Chapter 507 - The Transport Bottleneck

Under Tang Menglong's capable management, the Jiazi Coal Mine swiftly settled into regular production. Jiang Wenli proved herself a worthy graduate of the administrative training program, putting her lessons into practice with such efficiency that daily operations soon ran like clockwork. She oversaw all routine administrative affairs with meticulous care.

Work logs, files, and ledgers were established in due course. Regulations and procedures took shape. Admittedly, she could be doctrinaire at times, adhering rigidly to every clause in Ye Yumin's Coal Mine Administrative Management Manual. Though Tang Menglong's background was in geological surveying rather than mining operations proper, he had many friends in the industry and had observed management practices at both state-owned and private mines. Drawing on this experience, he made judicious adjustments to bring the procedures closer to practical reality.

Secretary Jiang had initially come to serve as Mine Director Tang's personal secretary with a mindset of simple compliance—obeying organizational directives as she understood them. After all, the chiefs always needed women to look after their daily lives: cooking and washing by day, warming their beds at night. For a girl who had once dressed in rags and gone hungry, such an arrangement was more than acceptable. She felt boundless gratitude toward the chiefs who had rescued her from the brink of starvation, clothed her, taught her to read, and even bestowed upon her a name. She was prepared to do whatever they asked. As for any romantic feelings toward this stocky, dark-skinned, rough-handed chief—those, of course, were out of the question.

Nevertheless, her months at the National School had instilled in her a reverence for knowledge. "Knowledge is power"—the chiefs had personally demonstrated this axiom. Through knowledge, they made iron ships float on water, manufactured cannons that neither government troops nor pirate lords dared provoke, and amassed boundless wealth. This had thoroughly overturned the meager worldview of a country girl. She had become a fervent devotee of knowledge supremacy.

Tang Menglong's few casual suggestions had transformed the management procedures she had labored over with every ounce of her training—making them more streamlined, more rational, and especially more practical. For Jiang Wenli, this renewed sense that the chief's wisdom was as vast as the sea also kindled a small spark of genuine admiration.

Tang Menglong naturally paid no mind to whether she admired him or not. She had been assigned to him; that made her his. Though her looks were nothing remarkable, physiological hormones trumped culturally conditioned aesthetics. Once work had more or less stabilized, he "consummated the arrangement." That night he went at it three or four times, leaving the thirty-something Tang Menglong barely able to crawl out of bed the following morning.

"Overindulgence," he muttered as Little Jiang helped him struggle into his clothes, his back and waist aching. Outside, the steam whistle had already sounded twice—it must be approaching seven o'clock. The whistle blew promptly at five each morning, then once every hour; the third blast at seven signaled the start of work. He fished out his pocket watch: 6:50. He would have to hurry to the office, or the miners would laugh at him.

At the doorway, the sentry from the security team presented arms in salute. Tang Menglong waved feebly, wondering whether his enthusiastic exertions the previous night had been overheard by the guards. Come to think of it, what purpose did posting a sentry at his quarters actually serve, aside from putting on airs? He gazed skeptically at the compound's high walls and watchtowers.

The entire mine area was enclosed by a double-layer wall of cement-bonded bricks and stone, defended by bastions and watchtowers, and ringed by a ditch—more formidable than most rural strongholds in the region. Once the gate was shut, several thousand men without siege equipment would never break in. Such precautions were not without reason: during the construction phase, they had spotted figures watching from a distance. The locals might not understand what all these strange objects were, but they instinctively knew they were valuable.

Tang Menglong ate breakfast in his office. The meal came from the Grassland Series: special dried rice noodles sprinkled with dried minced meat, dried seaweed flakes, and dried shrimp skins—quite colorful, truth be told.

"If only I had some fresh vegetables," he murmured wistfully.

His wish was soon granted. Jiang Wenli, who also oversaw logistics and food supply, understood that the mine's stockpile of Grassland rations could sustain them only briefly; long-term provisions of grains and vegetables would be supplied by Lin Baiguang's "Wanfeng Rice Shop." Like any traditional Chinese peasant in any era, the moment she arrived somewhere new she thought of growing vegetables and raising chickens. She had obtained various vegetable seeds through Lin Baiguang from the Tiandihui, borrowed a dozen or so chicks and ducklings, and established a sizable vegetable garden within the mine compound. Tang Menglong praised this initiative highly; freshly picked vegetables from the garden were certainly tastier than the wilted leaves delivered by transport boat.

The prostitutes were organized to work as well. Besides selling their services, they washed and mended clothes and bedding for the miners—for a fee, of course. Tang Menglong had initially worried the women would refuse such work, but they proved surprisingly enthusiastic, often waiving payment. He later realized this was simply one of their methods for cultivating regular clients.

Under stringent modern management and comprehensive logistical support, the miners achieved impressive productivity. The transmigrated collective's coal operation paid by the piece; income was directly tied to output. Tang Menglong set each squad's minimum quota at eighteen tons—yet plenty of squads managed twenty, even twenty-five tons. For extraction crews using only picks, shovels, and pushcarts, these were respectable numbers indeed.

Tang Menglong even considered launching a Stakhanovite labor competition, but then realized that doing so would only swell the stockpile already accumulating at the mine.

From a mine manager's perspective, the more coal extracted the better. Tang Menglong's dilemma, however, was transport capacity.

Even at the outset, limited transport capacity had been the reason for not deploying the coal-cutting machine. Now it was clear that even manual output exceeded shipping speed.

With twelve transport boats moving coal—each carrying five tons—the round trip from the Nandu River dock to the Hai family dock exceeded forty kilometers. Fully loaded and traveling downstream, speed was only five or six kilometers per hour; returning empty but rowing upstream, even slower. A complete round trip plus unloading took eight hours. Days were growing shorter; after dark, the Nandu River was unsafe for navigation. Each boat could make only one run per day. Twelve boats moved just sixty tons daily, while extraction ran to at least four hundred tons. The result: coal piled up in the mine's storage yard.

The backlog grew day by day, posing a serious problem for a mine that lacked modern loading equipment and relied entirely on manual labor. Tang Menglong had no choice but to reduce mining shifts and assign more time to military drill—otherwise, the stockpiled coal would become unmanageable.

Small mountains of coal accumulated in the yard with no immediate prospect of being shipped out. Burning it in the boilers consumed only a trivial amount, and they could hardly export electricity from here. Tang Menglong communicated with Lin Baiguang and asked him to petition Lingao for more transport boats.

"Transport boats aren't the main issue," Lin Baiguang replied. The real problem was not too few boats but too few runs per day.

"The Nandu River has decent hydrological conditions. When I came up on the transport boat, the river seemed quite wide and deep. Why can't they run at night?"

"Boss, that's easy for you to say. The Nandu has no navigation markers and hasn't been dredged. Running boats in the dark courts grounding or striking rocks."

Lin Baiguang had no solution. He could only cable the Executive Committee, requesting a remedy.

"In my view, simply adding more transport boats won't help," Jiang Ye said at an Industry Commission working meeting. "We need to increase vessel tonnage."

"I agree. These transport boats were originally designed for rivers like the Wenlan, with shallow depths and obvious dry-season lows. The dimensions are simply too small—wholly unsuited for the Nandu. We should build larger boats. Barges hauling sand, cement, and coal on canals routinely carry 1,000 to 1,500 tons."

"You're talking about steel- or iron-hulled vessels. Our wooden boats can't compare."

"How deep is the water?" Wang Luobin asked.

"The Nandu is the largest river on Hainan, and the Haikou reach is near the estuary, so navigability should be decent," Jiang Ye said. "Let's get a few flat-bottomed sand junks. Load them with coal at the Jiazi dock and sail straight back to Lingao. That would also eliminate the hassle of transshipping from small boats at Haikou. Qionghai Coal could be freed up for other tasks."

"That may not work," Wang Luobin said. "Visit Haikou and you'll see—one of the most lucrative trades there is sand dredging on the Nandu. Siltation is severe. Sandbars are as numerous as hairs on an ox. The river may look wide, but depth is another matter."

"The average depth of the lower Nandu is about two meters—not insignificant," Luo Duo said. "But that's the depth after the modern Songtao Reservoir was built. Like the Wenlan, the Nandu's water levels vary greatly between rainy and dry seasons. Still, an average depth of around one meter year-round is probably reliable—enough to float boats in the thirty-to-fifty-ton range."

"Since we're short of steel and the Nandu hasn't been dredged, why not build a wooden flat-bottomed boat to Ming grain-transport standards: thirty-one tons displacement, fifteen-ton cargo capacity?" Zhou Bili suggested. "The draft is about 0.75 meters."

"A boat like that would need masts," Wang Luobin said. "Otherwise, the heavy load and insufficient power would make it hard to handle and dangerous to operate."

"I never said no masts…"

Yan Quezhi shook his head with a smile. "You're all just speculating." He picked up the notebook beside him. "It was my suggestion to dispatch small transport boats to the Jiazi Coal Mine for hauling coal. Let me show you the 1957 survey report on the Nandu River from the Ministry of Water Resources Design and Exploration Bureau."

The navigable stretch of the Nandu—from Chengmai to Haikou—was about one hundred kilometers long, suitable only for small craft with a maximum load of ten tons. During the dry season, there were nine shoals with water depth of only 0.3 meters and six more with depths of 0.3 to 0.5 meters. Wooden boats carrying four to nine tons had to rely on crewmembers wading into the water to push the vessels across the shallows.

Author's note: The lower Nandu's current depth is quite impressive—an average of five meters, with the deepest points reaching twelve meters—all thanks to sand dredging. As late as 2000, the Nandu still had no substantial shipping industry.

(End of Chapter)