Chapter 430: Canned Goods

Huang Shaozhou Laoye's family departed from Shanghai by ship on December 24th. After a five-day journey to Taiwan, they immediately welcomed the Gregorian New Year in this unfamiliar environment.

Speaking of the New Year, there was actually no festive atmosphere under this power's rule.

Most Ming people had little feeling for the Gregorian New Year, and Master Huang's family was no exception.

The Transmigrators, committed to burying their heads in economic development, had probably inherited Old World habits and were never very keen on the New Year to begin with. Now, these masters did not even give the workers a holiday — we'll talk about it at the Spring Festival; not making you work 997 is already mercy enough, what more do you want, a bicycle?

And so, Master Huang's family stepped into the new year without even noticing.

For Master Huang, 1630 was undoubtedly a year of complete rebirth. In the first few days of that year, Master Huang not only cured his foot ailment but also underwent test-tube baby surgery.

When the test results came back half a month later, the Huang family wept with joy: the embryo had successfully implanted, and Madam Huang had officially entered pregnancy!

Yet at this point in mid-January, the delegation heading north for the King's Rescue had not even had time to recruit cavalry; they had only just set foot in Tianjin.

Knowing that the master's "seed" had safely "taken root," the older expectant mother Huang Xieshi now had only to wait: in a month or two, pregnancy symptoms like vomiting and nausea would appear one after another, and then it would be time to carefully nurture the pregnancy.

In this era, even for a young and robust woman, childbirth was a gate of hell. The proportion of women who died in difficult labor would scare to death any obstetrician from later generations, let alone an older pregnant woman, and a first-time mother at that.

For a woman of Huang Xieshi's age, without the Transmigrators, even if she became pregnant, she could not give birth in the seventeenth century — with luck, one of the mother or child would survive; without luck, it would be two lives lost in one pregnancy.

So they still had to rely on the Transmigrators: Dong Yuanzhang had already said that when the time came, they would most likely perform a cesarean section on Huang Xieshi. In any case, with her condition, another pregnancy was unlikely.

Regarding the cesarean section, Master Huang and his wife, having already experienced the miraculous gout surgery, had no worries about it. What troubled the couple was another derivative problem: who should be the one to give birth?

Since this long journey to seek medical help had achieved the best possible outcome, the next step was naturally to expand the gains... Master Huang still had several young concubines from various branches back in Hangzhou. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have three, five, seven, or eight more children in one go? The old Huang family would never again fear having no descendants.

However, things could not be done that way.

This was the seventeenth century, an era of scarce resources. Many advanced resources, including the doctors themselves, were one of a kind and extremely limited in number.

The Transmigrator doctors at Chikan General Hospital, including one who switched careers midway, numbered only four in total. They were terribly busy every day and could not possibly have so much free time to revolve around the Huang family.

Furthermore, the consumable supplies dedicated to certain surgeries were also limited and could not all be used on one family.

So Dong Qiang explicitly told Old Huang on this matter: at most, he would help him perform the embryo procedure for two more person-times, and he should not even think of more... This was the sorrow of a seller's era: insufficient product meant customers could not buy anything even with silver.

Thus, the Huang couple erupted into a new round of tearing at each other: among the four remaining concubines, Master Huang naturally favored the two younger girls who had married in later. Madam Huang, however, had never had a good impression of those two vixens and leaned towards "ranking by seniority," assigning the slots according to the order of "entry into the household."

Such tangled domestic matters were always beyond reason, so a conclusion between the master and his wife would inevitably require several rounds of warfare.

In the days that followed, besides the daily quarrels, Old Huang was not idle.

First, the two Huang-surnamed masters who had both been staying at the guesthouse bid each other farewell and checked out on the same day.

On the side of Huang Zhicheng, the Provincial Graduate Huang, he moved directly to the Transmigrator district with the best scenery — since his cover was already blown, there was no need to stay at the guesthouse any longer. The clever Comrade Zhong Xiuxiu was now already enjoying the fruits of the revolution: living in a villa, binge-watching American TV dramas, and incidentally watching Kung Fu Hustle.

On the side of Hangzhou Master Huang, he paid a high price to buy a wooden building near the General Hospital. This wooden building had quite a few rooms, could accommodate the Household Staff, and in the future, the wives and concubines could all stay here to nurture their pregnancies.

In the time that followed, Master Huang, whose foot injury was slowly recovering, not only began exercising daily as prescribed by the doctor but also hobbled on his crutch to the Kiln District to look around, experiencing firsthand the great source power of an industrial society.

At this time, Fang Tangjing, who had been sent to Guangzhou on business a few days ago, also sent back a letter.

He had already visited the colleague Nan Wang had introduced and had also registered at the Guangzhou New District Management Committee. That area was currently in the demolition phase; once land transactions were opened up, he would act at the first moment to select and secure a suitable plot.

After reading the letter, Master Huang immediately replied, telling Fang Tangjing not to rush back but to spend more time looking around there, just as he was doing research here, and first get a clear picture of the situation in Guangzhou Prefecture.

No sooner had he finished communicating with Fang Tangjing than Nan Wang came running over.

Hurriedly escorting the master out and renting a horse-drawn carriage, Nan Wang urged the coachman incessantly to rush to the Kiln District.

"What matter is so urgent?" Master Huang asked after boarding the carriage.

"Master, the cannery has officially started operation. Let's go take a look. If it works out, we must hurry to the Ministry of Commerce to register and negotiate!"

"Oh, then we must go see it quickly."

A commodity like canned food, given the Transmigrators' industrial capability, could actually have been produced long ago. Whether it was tinplate, food processing and sterilization, or bottle-cap sealing, none of these posed any difficulty.

The reason canned food was not produced earlier was mainly a lack of demand: the troops mostly operated in the surrounding areas, and whether within the Island Interior or in territories under Great Ming jurisdiction, they could receive supplies in time. Thus, this low-priority project was shelved.

A secondary reason within this was a shortage of sugar.

Sugarcane is a crop that consumes a great deal of fertilizer and soil fertility. In the first two years after the Transmigrators landed, the main crops planted were staple foods to feed the immigrants; there was simply no spare capacity to cultivate sugarcane.

Previously, the local consumption of white sugar was basically all from sugarcane shipped from Fujian and then juiced on the spot.

This situation only began to change in the latter half of last year. When large quantities of potatoes, corn, and sweet potatoes ripened, the Transmigrators finally caught a breather on the food problem and began to have the spare capacity to sow some sugarcane fields.

And the recent official launch of the cannery was also because the two aforementioned conditions had changed — the cavalry stationed in the north needed canned food, and the local sugarcane had just ripened.

When Master Huang and Nan Wang rushed to the newly opened cannery in the Kiln District, it was not only the Transmigrators who had come to inspect; some other well-informed merchants were already doing research at the production line.

The cannery's production line in the Kiln District naturally could not be as high-grade and automated as in later generations. Whether it was the large pots boiling food or the various semi-manual tinplate sealing lines, everything reeked heavily of a shady back-alley workshop.

However, although the equipment was crude, one could rest assured regarding hygiene. Workers wearing clean uniforms and hats were meticulously completing the procedures before them according to protocol.

The cannery currently had few varieties, mainly these four: lychees in syrup, mandarin oranges in syrup, fermented black bean fish, and tomato sauce fish.

The raw material sources for these four canned goods were all simple. Fujian was already the main producer of lychees and oranges, and the miscellaneous fish chunks were even less of an issue — the cold storage had plenty.

After carefully touring the production line, Master Huang discovered that compared to the other large factories in the Kiln District, the cannery's equipment requirements were actually not that high. Apart from some large pots, it was just the boiler used to provide sterilization steam, and some not-too-large sheet metal and sealing machines.

Calculated this way, theoretically, Master Huang could possibly open a factory in Jiangnan.

After the tour, Master Huang bought a pile of freshly produced canned goods from the factory on the spot, and then returned to his wooden building with Nan Wang.

With a strong pull on the delicate iron ring atop the can, he opened the thin tinplate lid, poured the four dishes into bowls, tasted each one separately, and then Master Huang immediately gave a thumbs up: "If the fruits and dishes in these tin cans truly can remain unspoiled for years, then this is a huge business."

"It must be so; the great masters would never smash their own signboard." Nan Wang smiled and held the white paper label from the pale yellow metal can up before the master's eyes.

This white paper was the product description, printed on it in black ink was some simple information about the canned good: place of origin, ingredients, shelf life, and a factory code in Arabic numerals.

Seeing the string of characters on the white paper stating a shelf life of "two years," Master Huang closed his eyes and pondered for a moment, then opened his eyes and asked: "How should this business be arranged?"

"First go to the Chikan Government Affairs Hall to register, declare, and verify capital, then negotiate with the people from the Ministry of Commerce."

"Then we must hurry."

Just as Master Huang approached the Chikan District Government, submitting his application to partner in opening a cannery in Hangzhou, several other application forms with the same content also appeared on the desks of the Ministry of Commerce staff.

The content of these application forms was basically the same, except for the factory's location: Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Guangdong... In short, these well-informed merchants from various regions generally had a favorable view of the canned food business.

One must know that travelers in this era usually could only gnaw on dry rations on the road. If they had this kind of canned food, it would be a good thing for the middle class and the wealthy who traveled away from home.

The Transmigrators were also happy to see this happen. If a cannery was opened in a place like Hangzhou, it could not only locally absorb various fruit and grain raw materials but also recruit workers locally, and save on the high shipping costs from Taiwan to the port — truly killing multiple birds with one stone.

Thus, Master Huang, having submitted his application, soon began negotiations with the Ministry of Commerce.

Since Master Huang's background had already been grasped by the Intelligence Bureau beforehand, the Ministry of Commerce was spared the troublesome process of capital verification and background checks, which accelerated the negotiations.

In the end, Master Huang smoothly reached an agreement with the Ministry of Commerce; before long, both sides would collaborate to open a cannery in the Shanghai Port Industrial Zone, with the registered trademark "Meilin."