"Haha, such a sub-scheming is not worth mentioning. It's very hard for the soldiers to go out to sea to catch fish. Mr. Feng, please take off the fish and shrimps and weigh them." Chen Zilong was praised by Feng Shi, and was very happy, but he deliberately kept a calm smile on his face.

Soon, with the help of a group of navy soldiers and the logistics team that arrived urgently, all the fish and shrimps were weighed, and they were 60,000 kilograms!

Everyone was surprised when they heard this number, and everyone threw a look of awe at Chen Zilong.

Mr. Chen looks like a scholar, but he didn't expect that this person's belly has such real talent and knowledge. He is really not good at appearance.

"Mr. Li, Chen Zanhua, this is my first fishing master. To be honest, I am not very skilled and shocked a lot of fish. If it is next time, I will definitely catch more!"

Feng Shi rubbed her hands, and her face showed a look of joy and regret.

After hearing Feng Shi's words, Li Xiao, the commander beside him, also had a bright smile that could not help but be hilarious.

He immediately calculated in his heart that he would catch it once every 3 days, and count it as 10 times a month. Even if he could only catch 600,000 kilograms each time, the monthly catch was as much as 600,000 kilograms, which was enough to supply all the people who needed to provide food.

If the sea route is peaceful in the future, more ships can be sent to fish further into the deep sea, and more fishing can be obtained.

"Zilong, it is all your contribution to the Chifeng Guard's ability to solve the problem of food. I thanked the military and civilians on behalf of the soldiers." Li Xiao held Chen Zilong's hand and said with a touching look on his face.

"Adults have too much award, even if students have minor wisdom, they are limited." Chen Zilong still smiled calmly. He lowered his voice and said to Li Xiao: "Sir, it is true that one person's wisdom is not as good as everyone's wisdom. Students are thinking that there must be more wise men in our army who can propose more solutions to our army's money and food problems. Why not issue a notice to seek talents? If anyone can make suggestions to help solve our army's money and food problems, he can give a reward."

"Very good! Then, Zilong, please write this notice. Chifeng City, Tielong City and other places will be posted." Li Xiao agreed to Chen Zilong's suggestion without hesitation.

What Li Xiao didn't expect was that the next day, Chen Zilong came to Li Xiao's Qianhuguan Hall with a smile on his face, wearing a coarse cloth shirt and a family member.

"Mr. Li, this person is Xue Dafu, the father of Xue Qiang, the shield soldier of the fifth team of the General A., and I came to show you how to make sea salt to the adults." Chen Zilong said to Li Xiao with a smile.

Li Xiao quickly invited Xue Dafu to sit in. Xue Dafu looked flattered and sat down with a flattering look.

Later, the person introduced himself that this person was the head of Dengzhou salt farm and was very familiar with the salt making process. Because Kong Youde's rebels plundered, burned and killed, Dengzhou salt farm was destroyed, he had to become a refugee. When the family wandered near Laizhou, they were fortunately discovered by Wang Yishou, the head of the B general who came to Laizhou to recruit refugees. His son Xue Qiang was selected as a shield soldier. Then the whole family came to Chifeng Castle, and the family avoided the fate of dying on the streets of freezing and starving.

"Xue Dafu, can I open a salt drying field in Chifeng City?" Li Xiao asked.

"Sir, of course, I see that there are many tidal flats on the coast of Chifeng City. If a large salt field can be planned, it will be a steady stream of profits." The thin black Xue Dafu spitted to Li Xiao and told Li Xiao about the prospects for developing the salt field.

Xue Dafu talked endlessly, but Li Xiao fell into deep thought.

Compared with Xue Dafu focusing on the production of salt, Li Xiao considers more about the future sales of salt.

Li Xiao read some historical books from the late Ming Dynasty, which mentioned the salt introduction system in the late Ming Dynasty.

During the Ming Dynasty, if you wanted to sell salt legally, merchants had to obtain salt intake from the government first. Merchants used salt to lead salt to the salt field to support salt, and then went to the designated salt sales area to sell salt.

This kind of salt entries, each entries are divided into two volumes in front and back. After stamping, they are divided into two parts from the middle. The ones that are then rolled to the merchant are called "inciting paper" - salt entries; the stubs in the front roll are called "inciting roots". The merchant uses salt to lead them to the salt field to support salt, and then sells salt in the designated salt sales area.

In the early Ming Dynasty, the court encouraged merchants to transport grain to the border for salt in exchange for salt turbulence and granted a system of salt trading. It is also known as Kaizhong. The Kaizhong system followed the Song and Yuan systems, but in the Ming Dynasty, it was more than Kaizhong in the border areas, to attract merchants to transport grain to border defense and enrich border military ration reserves.

However, it is now the late Ming Dynasty, and Kaizhong and Fa have long become a historical record, and the saccharine method has been replaced by the saccharine method.

"Ming History? Salt Administration" says that the general content of the method of tying the salt is that merchants holding salt citations are divided into 10 titaniums by region, each titanium is 200,000 titaniums of salt, 300 kilograms of salt, or 6 cents of silver and 4 cents of silver, which is called "woben", with another tax of titanium and 3 taels of silver (transport) titanium. Named after "the sage virtue exceeds the ages, and the imperial style covers the nine circles", those who have not entered the titanium have no right to operate the salt industry.

Of course, the statement in this historical book is that the prices and tax rates of the Ming Dynasty in the Middle Kingdom were very different from those in the late Ming Dynasty, which is not enough to be evidence. But it shows that the court has now directly changed salt from a government-owned monopoly to a contractor monopoly of salt. The government only carries out cash and tax collection, and then designates salt merchants to monopoly of official salt monopoly, and the descendants of the salt merchant can inherit this monopoly. The government then demarcates the area for these salt merchants to transport and sell salt.

So, what conditions are salt merchants qualified to sell salt?

First of all, the salt merchant has to get the order.

The so-called "wound order" is actually a certificate of legal transportation and sales of official salt, a license issued by the Ming government. The "wound order" will indicate the amount of salt inlet obtained by the salt merchant and the transportation and sales area. Those salt merchants apply for qualifications from the court's salt transportation department through various channels, then pay a deposit, and then find someone to provide insurance, and then get the "wound order" issued by the court.

With this thing, the salt merchant has the right to monopolize monopoly, and this nest can be hereditary, or used for buying, selling and trading like silver.

After the house order was established, the salt merchant became an official designated salt seller and had the monopoly rights of a certain area. According to the court's instructions, each salt merchant transported and sold official salt in his respective monopoly areas, and each salt merchant was not allowed to sell it across the border. There is also a special situation, that is, given that the salt merchant's power is small and not enough to support a region, he can still sell it together.

The so-called "selling" means that multiple salt merchants jointly operate a region and divide the sales quantity internally.

After having this house order, the salt merchant will pay the court every year to obtain a qualification certificate for this year, which is the New Year house. With the New Year house, he will have the monopoly rights for this year.

In short, under this kind of salt system, the most important thing is to have a bait order. If there is a bait order, there will be a monopoly and monopoly.

Li Xiao does not have such a monopoly.

He didn't plan to apply for a burial order to the court and sell salt.

Li Xiao, who was promoted to the commander of Chifeng Guard, just now, did not want to violate the interests of too many people because of salt trading in the early stages of his development and encountered too many unnecessary development obstacles.

Therefore, he did not intend to apply for a salt invoice order to the court, so as not to make himself seem too greedy, and to leave a too obvious handle for those court officials who saw him jealous.

Li Xiao planned to use Jintang City on Xuanfu North Road as a base to sell salt to Mongolian tribes first.

There is no such salt induction system in the Mongolian tribes, but it is a pure transaction of handing in hand with money and handing in hand with goods.

If Li Xiao does this, the sea salt produced in Chifeng City does not require salt induction orders, and it will have hidden and reliable sales channels, the prices can be sold higher, and tax evasion can also be taxed.

Now on the market, the purchase price of one 120 kilograms of private salt is three cents of silver. In order to attack opponents and collect more salt, many dealers who purchase private salt secretly mentioned five cents or even six cents of silver.

Of course, private salt dealers cannot do a loss-making business. Once they change their hands, their profits will double. If they are shipped to certain salt-deficient areas, the profits may be ten times higher.

Instead of doing this, it is better to make the profits in the middle.

As for the risk of smuggling with Mongolian tribes, with Jintang City as a cover, the risk can be reduced a lot. After all, there is no leader of the Salt Inspection Department who is tired of living, who dares to come to Jintang City to find bad luck.

Li Xiao believed that if the sea salt produced can be transported to Mongolian tribes for a long distance, it would be absolutely fine to sell 7 taels or 8 taels of silver for each load of salt.

Where the profit lies, even if you are thousands of feet tall, you will go up.

"Xue Dafu, your suggestion is very good. I have adopted it. Please give Xue Dafu a silver of 50 taels." Li Xiao smiled and patted Xue Dafu on the shoulder.

"Thank you for your kindness and reward, Lord Li." Xue Dafu took the heavy white silver and smiled so hard.

Next, based on Xue Dafu's opinions and suggestions, and Li Xiao also made specific designs of the entire salt farm based on the salt harvesting knowledge in later generations.

Li Xiao designed a 500-acre salt field on the coastal tidal flat in the eastern part of Longkou Bay, named Chifeng Salt Field. Its area is about 40 modern football fields. All of them are paved with thin bluestone slabs, slits with mud and glutinous rice juice, and made salt fields like square lattice with blue bricks. These salt fields are connected to the sea through multiple bent swelling channels.

Li Xiao chose this location to make full use of the beach open space. After all, a good deep-water harbor like Longkou Bay will have abundant funds in the future, but it would be a pity to use it to build Shandong's first import and export port.

The design principle of this salt field using seawater to dry salt is actually very simple.

That is, whenever the tide is high, open the gate and pour the surging seawater into the salt field. The water is evaporated in the sun and concentrated to about 15 degrees of salinity. Then open the gate of the salt field, flows into the brine pool from the ditches, and sediment is precipitated in the pool. After the clarification, the brine is pumped into the crystallization pool with a human pump truck, and continues to evaporate under saturation, and white sea salt crystals can be produced soon.

This novel method has improved much efficiency compared to the traditional method of salt boiling seawater and making salt by salt farmers. It is a new salt-making technology that Dengzhou Salt Field has only been newly used in recent years. Unfortunately, such a new salt field has been destroyed by Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming's rebels before they can produce benefits.

Given that there was plenty of people to build the city wall of Chifeng City, Li Xiao decided to be responsible for Chen Zilong and immediately dispatched a group of capable craftsmen to take a large number of family members and prisoners to build a salt farm in the planned place.

Seeing that Li Xiao supported his salt drying business so much, Xue Dafu looked happy. He introduced to Li Xiao that there is now a construction team of more than a thousand people. With sufficient bluestone, mud, glutinous rice juice and bricks, there are two months, 500 acres of salt fields, dozens of large brine pools and crystal pools, sea water rushing channels, and waterproof awnings for brine pool crystal pools, etc., which should be fully constructed.

Although the salt farm is quite large, it saves a lot of budgets because it can use bricks and bluestone slabs produced by its own workshop. According to Xue Dafu's estimate, more than 10,000 taels of silver is enough to be built.

Li Xiao was also very happy to see that the salt farm started construction in an orderly manner. He appointed Xue Dafu as the head of the salt farm, preparing to recruit 1,000 people to work at the salt farm after the salt farm is completed, and the entire salt farm officially began to operate.

Li Xiao remembered that he had taught in chemistry courses that the salt content of seawater is about 3.5%, so one hundred tons of seawater can produce 3.5 tons of salt.

According to Li Xiao, in the late autumn season in the north, the daily limit evaporation of salt fields can reach 6 mm. In this way, even if the production cannot be produced on rainy days and the output on cloudy days is halved, the most conservative output of these 500 acres of salt fields is more than 1.5 million jin per month.

This amount seems to be very large, but in fact, it is a bit insignificant compared to the salt consumption of the entire Ming Dynasty.

According to historical records, in the Ming Dynasty, each person consumed an average of 15 kilograms of salt per year, and Li Xiao's annual salt output was 150,000 dan, which was only enough for 1.2 million people to eat for a year.

This pitiful number is really pitiful compared to the Ming Dynasty's population of over 100 million, almost a drop in the ocean.

However, for the Mongolian tribes, including slaves and settled Han people, with a total population of millions, the salt production of Chifeng Salt Factory is still quite insufficient.

Li Xiao estimated optimistically that if he could really sell 150,000 dan of salt to the Mongolians every year, he would take away the production cost and transportation costs at a price of 8 taels per dan, even if each dan was only 5 taels of net profit, it would be a huge profit of 750,000 dan of silver a year.

With this money, Li Xiao will expand his army again in the future and will not have any worries.

If, in the future, except for Mongolian tribes, such as Korea, Japan, and Nanyang, all trade roads can be successfully established, Li Xiao's salt fields can be expanded again, which will bring him more continuous huge income and wealth.

Li Xiao sighed in his heart, no wonder many time travel novels regard salt making and salt making as a good way to quickly expand money. Only by being in it can you understand how amazing the amount of the silver money is.

"Dafu, if the salt field is running well, it will be expanded again next year to double the number of salt fields to reach 1,000 acres, so as to make full use of the existing mudflat site of our Chifengwei." Li Xiao's eyes turned to the distant sea and sky junction, with a bright smile on his face and his eyes were radiant.

"I am the only one who follows the orders of the Lord!" Xue Dafu, who looked excited and yearning, replied loudly.
Chapter completed!