Chapter 866 - Nanjing

Mei Lin, worried that delays on the project would make him miss the trip to Nanjing, was in such a state of anxiety every day that blisters broke out on his lips. This frightened Zhou Dongtian into not daring to mention "going to Nanjing" at all. He could only wander around the Zhao residence each day. Fortunately, by this time Qiwei had transported the printing equipment and machinery brought by the inspection team in batches. Zhou Dongtian began the work of assembling and testing the equipment.

The printing office was set up in a small courtyard within the abandoned garden of the Zhao residence. For now, the ink and paper for the printing presses would still be shipped from Lingao. Zhao Yingong planned to source these locally in the future. The chemicals required for lithographic printing would be difficult to obtain locally and would still need to be imported from Lingao.

Various types of native paper could be conveniently purchased in Hangzhou—though inferior to Lingao's writing and printing paper in smoothness and whiteness. As for ink, only water-based ink like pine soot ink could be obtained locally. Zhao Yingong would have to solve the oil-based ink problem himself. His solution was to grow flax at Phoenix Villa. Flax could be harvested to weave cloth, and flaxseed oil would serve as a suitable oil base.

While assembling and testing the equipment, Zhou Dongtian specially selected two local young men who had recently been taken into the household—mature and reliable, and literate—to serve as apprentices. The literacy rate in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region during the late Ming was quite high. To minimize literacy education work, Zhao Yingong paid attention to the basic educational level of applicants when recruiting servants and employees.

Although some argued they should transfer printing workers from Lingao, Zhou Dongtian disagreed. First, operating a manual printing press wasn't particularly advanced technique, and maintenance was easy. He could teach everything himself in a month or two. Second, excessive reliance on personnel transferred from Lingao could easily create alienation among local personnel.

Zhou Dongtian taught them hands-on to operate the machines, including simple maintenance work. Because lead type was too heavy and inconvenient to transport, the Hangzhou printing office currently had no lead type. They only used the lead stereotypes of books that had been shipped over for printing. When independent typesetting and printing was needed, they used lithography.

The two young men had originally been full of awe toward these iron contraptions covered with strange objects. At first it was a kind of fear, a deep apprehension that the thing might "bite." Then, when Zhou Dongtian started the machine and demonstrated its powerful printing capability, their awe transformed into heartfelt admiration.

Young people were quick to accept new things, and once they had accepted something, they often zealously defended what they had embraced. So Zhou Dongtian had no intention of recruiting workers from among the many unemployed old woodblock craftsmen to operate the machines—new things needed new people to use them.

"Both of these are printing machines from Guangdong—reportedly from overseas," Zhou Dongtian said vaguely. "Apart from Guangzhou, you won't find another like them in all the Great Ming."

The two young men were very excited. Everyone understood what it meant to master a technology that few in the Great Ming knew. Even more valuable was that this Master Zhou held nothing back, teaching everything unreservedly. Whenever they didn't understand something, he would explain as thoroughly as possible. Compared to this time-space where skills were jealously guarded and apprentices had to serve their masters like slaves for years just to learn a smattering of technique, this was practically saintly. This unconscious old time-space approach, practiced in any enterprise under the Elder Council's control, made the native workers overflow with gratitude.

Zhou Dongtian wasn't worried they would secretly flee to set up their own shops or spread the technology. Industrial society's technology required a sufficient material foundation. Without equipment and raw materials, they couldn't replicate the Hangzhou printing office's production capability. In Lingao, there had been cases of workers attempting to steal certain technologies or products—especially among naturalized citizen workers who had been small handicraft producers before arriving in Lingao. But their attempts had all failed without exception. Lingao's production model was impossible for small producers to replicate. Even if they could replicate it, the costs would be unimaginably high.

While Zhou Dongtian trained the printing workers, Mei Lin had basically succeeded in imparting his architectural concepts and construction methods to the mugui's head carpenter. He could now rest assured about handing over the remaining construction work to the mugui.

In Nanjing, hundreds of li from Hangzhou, two two-bearer sedan chairs were passing along the main road beside Zhengyangmen Gate. The sedans stopped not far from Chengtiangmen Gate—close enough but not yet in the restricted zone. The sedan curtains opened slightly. Two men were gazing through the sedan windows toward the magnificent Forbidden City of Nanjing.

Seated in the sedans were none other than Zhou Dongtian and Mei Lin. They had only arrived in Nanjing the previous day, escorted by Sun Wangcai's people. They were temporarily staying at the Qiwei branch office outside Nanjing city. Today's excursion into the city was specifically to survey local commercial conditions. When entering the city, Mei Lin had specifically requested to take a look around the Forbidden City—as a member of the architecture faction, he had intense interest in the Ming Palace, of which only a very few ruins remained in the old time-space. He very much wanted to see it with his own eyes.

Nanjing's Forbidden City was a complex of yellow-glazed-tile-roofed buildings enclosed by high walls five li from north to south and four li from east to west. The vermilion palace walls of Chengtiangmen had peeled considerably, looking mottled and shabby. Small trees and wild grass grew on the tower's roof, clearly not cleared for quite some time. At the palace gate, as expected, stood a few eunuchs and guards, but every one of them looked listless.

Accompanying them into the city was a senior clerk recruited locally by Qiwei—a true old-timer who knew the place inside out. Seeing their interest in the Forbidden City, he began describing the conditions inside.

Within the palace walls, Chengtiangmen Gate served as the boundary. North of the gate was the Forbidden City proper. Passing through Duanmen and Wumenafter, one was greeted in turn by the three great halls: Fengtian, Jinshen, and Huagai. On the east and west sides respectively stood Wenhua Hall and Wuying Hall, along with the Wen Tower and Wu Tower. This was where the emperor received court officials and held grand ceremonies.

North of the "Three Great Halls," all the way to Houzai Gate, was the "Rear Court" area. Inside were many palaces of various names, plus an imperial garden. The emperor's daily life and activities took place there.

Besides the Forbidden City portion, south of the palace walls, a broad Imperial Way extended straight from the Five Dragon Bridge outside Chengtiangmen Gate to the palace's main entrance—Hongwu Gate.

On the east side of the Imperial Way were distributed the five ministries of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, and Works (excluding Justice), along with the Court of the Imperial Clan, the Court of State Ceremonial, the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, the Imperial Academy of Medicine, and other offices. On the west side of the Imperial Way were the headquarters of the supreme military authority—the Five Military Commands—as well as the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the Office of Transmission, and the Court of Imperial Sacrifices.

"You know quite a lot. Have you perhaps been inside?" Zhou Dongtian suddenly grew suspicious.

"How could this humble one go in there? But there are quite a few eunuchs in Nanjing. I've heard them talk about many things inside the Nanjing palace at teahouses. So I know a bit." The clerk bowed and scraped.

This magnificent great palace, since Emperor Chengzu moved the capital to Beijing, had experienced more than two hundred years of disuse. By now, it had long since fallen into decay, completely unlike its former glory. Ming emperors very rarely left Beijing to visit this southern auxiliary capital. As a result, most of the palaces in the Forbidden City had fallen into disrepair. Even those government offices that still had officials assigned—whose so-called "conducting business" was nothing more than routine bureaucratic paper-shuffling—only maintained somewhat presentable reception halls. Most walls and buildings were left to crumble without anyone caring. The whole place presented an utterly dilapidated appearance. Mei Lin felt a bit of regret and said: "Let's go."

The sedan proceeded along the main road. After passing the Examination Hall, the streets became bustling and prosperous.

The weather was clear. Warm spring sunshine slanted down from the azure sky, casting the shadows of the row of buildings on the left onto the spacious, flagstone-paved street surface, and onto the passersby. This main thoroughfare of Nanjing had originally been very wide—"able to accommodate nine carriages abreast." But since the Wanli era, the population had grown rapidly and business flourished. Residences and shops on both sides of the street had progressively encroached on the official road, and gradually the street had become less broad. Combined with the many pedestrians, the road seemed increasingly crowded.

Shops lined both sides of the street one after another, densely packed. Most shops had low eaves but wide storefronts. On the black-lacquered signboards at the shopfronts were painted words like "Old Silk and Satin Store," "Complete Line of Hair Nets," "Famous Hangzhou Powder, Soaps, and Incense," "Sichuan-Guangdong Sundry Goods," "Northwest Frontier Furs for Sale," "East and West Ocean Goods Complete," "Inner Corridor Lexian Hall Famous Books," "Shunchang Trade Silver Shop"—some even inlaid with gold powder. On the streets, people rode in sedans, on donkeys, or walked, coming and going in streams.

Merchants from all directions gathered under the official galleries and before the tafang [trade halls], hawking and displaying their wares, bargaining with customers. Gentry, great households, scholars, and literati from various regions held forth in teahouses hung with lanterns and decorated with fresh flowers at the doors, their seats all occupied, business booming. From the upper floors of restaurants came the din of voices, the sounds of music and song drifting on the wind, punctuated by the titter of flirtatious laughter and the enticing aroma of wine and dishes...

The accents in the streets and shops were no longer entirely the Nanjing Mandarin that was the common tongue of north and south. Accents from all regions filled the air. Besides common folk from Huizhou, the Jiangbei region, Shandong, and elsewhere who had come to this prosperous place seeking their livelihood, among the crowds with their various accents there were also many elegantly dressed gentry and great households. The turmoil and warfare of the late Ming—the defeats in Liaodong, the She'an Rebellion in Guizhou, the various "popular uprisings" breaking out everywhere—had prompted local gentry to flock to the stable Jiangnan, seeking refuge in this land of gentle pleasures and gilded excess. Most arrived with large households of family members and servants and considerable gold and silver, buying houses and land inside and outside Nanjing, living lives of drunken, extravagant decadence.

The two elders sitting in the sedans had quite different feelings at this moment. Zhou Dongtian was rather shocked by Nanjing's prosperity—in his view, this place was no less impressive than Hangzhou. It seemed the "capital effect" was still quite significant in this auxiliary capital of the Great Ming. Such a flourishing market clearly didn't depend solely on Nanjing's local consumption capacity.