Chapter 1710 - Rescue on the River
During smelting, workers continuously stirred the molten alloy in the crucible with mixing rods. Once thorough mixing was confirmed, the liquid was poured into steel molds to form the silver bars used for coinage.
Because silver was denser than copper or zinc, during the mixing process silver tended to sink to the bottom while the other metals floated. Without thorough mixing, the first bar would be deficient in silver while the last bar would have excess. Therefore, a small amount of powder was ground from the end of the first bar and the top of the last bar of each batch and sent for assay to ensure consistent alloy ratios.
The cast silver bars could not yet serve as stamping material—they were still castings, not yet "forged." The finished bars were sent to the rolling workshop to be rolled into sheets of the required dimensions for stamping. Compared to processing steel plate under high temperature and pressure, making uniformly thick, flat sheets from the highly ductile silver alloy was already routine for Lingao's industrial system.
Next came stamping. The punch press stamped out circular blanks from the sheet—the embryo of each coin. The leftover scraps were collected, remelted, and pressed into new sheets.
The stamped silver blanks were buffed on an edge-grinding machine to remove burrs, then sent to the pickling workshop for cleaning to remove oils.
The washed and polished blanks were stacked neatly into the edge-rolling machine. This device held each blank and forcibly squeezed its edge, forming a raised rim. This rim—common on modern coins—protected the coin's design from wear. Of course, in this timeline such a design was highly advanced. The mint also impressed fine patterns during edge-rolling; under normal use, the wear on these patterns was imperceptible to the naked eye, but a single pass with a file would leave obvious marks—this was to discourage the "clipping" fraud so popular in this era.
Edge-rolled blanks were fed one by one into the stamping press. Fitted with steel coin dies, the press stamped the silver discs into coins.
Stamped coins still had to be weighed. One feature of stamped coinage was weight precision. But in actual production, making every coin weigh exactly the same was nearly impossible. Tolerances had to be controlled.
After discussions between Industry and Finance, it was agreed that with their current technical capabilities, tolerances could be held within 3‰. Coins were weighed on a continuous scale. The scale operated like a balance: as coins landed on the platform, if the counterweight's oscillation stayed within a certain range, the coin passed through to the exit; if it exceeded tolerance, the greater swing opened another gate and ejected the coin.
Stamped coins were inspected again by hand, then wiped clean. Wrapped in mulberry-bark paper, one hundred to a package, sealed with a Ministry of Finance stamp, they were locked in sturdy money chests and sent to the Central Reserve Bank's vault in Hong Kong to await disbursement.
In early spring, Guangzhou still bore traces of winter's chill. A spell of wretched wind and cold rain had just passed, and the sky remained overcast, adding three parts of gloom to the heart.
At this moment, on the Lion Ocean at the mouth of the Pearl River, an Australian self-propelled vessel trailing smoke and vapor was steaming upstream. By the rail, Meng Xian gazed at the somber gray surface of the river, looking preoccupied.
It was now the seventh year after D-Day—1635 by the Western calendar. Even by the Datong calendar prevalent in the Ming, time had crossed into the eighth year of the Chongzhen era.
Since the first year of Chongzhen, calamities had struck the Ming's north without cease: drought in the first year, great famine in the third, great famine again in the fifth, great floods in the sixth, autumn locusts and great famine in the seventh. From the Central Plains to the northwest, a thousand li of scorched earth—not a blade of grass. The people were displaced, and corpses of the starved littered the land. Ma Maocai, the Shaanxi investigating censor, wrote in his Memorial on the Great Famine: the common people fought over wild artemisia in the mountains; when that was gone, they stripped bark from trees; when the bark was gone, they ate "Guanyin clay"—and then died with swollen bellies.
Meanwhile, the Later Jin in Liaodong raided the frontier year after year. The court not only failed to relieve the disaster areas but redoubled its tax levies. Officials drove the people to revolt. Countless desperate, starving peasants rose in arms; the north was engulfed in smoke, ruined for a thousand li, and the people perished.
In the eleventh month of Chongzhen Six, masses of northwestern peasant armies crossed the Yellow River and burst into Henan.
In the seventh month of Chongzhen Seven, the Later Jin invaded a second time, ravaging the regions around Xuanfu and Datong.
In the first month of Chongzhen Eight, Gao Yingxiang, Zhang Xianzhong, Old Hui-hui, Luo Rucai, Ge-li-yan, Hun-shi-wan, Jiu-tiao-long, Zuo Jin-wang, Gai-shi-wang, Heng-tian-wang, Shun-tian-wang, Guo-tian-xing, She-ta-tian, and other leaders—thirteen houses and seventy-two camps of peasant armies—gathered at Xingyang. Li Zicheng, a subordinate of Gao Yingxiang, proposed the strategy of "dividing forces by direction, attacking on four fronts." Afterward, Gao Yingxiang, Zhang Xianzhong, and Li Zicheng led their forces south to Fengyang, where they dug up the imperial ancestral tombs, burned the Huangjue Temple where Zhu Yuanzhang had once been a monk, killed over sixty eunuchs, beheaded the Zhongdu garrison commander Zhu Guoxiang, and carried off countless treasures. Court and country were shocked; many men of insight sighed privately: the Great Ming was surely finished.
As floods of refugees, gentry, and wealthy families fled south, Guangzhou's harmonious peace acquired an almost grotesque prosperity. The Yuan Council's enterprises—Ziming Tower, Zicheng Records, Guangzhou World—thrived. At the same time, batches of destitute refugees were shipped to Lingao by sea to enjoy the Yuan Council's benevolence.
The fruit was rotten through. Strike while he's sick—the Yuan Council's launch of the Guangdong Campaign at this juncture was like plunging another knife into a dying man. In his heart, Meng Xian rather pitied the Chongzhen Emperor in the Forbidden City: the agony of knowing the situation was hopeless yet still struggling to hold things together was something ordinary people couldn't appreciate.
Yet Meng Xian could take no pleasure in it. As president of Delong Bank and concurrently president of the Central Reserve Bank's Guangdong Branch, he was the Yuan Council's financial general in this new territory. Maintaining fiscal and financial stability in the new region was his inescapable responsibility, and he felt the weight of the pressure.
In this ship's hold lay the new currency he had just drawn from the Ministry of Finance warehouse in Hong Kong. Two hundred thousand yuan in assorted silver coins—mostly half-yuan and 20-fen subsidiary coins. One-yuan coins were few. These were mainly for military and administrative expenses after entering Guangzhou. After all, each one-yuan coin contained over seven qian of silver—rather too valuable by Guangdong's current market standards.
Besides the silver, there were twenty crates of banknotes—again mostly subsidiary notes—totaling one million yuan in face value. This money was the "startup fund" for the Yuan Council's Greater Guangdong Government. Not only that, it would also have to somehow maintain financial stability in the market.
The Hong Kong Mint was still striking silver coins; the presses in Lingao's printing works were still running. Yet he knew resources were limited. He had to find revenue sources for this freshly minted regime as quickly as possible.
"That worry-for-the-nation-and-the-people expression—got something on your mind?" a teasing voice came from beside him.
"West, I'm carrying a heavy load that's suffocating me—not worrying about any nation," Meng Xian turned around. The speaker was Liu San. He had been dispatched by the Ministry of Livelihood and Labor to oversee health work in the new territory. The choice of a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine was probably because the Yuan Council didn't have much modern medical material to spare for the new region—better to start with TCM, which could "make do with native methods."
Liu San nodded. "We're both being sent to cook without rice..."
Meng Xian was about to reply when he suddenly heard sailors shouting in alarm. He turned to look. Several crewmen were pointing at a black speck ahead in mid-river. Liu San was slightly nearsighted; after squinting for a while, he barely made out that the dark shape was probably a person. Meng Xian, who trained with the shooting team, had excellent vision. He could see the figure clinging tightly to a plank, drifting downstream, bobbing up and down, unresponsive to the sailors' shouts—dead or alive, who could say?
Just then the captain came over to ask: there was someone floating in the river—should they rescue him?
Because the ship was carrying "Special-Grade Materials," the captain dared not decide on his own whether to slow down for a rescue.
Meng Xian noted that the ship had progressed to near Yuzhu Islet, not far from Guangzhou World. This was Yuan Council territory, and security had always been good. There were no suspicious circumstances nearby—no problem. He authorized the rescue.
The captain ordered the ship to slow. Several experienced sailors jumped into the river and, pushing and pulling, hauled the man aboard. Liu San came forward to examine him. The rescued person was a young man of about twenty. Apparently he had been in the water for quite some time: his skin was blue-purple, his jaw clenched, his expression pained, his body ice-cold—already unconscious.
With many hands helping, they carried him into the hold. Liu San saw that his breathing was unobstructed and he had not swallowed water. He had them pry open the man's mouth and force down half a bowl of hot water. The young man gradually regained some awareness. In a daze, he pressed his hand to his right lower abdomen, moaning in pain.
Liu San ordered his two young apprentices—orphans he had recently taken in; Fu Wuben was now a famous TCM physician in Lingao—Liu De and Liu Quan to strip off the man's wet clothes and examine his symptoms. There was no external wound on the abdomen, but his face was flushed, eyes red, lips dry, breath foul, tongue red with yellow coating. Feeling his pulse, it was floating, full, and taut—internal yang depleted, yin-cold extreme, pathogenic evil driven deep, the abdomen shrouded in yin miasma. This was the critical sign of intestinal abscess—acute appendicitis with perforation leading to diffuse peritonitis. The situation was quite serious.
Liu San hesitated. With the evil having entered the blood level and yin-yang on the verge of separation—a single thread of yang about to slip away—the patient was at death's door, nine chances out of ten. Standard TCM treatments like Dahuang Mudanpi Decoction or Da Chengqi Decoction would likely not take effect in time to save him. But surgery was impossible on board this ship. What was to be done?
"This man's life is in danger—very critical!" Liu San said. "Surgery is needed, but we don't have the conditions. Alas!"
"If he can't be saved, so be it..." Meng Xian had no interest in someone half-dead. They had rescued him casually; whether he survived afterward was beyond his control. After years living under Ming rule, having witnessed countless human tragedies and separations, he knew that individual compassion could not change most people's fates. His heart had grown hard.
(End of Chapter)