the grinning foreman standing nearby to bring in the clay pot from outside, and grab some beer while he was at it.

"We're doomed. I just knew today wasn't a Good Day." Ma Ming was now full of grief and indignation: "Serow meat! I've been stewing it all morning!"