Chapter 416: The Most Expensive Iron

Liu Chengzong had never seen the Marshal's Office shipbuilding budget at the Naval Command.

After all, they had just dumped Vice-Commissioner Zhou here, and in barely two years, every kind of vessel was sailing on vast Qinghai Lake — the Marshal's Office's military operations were never held up.

This time he took a close look at the Naval Command, and to be honest, shipbuilding was no simple matter.

In the Naval Command's dockyard, a horse-transport ship from Dragon Colt Island was nearly finished. According to Zhou Riqiang, the prototype for this horse-transport ship was a patrol vessel used for coastal defense in Shandong.

The ship was sixty-seven chi long, eighteen chi wide, and six chi deep, with hull planks two and a half cun thick, equipped with a fighting platform and a small tender boat for rapid short-range river patrols.

This vessel was meant to transport warhorses between the Naval Command and Dragon Colt Island, so cargo space inside had to be considered. The design therefore did not use a paddlewheel structure — two masts, four sculls — and it was not intended to carry munitions for combat, though fishing gear was placed at the stern.

For such a very simple cargo ship, several dozen large fir trunks were used; the iron nails alone required two thousand seven hundred and eighty jin, with one thousand three hundred jin of grass-root fiber and seven thousand jin of lime.

Most of the material processing did not take place at the Naval Command. The rougher hull-plank work was contracted out to Mongol carpenters in Haibei County — though their main trade was actually timber-felling.

Materials requiring finer processing were handled by the Juerwan Hundred-Works Bureau. Only certain large components that were hard to transport required the Armory Bureau to dispatch a few craftsmen, who brought their apprentices to the Naval Command to manufacture them on site.

This way, the Naval Command was responsible only for the ship's design and assembly, requiring one thousand five hundred man-days of labor at a wage cost of forty-five taels of silver.

If this were the imperial court building the ship, the cost of this vessel would be forty-five taels.

Because all shipbuilding materials fell within the scope of taxation, the cost was merely the grain-wages of the artisan households.

When the Marshal's Office built ships, however, it was more like private merchants or sea bandits of the Great Ming building ships: materials were either gathered and processed by mobilizing manpower, or purchased from New City or even He-Huang at market prices. Calculated at market rates, the materials came to three hundred and sixty taels of silver.

The entire ship, labor and materials combined, cost four hundred and five taels of silver. Five hundred shipwrights plus eight or nine arsenal craftsmen, busy for a month, could launch ten of them.

The arsenal craftsmen seconded here were mainly responsible for forging the ship's anchors.

This ship, for example, had five anchors. The largest was called the "home-guard anchor," weighing five hundred jin. It could not be cast — it had to be forged. The anchor body and the four flukes had to be forged separately, then joined together by forge-welding, which meant only military craftsmen could come to the Naval Command to make it.

As it happened, Baatur Khong Tayiji was already utterly captivated by the Armory Bureau craftsmen's forge-welding of anchors. The Tatar smiths who paid tribute to the Oirat could forge the finest blades, spearheads, and arrowheads, and could even draw metal into wire to make mail armor that arrows could hardly pierce — but they could not hammer out a huge object like this.

Perhaps the Tatar smiths could forge an anchor shaft and anchor flukes?

Baatur Khong Tayiji did not know. He had never seen the Tatar smiths hammer out anything this big. And more to the point, how did you stick two massive iron chunks, each weighing two or three hundred jin, together?

The Marshal's Office blacksmiths erected a two-story wooden scaffolding beside the forge. Eight apprentices hauled on iron chains to hoist the heavy anchor flukes into the air, while four apprentices below struck them with repeated blows of heavy hammers. The master smith evenly sprinkled finely sifted yellow mud onto the fracture surfaces, and an apprentice worked the bellows beside him. With every handful of yellow mud scattered, the fire blazed one degree hotter.

The Khong Tayiji watched, utterly entranced, his face full of bewilderment. "Why use mud? Can it stick iron together?"

Dai Daozi had no idea either, and even if he had known, he would not have known whether he was allowed to say, so he could only cast a pleading look at Liu Chengzong.

Liu Chengzong laughed. "I told you to look at ships, and you've fallen for blacksmithing instead. That's not yellow mud — it's called aged-wall dust."

It was actually soil scraped from the base of old house walls. Because forge-welding was not like casting: the blast furnace for casting pig iron was sealed and reflected heat, so the temperature inside the furnace was higher. For forging, the heat source was only the forge fire. Small forge-welded items could be heated red in the forge fire and joined with white-copper filings.

But for large pieces like an anchor, it was impossible to heat the whole thing red in the fire. The forge fire's ventilation also made it hard to maintain the fire at the right temperature, so localized oxygen-burning was needed to raise the temperature.

The base of old house walls drew damp, so the soil scraped from them contained saltpeter. The role of aged-wall dust in this process was as an oxidizing agent: it continuously raised the temperature locally at the fracture surfaces, softening the iron so it could be forced together.

Liu the Lion had no wish to see Baatur Khong Tayiji turn into a master smith. He had Dai Daozi pull the Khong Tayiji, drenched in sweat from the heat, away from the forge, and led him to the shore, pointing at the horse-transport ship in the dockyard. "Look at this ship — what do you think?"

Baatur Khong Tayiji looked and looked, then shook his head repeatedly at Dai Daozi. "No good, no good. This ship won't do."

Liu Chengzong was rather surprised. "Why won't it do? You think this ship can't beat that centipede ship?"

The Khong Tayiji then muttered a long string of words. Dai Daozi frowned, his face full of puzzlement. After a long moment, he turned to Liu Chengzong, caught between tears and laughter. "Marshal, he says the ship isn't bad — the trouble is it's too big. They can't build an oxcart big enough to haul it away."

Liu the Lion opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but then felt that the vast and profound Han language was, at this moment, so terribly feeble. He paused, drew a deep breath, and said, "Among ships, this one counts as small. It used three hundred liao of timber, roughly a hundred thousand jin. Are you sure you want to drag it back?"

Hauling boats overland was nothing new. At Hukou Waterfall, in the past when trade moved normally, cargo had to be unloaded upstream of the falls, the empty boats pulled onto land and dragged around the falls, then relaunched empty downstream to load cargo and sail on.

But how far a distance was that?

What was more, Qinghai Lake was ringed by mountains on all sides. Dragging a boat out was no different from a fool babbling in his dreams.

The Khong Tayiji's face was likewise written with helplessness. "Then what to do? We can't just take it apart, can we? What a waste."

Liu Chengzong smiled, watching the bustling dockyard. He had men bring over several folding chairs and sat with Baatur Khong Tayiji by the lakeshore. "If we trade, I can provide the Oirat with warships, firearms, cannons, and all manner of fine, costly goods. What can the Oirat provide me?"

Baatur Khong Tayiji could not say for certain. He said, "If we trade here, there is not much the Oirat can bring. But if the Grand Marshal can find a way to receive goods at Suzhou, the Oirat can bring the Grand Marshal a great many things."

He explained, "From the Tianshan Mountains to Suzhou, past Hami there is a four-day stretch with no water to drink — it is a hard road. But from Hami to Ulan Mountain, apart from Chudan, there are a full eight days with no water to drink, eight days with no food to eat."

This was indeed a problem. Even if the Marshal's Office extended its grazing lands to Chudan and Golmud, the local conditions as a trade route still could not compare with Gansu.

But the Gansu question was already within the Marshal's Office's considerations, so Liu Chengzong was not overly concerned. He merely asked, "If it were at Chudan, what could the Oirat provide? And at Suzhou, what could the Oirat provide?"

"Then there's no need for Chudan. We can deliver goods straight to the sea."

Baatur Khong Tayiji said, "Persian brocade satins and silks, all kinds of leather; from Bukhara, sheepskins, fox furs, gemstones, indigo. As for the Oirat, the journey is so long that live animals are hard to transport…"

He thought for a moment and added, "Each year, twenty to fifty thousand steppe fox and yellow fox pelts, fifty thousand ermine pelts, twenty to forty thousand sheepskins, three thousand mountain-weasel pelts, one thousand wolf pelts, eight hundred sable pelts, five hundred lynx pelts, three hundred leopard pelts, one hundred white rabbit pelts."

Having said this, he glanced up at Liu Chengzong, sensing that these enormous quantities of furs perhaps did not hold great competitive weight among the Marshal's Office's goods, and spoke again. "If the Grand Marshal can receive goods at Suzhou, I can have merchants bring live animals over."

In truth, over a hundred thousand furs a year still held a certain competitive weight for the Marshal's Office. For sheepskins alone, counting adult sheep, goat, and lamb pelts, Juerwan's total annual trade volume was around one hundred and fifty thousand.

That the Oirat could transport twenty to forty thousand sheepskins over such a long distance — that single item alone was worth sixteen thousand taels, no small sum.

It was just not as much as Liu Chengzong had imagined.

So he asked, "If you could bring live animals over, how many would that be?"

"Fifty thousand sheep, five thousand horses, one thousand head of cattle each year." Baatur Khong Tayiji said, "These things ought to be worth some money at the Marshal's Office… Can they be exchanged for firearms, cannons, and warships from the Marshal's Office?"

Liu Chengzong nodded, very satisfied. These things were indeed valuable at the Marshal's Office. The annual scale of the cattle and horse market at Juerwan was no more than a thousand-odd head; the sheep market was only twenty thousand head.

Sheep at one tael each, cattle and horses at eight taels per head — add those furs, and the goods the Oirat could provide each year approached two hundred thousand taels.

And these two hundred thousand taels could not possibly all be taken back to the Tianshan Mountains by the Oirat; they would absolutely have to spend lavishly at Juerwan.

"It can. It's enough — even more than enough."

Liu Chengzong said, "I know the Tayiji can also make guns. Using the Tayiji's own craftsmen to make them must be cheap, but after all, they make them slowly, and in small numbers. I can provide guns and cannons in bulk. It just depends on how many the Tayiji wants to buy."

Baatur Khong Tayiji thought to himself that this was the crux of the matter. Gritting his teeth, he spread his hands and said, "We can make five hundred muskets a year. How many can the Marshal's Office sell me?"

Having spoken, he stole another glance at Liu Chengzong, very much lacking confidence.

Because the Dzungars could not produce that many in a year. His muskets all came from a few Tatar smith tribes who nomadized near the Ob River. Each small tribe paid him an annual tribute of thirty or fifty muskets — around two hundred a year in total.

They had begun paying tribute of muskets to the Dzungars in the forty-eighth year of Wanli. Up to now, counting captures from several large-scale clashes with Tsarist Russian expeditionary forces, the whole tribe had fewer than four thousand muskets.

But Liu Chengzong actually believed him.

The Khong Tayiji was thinking: did he have any idea what an annual output of five hundred muskets meant?

A Tatar ironworking tribe of over a thousand able-bodied men, busy all year round, could only knock out thirty to fifty firelances beyond digging ore, smelting iron, and forging weapons. Five hundred a year meant that under Dzungar rule there were over ten thousand Tatar ironworkers — roughly equivalent to an unprecedentedly powerful overlord of the Tianshan.

In Liu Chengzong's mind, five Oirat gunmakers with gin-blossom noses hefting great hammers took shape.

They brought forty-five little Tatar apprentices, busied themselves three days a month hammering out barrels, and spent the remaining twenty-seven days in the workshop blearily guzzling kumiss, directing apprentices to work the draw-bench, then gave themselves two months of paid leave each year, and finally delivered five hundred firelances.

The productive capacity in the two men's minds was not on the same plane at all.

Khong Tayiji thought, I'm already this formidable — shouldn't you sell me firelances a bit cheaper?

Whereas Lion Liu thought, this Dzungar fellow can field tens of thousands of bowstrings, yet after all that he's only got fifty gunmakers in hand.

"The Marshal's Manor produces military equipment solely to supply the manor's own military needs. It cannot spare much."

He was telling the truth, so he prepared to set up a separate arsenal specifically to supply foreign trade to the Oirats: "Starting next year, depending on what sort of equipment you want — the hides are worth roughly a hundred thousand taels, the goods another hundred thousand — I have two proposals."

"I can, by the set, equip one thousand-man unit for Dzungar each year. That is, one thousand one hundred and twenty-five sets of armor and weapons, including four hundred firelances, ten three-hundred-catty cannons, one fifteen-hundred-catty cannon, six hundred waist sabers, six hundred utility knives, four hundred long spears, four hundred and twenty-five suits of mail, two hundred and twenty-five suits of cloth-faced iron armor, one thousand one hundred and twenty-five cotton soldier uniforms, and one thousand one hundred and twenty-five leather soldier uniforms."

Having said this, Liu Chengzong added: "These goods come to fifty thousand taels — that is, half the hides you brought. I can strive, after three years, to provide you with the equipment for two thousand-man units each year. If I take Suzhou, counting your livestock, I can provide equipment for three thousand-man units."

Dai Daozi watched the Grand Marshal, face utterly unruffled, perform a barefaced fleecing right before his eyes. His own eyes went perfectly round, and his interpreting grew somewhat halting.

All these items were individual soldier equipment. To the productive power of a Central Plains dynasty, individual equipment was the cheapest thing of all. The greatest cost of an army had always been the expense of maintaining soldiers.

A soldier armed to the teeth, warhorse and full kit included, was worth only twenty taels. Yet that soldier's annual pay alone was nearly twenty taels, and counting rations, another twenty on top.

Even if he doubled the calculation, this equipment could not possibly come to twenty thousand taels of silver. The Grand Marshal was asking fifty thousand — was he not treating Khong Tayiji like a fool?

In truth, as Dai Daozi saw it, the crux of the matter was not Liu Chengzong's barefaced fleecing, but that he had dealt with Khong Tayiji quite a lot and knew perfectly well that Batur Khong Tayiji was not only no fool, but beneath his rough-hewn exterior was the shrewdest of men.

Sure enough, Dai Daozi, his expression pained, said to Liu Chengzong: "Grand Marshal, Khong Tayiji asks the unit price of each item of equipment."

"Don't be nervous. A trade — each takes what he needs."

Liu Chengzong unconcernedly reassured Dai Daozi, then answered without hesitation: "Firelance, fifteen taels; waist saber, three taels; utility knife and long spear, both one tael; mail, ten taels; cloth-faced armor, thirty taels; cotton uniform and leather uniform, both ten taels apiece. The cannons are simpler — priced by the catty, one catty for two taels."

What Dai Daozi had not expected was that not only Liu Chengzong took this attitude — Batur Khong Tayiji did as well: "Anda, don't be nervous. Ask the Grand Marshal again — can these guns and cannons come with ammunition or not?"

He knew Liu Chengzong meant to make money off him. Even without Dai Daozi's awkward expression, he could guess that these goods cost Liu Chengzong very little.

But by the same token, those hides cost him very little too. He would not be collecting the hides his tribespeople needed for daily life and selling them off to Qinghai — those were all hides that the tribute-paying folk of the northern tribes delivered to him each year.

To be able to exchange those hides, piled mountain-high with nowhere to use them, for a thousand or even three thousand troops — herdsmen soldiers, highly skilled in bow and horse, could at once become the most elite warriors.

And relatively speaking, aside from the firelances and cannons, the prices of the other equipment, once he converted them into cattle and sheep hides, were even a little cheaper than making them himself.

It was equivalent to his tribute folk providing him with one to three elite thousand-man units each year.

"I forgot — cannonballs."

Liu Chengzong had a sudden realization. The Oirats could not cast iron; cannonballs had to be hammered out. He said: "Easy. For the three-hundred-catty cannon, include five hundred one-catty cannonballs and powder. For the fifteen-hundred-catty cannon, include five hundred seven-catty cannonballs and powder. Once the cannon's shot out, just retire it."

Amid Khong Tayiji's repeated praise of the Grand Marshal's forthrightness, Dai Daozi also nodded with a beaming smile.

He had already seen it — the weight of these cannons and cannonballs was entirely different from the Marshal's Manor's active artillery. That meant the Grand Marshal intended to sell the Oirats iron cannons.

The cost of one cast-bronze cannon equaled five cast-iron cannons. The price of iron in this transaction was one catty for two taels. He had never seen iron this expensive!

－－－－－－Off-topic－－－－－－

Good morning!