Chapter 366: A Fall

After seeing the Iron Bull and resting the horses, Lao Hai led the gentlemen deeper into the farm.

A few kilometers further on, the cinder road gradually turned into a dirt road, and the surface grew bumpy. But this little bit of jolting was really nothing compared to the official roads of the Ming state. Under the Transmigrators' rule, even country dirt roads were rolled flat by road rollers, their smoothness built to the construction standards of later generations.

The carriage stopped and started along this road, giving certain people ample time for investigation. And on the Transmigrators' farm, Master Bo successively discovered more places that differed from the Ming state.

First and most important was still the irrigation system. Looking at those deep channels lined with cement, those finely crafted sluice gates one after another, and that black-smoke-belching machine that could ceaselessly lift water from low places to high, Master Bo's eyes seemed about to spew fire.

One must know that even the best paddy fields in Fujian only had some irrigation channels along the banks of streams and rivers. Any farther out, even great households lacked the strength to build crisscrossing capillary canals. Thus, whenever a drought year struck, the farmers had to stake their whole families' lives — carrying water to the fields bucket by bucket, a cup of water to a cartload of burning firewood, a single hair from nine oxen.

So now, as Master Bo stood at the field's edge gazing out, he sighed with emotion again and again. He heard from Lao Hai that this boundless expanse of mature fields and the web-like network of canals before him had all been built by the General's Mansion in recent years, relying on mechanical iron devices similar to the Iron Bull — if there were ones for plowing, naturally there were ones for digging canals.

At this moment, if he were to use the so-called "bizarre tricks and cunning crafts" to disdain all those hundred-artisan creations, Master Bo could no longer convince even himself.

Before this, whether it was those dock machines and enormous ships, including the bright streetlamps at night, Master Bo could still use "bizarre tricks and cunning crafts" to ostrich his way through for a while, seeking a bit of psychological comfort. But when tens of millions of mu of paddy fields — the very foundation of the Scholar-Official — were laid out before him, Master Bo could find no more excuses.

Last year, when Southern Fujian suffered a great drought and Xiong Wencan issued orders demanding local authorities everywhere transport the starving to Taiwan, Master Bo had been cursing Xiong Wencan in his own Flower Hall at the time — could a land beyond civilization really sustain so many refugees? Were they not just going to steal the wild men's food?

But now he understood everything: Xiong Wencan had truly saved many lives. One look at these boundless farmlands made that clear.

And so Master Bo's mood at present was very complicated.

He was both gratified by the settlement of the starving and the opening of good fields, and yet from the bottom of his heart arose unease: this mode of social production, where a single household could farm a thousand mu of land and its surplus labor all went to work in workshops, far exceeded his understanding.

The landlord mindset born of traditional agrarian society left him at a loss. Master Bo had already developed a fearful emotion toward this farm model that required no tenant farming. What was more, these fine fields were held in the hands of a group of Short-Haired Sea Bandits who could rebel again at any moment and held no respect whatsoever for the imperial court. Master Bo could dimly sense that this model was no good thing for the Scholar-Official class, but he could not deduce the core principle behind it. The twisted feeling made his heart extremely agitated.

Suppressing his vexed mood, Master Bo rallied his spirits and continued touring the farm.

Next, they successively became acquainted with two crops that the Great Ming did not have: corn and potatoes. Lao Hai told the guests: corn was in fact barbarian sorghum, and potatoes were barbarian sweet potatoes. These seeds, it was said, had all been bought from foreigners by the General and promoted here.

Once they were called barbarian sorghum and barbarian sweet potato, Master Bo gained a concept of these two crops. He even drew inferences, deducing that both crops were coarse grains. However, when Lao Hai told the guests that the potato's yield could reach two to three thousand jin per mu, the old gentleman was, in the end, startled.

But by now he no longer readily voiced his opinions: the experience of having his face slapped many times over these two days told Master Bo that in this magical land, nothing was impossible.

The final stop of the tour was the farm's machine room and granary.

The black-smoke-belching machines could no longer astonish the Ming People now. Master Bo stood beside the great iron hopper, watching farmhands pour basket after basket of paddy rice into the iron mouth, and then from the machine's other end, milled rice and rice bran automatically flowed out.

Grabbing a handful of rice and bringing it before his eyes, Master Bo found every grain of this polished rice plump and full; shriveled seeds rarely appeared.

"They farm the land well..." Desolately walking out of the machine room, Master Bo no longer wished to probe the terrifying rice-milling efficiency of these machines. He waved his hand and said, utterly disheartened, "Let us go back."

The Visiting Delegation's first day of chartered carriage work thus came to an end.

Returning to the bustling area, later that evening, Master Bo sat in the dining room and slowly said to the waiter, "Today I wish to eat some dishes made of corn and potatoes. Bring up whatever you have."

And so that night Master Bo ate Mexico Corn Rolls, Pine Nut Corn, Fried Potato Strips, and Stir-Fried Potato Shreds. Probably because he had not eaten his fill, the next day, before going to tour the Kiln District factories, the old gentleman specially led the group downstairs to the stalls and bought a pile of roasted potatoes... two per person, eat they must!

Feeling that heavy sense of fullness in his belly, Master Bo sat in the carriage with a gloomy face, not uttering a single word.

Last night, after returning to the guesthouse, he had already thought some matters through clearly: suppose a single household could farm a thousand mu of land, then this power base could at any time draw away the majority of its able-bodied young men to go to war.

What was more formidable was that while grain flowed continuously to the front lines, the rear would not collapse. If the Ming Dynasty were to do the same... it would not need the majority, just drafting one man from every two households, and the nation would be finished, because a great famine would appear the following year.

What terrified Master Bo even more than this was: if land was farmed this way, what need was there still for the Scholar-Official?

Controlling the land, breaking it up and distributing it to tenant farmers, then collecting rent, cultivating scholars — this was a cyclical program that had been practiced for several thousand years, the very foundation upon which the Scholar-Official clique, rooted in the land of agrarian society, depended for its existence.

Tenant farmers were not only the worker bees providing nourishment; in many times, tenant farmers were also responsible for shedding their blood and laying down their lives, serving as the most reliable human resource the landlord clique used to confront natural and man-made disasters.

And if all the tenant farmers went off to do factory work, with only those few households farming the land, then what were the Scholar-Officials to do? Divorced from the constraints of the land, Master Bo, who had absolutely no concept of industrial society, truly could not imagine how to control the tenant farmers.

Whether it was imperial authority, clan authority, or gentry authority, whether it was ancestral halls, public fields, or family law — every single thread and shred of these various means by which feudal landlords controlled their clansmen was built upon the land, upon binding the clansmen to the land.

And if one day they were freed from this bondage — in fact, a certain person had already glimpsed this trend the day before — then Master Bo would have absolutely no idea how to control those workers, because within his worldview, there was simply no store of knowledge concerning capitalists.

But there was one point Master Bo could sense by instinct alone: no matter what, once this mode of production was spread across the Great Ming, the roots of the gentry would be dug up. Master Bo could not come up with a term like "dimensionality reduction strike," but he understood the principle.

"Fortunately, those people are confined to a remote corner and have not yet grown into a climate. Righteous gentlemen still have time..." Sitting in the carriage, Master Bo watched the forest of smokestacks in the distance gradually draw nearer as he secretly calculated.

The Kiln District had now become a super calling card for the Cao Clan group.

It was just like the skyscrapers of Manhattan Island in later generations — for people from the Third World visiting for the first time, it was more persuasive than any words. And the gap between this factory complex standing in the 17th century and the native world far exceeded that of the later generations' Third World.

After all, everything here was built upon the industrial design of the Big Data era. Even the production of a single screw had computer coordination behind it. The value it represented was nothing short of Arabian Nights to a 17th-century native, and at times even closer to myth.

Take the carriage for example: a high-grade product manufactured with shock-absorbing springs, light steel plates, and a bearing steering system was bound to far surpass the crude, clumsy antique goods of the Ming People.

The technology content embedded within was in fact so high as to be beyond pricing. Therefore, the Ministry of Commerce had no need to set prices based on the carriage's apparent cost; they only needed to set a price that ordinary people could not afford, based on the natives' spending power: six hundred taels of silver locally, one thousand taels in Hangzhou, with exterior trim and interior decor costing extra... you had to understand the consumer psychology of Old Wealth.

The above was the reason the Transmigration Nation had never worried about money: those powers that dumped industrial goods into China during the late Qing at least had some competition, whereas the Transmigration Nation's industrial goods were one of a kind. So the "Transmigrated Nobles" could set prices arbitrarily, sell globally, and encounter no tariff barriers... such a shameless enterprise would be destroyed in later generations, and the boss would be executed by cannon!

The factory complex, constantly belching thick smoke and noise, was the source of the Transmigration Nation's wealth and strength. Yet this method of producing wealth was very unfriendly to a native like Master Bo.

Under the guidance of a specialized tour guide, when everyone entered the first Steel Plant, unsurprisingly, all were stupefied: a gigantic hammer smashed down again and again onto a huge, red-hot iron block, sparks flying everywhere, a deafening roar resounding. Accompanied by the thick smoke and firelight from the steel furnace, and the various automatic steel-forming devices that seemed like a demonic hell, Master Bo quickly could not take it anymore and hurriedly fled the scene.

The tour guide, long accustomed to such guests, next led the old gentleman to a few assembly-line production workshops that were not so noisy.

In these workshops, the Visiting Delegation truly had their eyes opened wide: various metal parts slid off conveyor belts like flowing water, dropping into the finished-product bins below. And there were glass bottles lining up to be filled one by one with orange-red soda, then capped with iron lids.

People differ from one another. Just as Fang Tangjing was watching with exuberant delight, scratching his ears and cheeks in excitement, Master Bo collapsed.

What caused the old gentleman's collapse was the nail production line.

The Kiln District's nail production line was a bit inferior to later generations, capable of producing only 500 iron nails per minute. And when Master Bo received a few large carbon-steel galvanized iron nails as souvenirs, he unfortunately overheard the tour guide say this one sentence: "Apart from nails, with just slight adjustments, this production line can also produce arrowheads and steel needles."

In the next moment, the torrents of silver swallowed up in those shops along Chikan Avenue, the endless rice of the suburban farms, and the arrowheads and iron nails shot over by tenant farmers blotting out the sky... these three visions intertwined, turning into a mass of dark, oppressive storm clouds that blotted out the horizon and instantly filled Master Bo's sight.

And so, with a great cry of "Ya!", Master Bo collapsed and sat down upon the ground.