Chapter 92: Nanjing
Mei Lin, worried that the construction schedule would be delayed and he would miss the trip to Nanjing, was so anxious that he developed blisters on his mouth. This scared Zhou Dongtian so much that he didn’t dare to mention the words “go to Nanjing” again. He had to wander around the Zhao residence every day. Fortunately, at this time, the printing equipment and supplies brought by the inspection team arrived one after another, so Zhou Dongtian started the work of installing and debugging the equipment.
The printing house was set up in a small courtyard in the abandoned garden of the Zhao residence. For now, the ink and paper used by the printing press were still transported from Lingao. Zhao Yigong planned to solve this locally in the future. The chemicals needed for lithography were difficult to obtain locally and were still imported from Lingao.
Hangzhou could easily purchase various types of native paper—although they were not as smooth and white as Lingao’s writing and printing paper. As for ink, only water-based inks like pine soot ink could be obtained locally. Zhao Yigong had to find a way to solve the problem of oil-based ink himself. His solution was to plant flax at the Phoenix Mountain Manor. The harvested flax could be used for weaving cloth, and the flaxseed oil would be a suitable oil base.
While assembling and debugging the equipment, Zhou Dongtian specially selected two recently recruited, mature, reliable, and literate local young men as apprentices. The literacy rate in Jiangsu and Zhejiang was quite high in the late Ming. To minimize the work of literacy education, Zhao Yigong had also paid attention to the basic literacy level of the applicants when recruiting servants and clerks.
Although some people believed that printing workers should be transferred from Lingao, Zhou Dongtian disagreed. Firstly, operating a manual printing press was not a high-level skill, and maintenance was also easy. He could teach them himself in a month or two. Secondly, relying too much on personnel transferred from Lingao could easily lead to a sense of alienation among the local staff.
Zhou Dongtian taught them how to operate the machines step by step, including simple maintenance work. Because lead type was too heavy and inconvenient to transport, the Hangzhou printing house was not equipped with lead type for the time being. They only used the lead molds of books transported from Lingao for printing. When they needed to make their own plates for printing, they used lithography.
The two young men were initially filled with awe for these iron contraptions full of strange objects. At first, it was a kind of fear, afraid that these things would “bite” them. Later, when Zhou Dongtian started the machines and showed them their powerful printing capabilities, their fear turned into sincere admiration.
Young people are receptive to new things, and after accepting them, they often tend to vigorously defend the new things they identify with. Therefore, Zhou Dongtian did not want to recruit old, unemployed woodblock carvers from outside to operate the machines. New things should be used by new people.
“These are both printing presses from Guangdong—I’ve heard they are from overseas,” Zhou Dongtian said vaguely. “Apart from Guangzhou, you won’t find them anywhere else in the Great Ming.”
The two young men were very excited. Everyone understood what it meant to learn a skill that few people in the Great Ming knew. What was even more commendable was that this Master Zhou was not secretive at all. When teaching, he taught everything he knew, and he would try his best to explain anything they didn’t understand. In this era, where skills were strictly kept secret and apprentices had to work as slaves for their masters for several years to learn even a little, this was simply the act of a saint. This casual, old-world practice made the native workers in any enterprise controlled by the Senate feel extremely grateful.
Zhou Dongtian was not worried that they would secretly escape and set up their own business or spread the technology. The technology of an industrial society had to have a sufficient material basis. Without equipment and raw materials, they could not replicate the production capacity of the Hangzhou printing house. It was not that there had been no cases of workers trying to steal a certain technology or product in Lingao—especially among the naturalized workers who were small craftsmen before coming to Lingao. But their attempts had all failed without exception. The production model of Lingao was something that small producers could not replicate. Even if they could, the cost would be unimaginably high.
While Zhou Dongtian was training the printing workers, Mei Lin had also basically instilled his architectural intentions and construction methods into the head carpenter of the wood cabinet. He could now safely hand over the rest of the project to the wood cabinet.
A few hundred li away from Hangzhou, in the city of Nanjing, two two-man sedan chairs were passing by the main road next to Zhengyang Gate. The sedan chairs stopped at a place not far from Chengtian Gate, but not yet in the forbidden area. The curtain of the sedan chair was slightly opened. Two men were looking out from the sedan chair window at the majestic Forbidden City of Nanjing.
Sitting in the sedan chairs were Zhou Dongtian and Mei Lin. They had arrived in Nanjing the day before, escorted by Sun Wangcai and his men. They were temporarily staying at the outer branch of Qiwei outside Nanjing city. They had come into the city today specifically to investigate the local commercial situation. When entering the city, Mei Lin had specifically requested to see the area around the Forbidden City. As an architectural enthusiast, he had a strong interest in the Ming Forbidden City, of which only a few ruins remained in the old world, and he wanted to see it with his own eyes.
The Forbidden City of Nanjing was a complex of buildings with yellow glazed tile roofs, surrounded by a high wall that was five li long from north to south and four li wide from east to west. The vermilion palace wall of Chengtian Gate had peeled off a lot, looking mottled. There were small trees and weeds on the roof of the gate tower, which had clearly not been cleaned for a long time. At the palace gate, as usual, there were a few eunuchs and guards, but they all looked listless.
Accompanying them into the city was a major employee recruited by Qiwei locally, a true old resident who knew the city like the back of his hand. Seeing their great interest in the Forbidden City, he began to tell them about the situation inside.
Within the palace city, Chengtian Gate was the boundary. North of the gate was the Forbidden City. Passing through Duanmen and Wumen, one would see the three great halls of “Fengtian,” “Jinshen,” and “Huagai” standing in succession. On the east and west sides were the “Wenhua Hall” and the “Wuying Hall,” as well as the “Wenlou” and “Wulou.” This was where the emperor received the audience of officials and held grand ceremonies.
North of the “Three Great Halls,” all the way to Houzai Gate, belonged to the “Rear Court.” There were many other palaces with different names, as well as an imperial garden. The emperor’s daily life was all there.
Besides this part of the Forbidden City, to the south of the palace city, a wide imperial road stretched straight from the Five-Dragon Bridge outside Chengtian Gate to the main gate of the palace city—Hongwu Gate.
On the east side of the imperial road were the five ministries of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, and Works, excluding the Ministry of Punishments, as well as the Court of the Imperial Clan, the Court of State Ceremonial, the Imperial Observatory, and the Imperial Academy of Medicine. On the west side were the highest military institutions—the Five Chief Military Commissions, as well as the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the Office of Transmission, and the Court of Imperial Sacrifices.
“You know a lot. Have you been inside?” Zhou Dongtian suddenly became suspicious.
“How could I have been inside? But there are many old eunuchs in Nanjing. I’ve heard them talk a lot about things inside the Nanjing palace in the teahouses, so I know a little,” the man said with a bow.
This magnificent palace city, after Emperor Chengzu moved the capital to Beijing, had been idle for more than two hundred years and was now dilapidated, completely losing its former grandeur. The Ming emperors rarely left Beijing to visit this southern capital, resulting in most of the palaces in the Forbidden City being abandoned and in disrepair. Even the yamen that were still staffed by officials, apart from a few gatehouses where some people came to “attend to business”—the so-called business being nothing more than routine paperwork—most of the walls were left to crumble without anyone caring. It was a scene of utter decay. Mei Lin felt some regret and said, “Let’s go.”
The sedan chairs proceeded along the main road. After passing the examination hall, the market became lively and prosperous.
The weather was clear. The warm spring sun shone down from the clear blue sky, casting the shadows of the row of houses on the left onto the wide, bluestone-paved road and onto the pedestrians. This main thoroughfare in Nanjing was originally very wide, “wide enough for nine carriages,” but since the Wanli era, the population had grown rapidly, and business had flourished. The residences and shops on both sides of the street had encroached on the official road, gradually making it less wide. Coupled with the large number of pedestrians, the road became even more crowded.
The shops on both sides of the street were packed together. Most of them had low eaves and wide storefronts. The black lacquered signs on the storefronts read things like “Old Silk and Velvet Shop,” “Hairnet and Wig Shop,” “Hangzhou Powder and Famous Fragrance Official Soap,” “Sichuan and Guangdong Miscellaneous Goods,” “Northwest and Two-Mouth Fur Goods for Sale,” “East and West Ocean Goods All Available,” “Famous Books from the Inner Corridor’s Lexian Hall for Sale,” and “Shunchang Hong Tongshang Silver Shop,” some even inlaid with gold powder. On the street, people in sedan chairs, on donkeys, and on foot bustled about.
Merchants from all over gathered in the official corridors and in front of the inns, hawking and displaying their goods, and haggling with customers. Gentry and wealthy households from all over, as well as Confucian scholars, sat in the teahouses with lanterns hanging in front and various fresh flowers, talking animatedly. The teahouses were packed, and business was booming. The restaurants were noisy with the sound of voices, and the sound of music and singing filled the air, with the enticing aroma of flirtatious laughter and delicious food drifting on the wind…
The accents on the street and in the shops were no longer entirely the Nanjing Mandarin that was common in the north and south. A mix of southern and northern accents filled the air. Besides the common people from Huizhou, northern Jiangsu, and Shandong who came to this prosperous place to make a living, there were also many well-dressed gentry and wealthy households among the crowds with various accents. The social turmoil and wars at the end of the Ming, the defeat in Liaodong, the She-An Rebellion in Guizhou, and the endless “popular uprisings” in various places had caused the local gentry to flock to the socially stable Jiangnan, to this land of pleasure and indulgence to escape the chaos. Most of them brought their large families of dependents and servants and a great deal of gold and silver treasures, buying houses and land in and around Nanjing, and living a life of debauchery and extravagance.
Sitting in their sedan chairs, the two transmigrators had different feelings. Zhou Dongtian was quite surprised by the prosperity of Nanjing. In his view, it was no less impressive than Hangzhou. It seemed that the “capital effect” was still quite significant in this secondary capital of the Great Ming. Such a prosperous market was obviously not sustained solely by the consumption power of Nanjing itself.