Chapter 183: Stoke That Furnace Fire to a Blazing Red

By late in the eighth month, with the land distribution largely complete, Wan Xiu began urging Diwu Lun to leave.

"The Commandery Governor isn't in a hurry to return to Yecheng and see his pregnant, lovely wife — could it be he plans to settle down in Wu'an for good?"

The reason Diwu Lun had stayed so long was, first, that Wu'an could not do without him for the time being. Distributing land to the troops was something never done before; he had to oversee it personally, or who knew what kind of chaos it might still erupt into.

Although Diwu Lun's prestige in the army was very high, and though all his subordinate clerks were men he had handpicked, even so, once an order was issued, by the time it was carried out on the ground it would still become distorted — the army, to grab more land, drove out wealthy households that had never been involved in the rebellion; his clerks, eager to show results, recklessly expanded judicial cases and, after taking bribes, distributed the land unfairly.

This matter touched the very foundation on which their small regime stood; he had to keep his own eyes on it. He had therefore transferred Ma Yuan to lead the refugee troops back to guard Yecheng, while he himself stayed on in Wu'an an extra half month.

And before he left, Diwu Lun still had to make one more inspection tour of the Iron Office.

During the Warring States period, Handan had not only been a great metropolis that set the fashions, but also the most renowned smelting center in the north, and its largest open-pit iron mine was right here in Wu'an. By the time of Emperor Wu of Han, Wu'an had been placed under Wei Commandery, and an Iron Office was established to manage it.

When Ma Yuan seized the Iron Office earlier without bloodshed, it was thanks to the defection of the iron-office convict laborers. These convicts doing hard labor had a long history of rising up at the drop of a hat. As far as Diwu Lun knew, in the preceding dynasty under Emperor Cheng of Han, iron offices in Yingchuan, Guanghan, and Shanyang had revolted one after another.

The convicts had also risen up in the face of adversity — for instance, in the third year of the Yangshuo reign of Emperor Cheng of Han, the Yingchuan iron-office convict Shentu Sheng revolted; in the third year of the Hongjia reign of Emperor Cheng (18 BC), the shackled convicts of Guanghan revolted; and in the third year of the Yongshi reign of Emperor Cheng (14 BC), the Shanyang iron-office convicts revolted. The Shanyang uprising in particular was the largest in scale: the rebels called themselves Generals, killed the Governor of Dong Commandery and the Commandant of Runan, captured countless weapons from the arsenal, and fought their way across nine commanderies. The court spent a fortune mobilizing troops just to barely suppress them.

This was far more formidable than an ordinary peasant uprising, because the miners' level of organization and discipline far exceeded that of farmers.

Diwu Lun was quite wary of these iron-office convicts, a mixed lot of good and bad but with ferocious fighting strength: "Yesterday they could turn on the Li clan; tomorrow they could just as easily turn on me. Used well, they are a sharp blade's point; used poorly, I fear they will bite the hand that wields them."

But the iron-office convicts were no fools either. After their uprising, they still kept their armor and weapons and controlled the mining area, afraid that once they laid down their arms, they would have no way to bargain with Lord Diwu.

So after taking over the Iron Office, Diwu Lun played a cunning trick.

He brought his soldiers into the Iron Office and feasted the convicts with meat and wine. When they were well into their cups and in high spirits, he raised a toast to them all: "Gentlemen, your righteous valor in slaying Li Lu with your own hands has won you great merit. But seeing how bitter life is in this Iron Office, I truly cannot bear it. May I ask, do you gentlemen still have parents, wives, or children alive in this world?"

Diwu Lun's fluent use of the Wei Commandery dialect made him feel warmly familiar to them. These words stirred many of the iron-office slaves. Earlier, Qinglu, the man who had led the uprising and hammered the Li clan to death, had warned them: "We must not disperse. Once we scatter, we'll be at the mercy of the government troops."

Only the blades in their hands were their true reliance — this was a truth the iron-office convicts naturally understood.

Yet every man longs for his own family. They began to look upon Diwu Lun with a measure of hope, and one after another spoke of how their parents, wives, and children were mostly slaves as well, either in Wu'an or in Yecheng.

Diwu Lun smiled and said: "Those whose families were serving as tenant-serfs or slaves in Wu'an — I have already ordered my clerks to identify and release them. They are now living near the county seat. Since you gentlemen have already been pardoned and gained your freedom, why not hurry off to see them?"

At those words alone, half of the thousand-odd iron-office convicts laid down their weapons, joyfully collected travel expenses, and disbanded to go find their families and live their lives. Diwu Lun promised them they could serve as county soldiers in Wu'an, under the command of the newly appointed Wu'an Commandant, Zhao Pang.

Qinglu, nicknamed "the Sledgehammer," could only watch helplessly as his own side's strength was drastically reduced, while the Boar-Rush Braves seized the opportunity to take over the Iron Office and the mining area.

Next, Diwu Lun received the five ringleaders one by one, granting each of them official posts — some as Centurions, some as Company Commanders — bestowing silk, and giving them residences, then transferring them separately to Liyang, Yecheng, and Liangqi.

Watching the others leave one after another, fully satisfied, and with only two hundred men left at his side, Qinglu grew even more anxious. By now Diwu Lun had complete control of the Iron Office; even if he wanted to reduce them back to slavery, they would have no way to resist.

Fortunately, Diwu Lun did not turn hostile and disown them. When he received Qinglu, he smiled and asked: "The others could not wait to leave this place at once. Why are you willing to stay on at the Iron Office?"

Qinglu had his own thoughts on the matter: "We've worked in the Iron Office for so many years, we no longer know how to do anything else. Because we can't read, we can't serve well as officials or clerks. In the army, we can't compare to Lord Diwu's own trusted men. Going home to farm — we're not willing to settle for that."

"Here in the Iron Office, on the other hand, we can still be of some use."

Seeing that Qinglu had a powerful physique and spoke with a bit more sense than the average iron-office convict, Diwu Lun said: "If I put you in charge of the convicts newly escorted to the Iron Office, could you manage them? Most of them are private retainers and tenant-serfs who attached themselves to Li Neng's rebellion. Some of them may well have flogged you before."

Qinglu patted the great sledgehammer at his side: "I guarantee no one will dare to stir up trouble!"

And so Qinglu was appointed by Diwu Lun as "Clerk of Works," while a different man was chosen to serve as Chief of the Iron Office. Mining and smelting were tasks requiring tight organization. To be a good manager here, an illiterate would not do, an outsider would not do, and a mere craftsman would not do either.

The newly appointed Iron Office Chief was surnamed Guo. It was said he was a descendant of the great Guo clan of Handan ironmasters from the Zhao kingdom era. He understood both the technical side and management, and had previously been the real supervisor of the ironworks. When the iron-office convicts rioted, he had been locked inside a mine pit, and because this Chief Guo had usually treated the convicts fairly well, he was fortunate enough not to be killed.

Diwu Lun released him, restored him to his original post, and left a few of his own clerks to supervise.

Chief Guo understood that his life and his family's fate hung on a single thought of Diwu Lun's, and he was quite eager when accompanying him on the inspection of the ironworks: "The Iron Office is divided into officials, guards, craftsmen, and convicts."

"The officials are responsible for management; the guards bear blades to oversee the labor; the craftsmen specialize in iron smelting; and the convicts do the heavy work."

Now that the ironworks had resumed operation, there were several dozen officials, five hundred soldier-guards, three hundred craftsmen, and nearly two thousand convicts. The scale of the Wu'an Iron Office already matched that of a small township.

The iron mines at Wu'an were mostly open-pit. They had been mined for several hundred years and were still not exhausted — partly because the efficiency of manual mining was indeed nothing special, and partly because the ore veins were quite rich. At the very least, Diwu Lun's generation would have nothing to worry about.

The tenant-serfs, field slaves, and private retainers of the Li clan who had held out in rebellion were mostly escorted here to work the mines. Many of them had surely been forced into following the rebels and could have been pardoned to become law-abiding commoners, but there was no help for it — a huge iron mine needed people to work it. They could hardly have the Boar-Rush Braves or the refugee soldiers carry the ore on their backs, could they?

Thus Diwu Lun liberated one batch of slaves, only to make even more people into slaves — or rather, many of them had been slaves in the past as well. The only difference was that instead of working for Old Master Li, they now did hard labor for Old Master Diwu Lun, and the treatment the latter gave them was even worse than the former.

By contrast, the iron-office convicts who had once been trampled at the very bottom had now turned their fortunes around and become soldiers. Qinglu, newly installed in office, carried his beloved great sledgehammer and led men to supervise. He also stationed men with crossbows to occupy the high ground, ready at any moment to stamp out resistance and rebellion. Qinglu had sharp eyes — he himself had led the uprising, so he knew which men were dangerous. Anyone who made a reckless move would be dragged out at once. Better to kill by mistake than to let one slip by.

Under this brutal repression, most men accepted their fate. Their faces caked with dust, they pushed small carts carrying crushed ore from the mines toward the smelting area. Some used livestock to pull the carts, but halfway there an old ox would collapse from exhaustion, and the whips fell without mercy on it and on them alike.

In the mining area, flying dust and stone chips swirled and billowed, while in the smelting area, the furnace heat blazed so fiercely it parched men's mouths and tongues. Convicts shoveled charcoal and hauled ore there too, but the work was mostly handled by craftsmen of slightly higher status, men whom Diwu Lun had given raises and protection and whose living conditions he had improved.

On his first visit to the Iron Office, Diwu Lun had noticed that they were already using blast furnaces to smelt iron. But those furnaces were not really all that tall — just a little over two meters. The furnace walls were built of red sandstone, the inner walls narrower at both top and bottom with a bulging belly. Furnace workers added charcoal and iron ore inside to produce pig iron.

Diwu Lun, who had built his start on coal briquettes, examined the charcoal used for iron smelting: "Where is this charcoal fired?"

Chief Guo replied: "One does not peddle firewood beyond a hundred li, nor grain beyond a thousand. But the trees around Wu'an are already exhausted; the wood has to be brought from the Taihang Mountains to the west and fired nearby. There are several hundred men specifically assigned to felling trees and over a hundred to charcoal burning."

Diwu Lun nodded. He did not rashly order all the craftsmen to smelt iron using his "new techniques." Instead, he made restoring production the main goal for most of the smelting area, following the iron-smelting methods the Wu'an craftsmen were already skilled in, to guarantee daily output.

On that foundation, he also designated a small area for innovation and tinkering with new techniques.

Speaking of which, the several dozen ironworkers Diwu Lun had swindled out of the Li Tong household in Nanyang the year before had also been brought along to Wei by Ma Yuan. Now, at last, they had a place to put their skills to use.

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Only, the composition and content of the iron ore from Nanyang and that from Zhao were not entirely the same, and the details of iron smelting also differed. Add to that the mutual unintelligibility of their dialects, and rather than letting them and the Wu'an craftsmen get in each other's way, it was better to separate them. The Wu'an smiths would ensure production was restored, while the Nanyang smiths would tinker with a new production line for Diwu Lun.

In light of the Wu'an Iron Office's situation, Diwu Lun planned to start the overhaul with the furnace construction — things like increasing the height and using new materials.

As for fuel, switching abruptly to coal would not be suitable, but there were also tricks to how charcoal was fired.

All of this was aimed at raising the furnace temperature. And when Diwu Lun proposed that, on top of the locally used "horse-driven bellows" — leather bag bellows powered by manpower and animals — they should try using the rushing stream that flowed past the smelting area to drive the blast with water power, Chief Guo told him: "This technique — this humble one has heard of it!"

It already existed? But Diwu Lun had never seen water-powered bellows in Guanzhong, Yecheng, or Wu'an.

"I've heard that in Ji County in the neighboring commandery of the Rear Column (Henei), there is a Clerk of Works named Du Shi who built water-driven bellows to cast iron into farming tools — using little effort but achieving great results. Only, this humble one has not seen it with his own eyes, only heard others mention it. I don't know if it's true or false."

"Du Shi…" Diwu Lun committed the name to memory. Ji County in Henei was not far from Wei.

As for the pig iron produced, it was either directly cast into iron implements or further processed into wrought iron — that was all. Only a very small amount was forged a hundred times and carburized into steel.

And just as Diwu Lun was arranging for the Nanyang craftsmen to establish the new techniques, the production at the Wu'an Iron Office that had been disrupted by war, and the furnaces that had been destroyed, were gradually being repaired.

As the furnace fire blazed a deep red, amid the cheers of the crowd, the first batch of pig iron after the resumption of work gurgled out from the tap hole. It was cast into a standard spearhead and brought over for Diwu Lun to inspect.

"Excellent."

Though it was still the old technique, this meant that the war machine of Wei Commandery, under Diwu Lun's control, had begun to turn once more.

Gripping this spearhead that still held the lingering heat of the fierce flames, watching the Iron Office workshops bustling with fiery activity, and watching the Nanyang ironworkers tinkering with new techniques and promising to test the new production line for the "co-fusion steel method" Diwu Lun had proposed before winter set in —

In Diwu Lun's heart, all the stifled frustration from the past year of swallowing indignities, of "governing by non-action" and feigning compliance with the powerful clans, seemed to be swept away in an instant. The time had come to act boldly and decisively.

"The land reform, the iron and steel — everything begins with Wu'an. Perhaps this is Heaven's will!"

By now, the path Diwu Lun would walk was beyond doubt.

"Pacify all under Heaven by force of arms!"

…

In the eighth month of the third year of Dihuang, just as Diwu Lun was preparing to smelt iron and steel on a grand scale in Wei and begin his campaign to pacify the realm by force, the Li clan — Nanyang's foremost great house, from whom he had earlier poached several dozen ironworkers — was fretting over its own family's future.

Li Tong and his cousin Li Yi met once more within their fortified manor.

The situation in Nanyang had shifted dramatically from the seventh month of this year onward.

First, a plague and malaria broke out on Greenwood Mountain in the south. Over half the Greenwood men died of the sickness, and the various chieftains, having no choice but to relocate, split their forces in two.

"One band, called the Xiajiang troops, headed south — probably aiming to enter Nan Commandery to the west."

Li Yi held a post in the Grand General of the Advisory's staff, but he had not gone to the front lines, remaining instead in the Jiang-Han region. Now he had found an excuse to hurry back.

"The other band, called the the Xin troops, marched north into Nanyang and is now attacking Sui County!"

The reason the Greenwood the Xin troops did not take the flat, open route through Jiang-Han was that Yan You held the line along the Han River. They were forced to cross hills and ridges, but they still entered Nanyang. The commandery troops rushed over to intercept them, yet their vanguard was routed by the Greenwood men.

The crisis they had dreaded for years had finally become reality. Li Tong's brows furrowed deeply as he looked at his cousin. "You've been serving in the army, my brother, and know the true state of the imperial forces. In your judgment, what are the odds between Greenwood and the government troops?"

"Lord Yan is a master of military operations. If he can annihilate the Xiajiang troops and then return north with his main force, Greenwood will certainly be no match. However…"

Li Yi looked at his elder cousin. "However, I have heard that the plague not only ravaged the Greenwood ranks but also spread into the government camps. The imperial troops are mostly northerners, far less able to endure the blistering heat and pestilence than southerners, and their losses are even more catastrophic. Over half have already died of sickness, and they have almost no fighting strength left."

"There are even rumors that the Grand General of the Advisory, Yan You, has also contracted the illness. He has been bedridden for many days, and no one knows whether he is dead or alive!"

…

PS: Chapter 2 at 18:00.