Chapter 15: Coal Stove and Experiment

The early morning was quiet and elegant, and the whole city was shrouded in a light blue haze, like a shy young girl. The gates of the neighborhood opened one after another, and people walked out of their homes in twos and threes to start a new day.

The clanging sound of the bell in Zhaoguo Lane never stopped all night. Lao Shuan wiped the sweat off his face, poured a bowl of herbal tea from the teapot, and gulped it down. The coarse tea, which had been assimilated by the cold, made him shiver. Sleepiness disappeared in an instant, and he took a piece of ginger out of the teapot and chewed it in his mouth. It was not yet time to eat, and the women and children were still sleeping. They were too tired last night.

Lao Shuan looked at the charcoal piled in the corner of the wall. Each piece was the size of a walnut, very even. This is the best hardwood charcoal, which is notoriously expensive. If it weren’t for the good business, he couldn’t afford such good charcoal.

There were three of the latest stoves in the courtyard, the result of a night’s work by him and his apprentice. Someone would come to collect them today. Three hundred cash for each stove, plus the cost of the iron, made a total of five hundred cash! He had toiled away for days to earn five hundred cash by making a few dozen kitchen knives and door nails. Now his work in one night was equivalent to his previous monthly income, and he had no worries about selling them.

He took out a piece of paper from a small box hidden under the anvil. It was good paper used by wealthy families to write letters and invitations. It was thick and hard to damage. There were drawings of stoves on it, some seen from above, some seen from the side, and some seen from below. There was even a drawing of a stove split open. It was full of words that Laoshu didn’t recognize, but now he could recite them all by heart, without a single mistake. This was taught to him word by word by the old lady of the Yun family.

He had been forging iron all his life, but he had never seen such a pattern before. Once he understood the pattern, even a stupid blacksmith could forge a stove. This was a family treasure that could only be given to Shuanzhu. The other children could just be given more money. When he thought about this, his chest burned with anger. The Yun family is so kind! Back then, they only helped out a little because the widow and the orphan were neighbors, but I never expected the reward to come so quickly and so violently. This has given my family a living for generations. Lord Yun learned his skills from the old immortal. What immortal was that?

He shared the same idea as Sun Wang, the owner of the iron shop next door. He never dreamed that iron could be rolled out like dough. Although it was not as durable as iron hammered out, it was much faster. As long as molten iron was poured into the hopper, the two men pushed the wheel, and a little bit of iron would come out between the two iron rollers , and after a little repair, it is a good piece of iron. It is not difficult to roll it into a three-foot iron bucket with a slightly larger head by knocking it on an iron cone. Now, the iron stoves sold in Zhaoguo Square are sold all over Chang’an, and the chimneys made of iron are indispensable. In addition, a large iron kettle is added to the family to provide hot water at any time, which is very comfortable.

Yesterday, the old lady of the Yun family said that the family was looking for servants for the young ladies. Her own daughter was about to turn ten, so she wondered if she could be sent to the Yun family as a maid. The Yun family was very friendly, and they were all women and children. I heard that the Yun family servants eat three meals a day, the girl will be enjoying a good life. When she gets older, she can ask the old lady to find a good family for her on the basis of the old neighbor’s face. Besides, the girl will be serving the young lady in the noble family, and it will be much better to be trained for a few years than to be a wild girl in a small family.

Zhaoguo Square has never been as vibrant as it is now. Everyone has a lot of work to do. The Yun family’s master said that it is enough for his own people to know, and not to brag about it. Although I don’t understand what it means to brag, I will always shut up. The official of Zhaoguo Square personally guarded the door, and no one who was not related was allowed to enter. He also warned the residents of the square that if relatives came, they should talk at the door. If they wanted to stay, they would be arranged to stay at the inn and not be allowed to enter the square.

The entire neighborhood of 175 households formed the most primitive assembly line. Blacksmiths made stoves, riveters made chimneys, and masons bought unwanted carbon powder and made it into coal briquettes. Making briquettes was no problem for Yun Ye.

Mrs. Cheng and Aunt Yun have been going from house to house these days, and they quickly became friends with the ladies of the house, and they also took the opportunity to sell coal stoves. These smokeless stoves spread throughout Chang’an in no time, and no one wanted to use charcoal braziers anymore. The beautiful ladies didn’t want to wake up with soot in their nostrils.

The old man sat by the stove, warming a pot of sour wine and baking two flatbreads. He looked proudly out at the snow, occasionally telling his grandchildren stories about how heavy snowfall was a sign of a good harvest. The housewife’s favorite was the hot water that was always on the stove, so she no longer had to worry about her hands getting red and swollen from washing clothes and cooking. After all, coal briquettes weren’t expensive.

Yun Ye was a little depressed. He looked at the soot floating above the Yun residence, which stained the sky after the heavy snowfall, and was worried. He wondered if future environmental protection experts would use him as a negative example.

The little girls were sitting on the huge kang in their brother’s room, playing games and messing up the lambskin mattress that their aunt had just made. The little girl was wearing a monkey mask and holding a feather duster, chasing the mouse spirit played by Xiaoxi. Xiaobei was unwilling to wear a pig’s mouth and strongly requested to exchange the Qiankun circle with Xiaodong.

The eldest girl, who is the most obedient, is learning to sew with her little hand holding a needle and thread, and is learning to sew with her little hand holding a needle and thread. Her brother’s clothes are all tight-fitting, not loose-fitting, and they are not warm, not to mention that they are too expensive. I don’t understand, obviously the material is not yet abundant enough to be superfluous, so why don’t you use your brain and use less fabric? The Yun family no longer uses loincloths, nor does the Cheng family, and I guess the Lao Niu family and the crown prince no longer use them either. This proves that the ancients were also very capable of accepting new things.

Zhaoguo Square was just a pilot project that Yun Ye made on a whim to make some money for his family. The neighbors were only earning some silver for their labor. Originally, they planned to pay each person 30 coins a day, which made Yun Ye feel that his heart could be burned as charcoal. The old neighbors refused, and Yun Ye thought it was too little and planned to add ten more. Unexpectedly, the neighbors thought that the Yun family was doing good deeds and could not bear the pride. They said that if the wages were more than twenty, they would rather go begging than eat food given to them.

Apologizing for paying more? Lord Yun left in a huff, slapping his sleeve. The people of the neighborhood were victorious and cheered. A coal stove production line could support 175 households, employing more than 600 people, not counting the blacksmiths, riveters, and coppersmiths who ran their own shops.

Simple lives led to simple employment. These citizens, who grew up in Chang’an, were the first proletarians in the city, doing the hardest work, but they did not receive the respect they deserved. They had no land, and the new land distribution system in the early Tang Dynasty had forgotten them. The terrible artisan household system and the terrible discrimination of merchants. They were not allowed to work, not allowed to do business, and not allowed to farm. They could only exist in a form of vassalage. This is why Sun Wang’s family did not lack food for their daughters, but they were still determined to send their daughters to the Yun family.

Li Er’s head of the guards was a good man named Liu, whose courtesy name was Xian. He was generous enough to let Yun Ye call him Liu Er. His background and experience were unknown, and he was even more mysterious than Yun Ye. He suddenly appeared at the Yun residence carrying half a pig’s head and was in a hurry to kill. It was said that he wanted to discuss the mysterious topic of why Han people could survive bloodletting, but Qiang people would die from it.

Yun Ye really didn’t want to talk about bloodletting. He was only half-baked himself, so how could he be a teacher to others, especially a butcher-like doctor?

Liu Er claimed to be extremely interested in medicine. He had studied the human body on the battlefield, and once carefully dissected a person with a horizontal knife for three days before the person died. He was very curious about what the white brain matter in the skull was used for. How could the heart, which was full of large and small tubes, make people remember so many things? Where was the human mind? After asking, he tore the half of a pig’s head apart with his hands, and each person took half as a snack.

There is no doubt that these hands have touched brains and hearts, and now they are grabbing pig heads? Yun Ye endured the urge to vomit and changed the subject without saying a word. I’m not a pervert, discussing the human brain with you while picking up chopsticks and eating pig brains? I explained to him in detail what psychological terror was like, giving him a small example. You tie a person to a post so that he cannot see his own hands. You cut a small incision on his wrist, but don’t cut it open. Tell him that you have cut open his veins, and that his blood is constantly flowing. After an hour, it will all be gone. Next to him, put a wooden bucket with a small hole in it so that the water drips into the copper basin. Tell him that this is the sound of his blood dripping into the copper basin. When the water in the bucket runs out, the person is dead. In fact, there is not a single wound on his body. This is psychological terror, and he killed himself.

Liu Er felt that he could leave the mountain. He had inherited part of the knowledge of the great man, and now he would go back and write it down to pass it on to his descendants, so that it would be remembered for a hundred generations.

After seeing him leave, Yun Ye smiled and returned to the back hall to continue playing with his sister. What he didn’t know was that as he was about to go to bed, Liu Er was reporting to Li Er.

“Your Majesty, what the Marquis of Lantian said was not wrong at all. All three of the criminals are indeed dead, and there is not a single wound on their bodies.”