My younger brother Zhuge Liang

Chapter 25 Age of Empires Technology: Drifting Barb Net
Liu Bei also came from a poor background. After all, he was a weaver and seller of mats until he was fourteen, and worked as a guide and bodyguard for a horse merchant until he was eighteen. Later, he relied on the financial support of his relatives and friends to study seriously and gradually became prosperous.

Even though he has been an official for many years, he is still very clear about the importance of seeing and hearing the suffering of the people with his own eyes.

Sun Qian told him that the people did not respond to the government's call to grow winter mustard because of their fear of the unknown. However, Liu Bei insisted on taking time to go to the countryside to confirm it himself.

So after breakfast, he rode more than 20 miles with his entourage, inspecting three townships and more than a dozen villages in the eastern part of Guangling County.

Interview hundreds of sampled landlords, gentry, and self-cultivating farmers to understand their concerns and listen to their feedback.
Finally, he took off his straw sandals and went barefoot into the fields to check how to breed and transplant the germinated mustard seeds.

After all, this method had never been seen before, and Liu Bei had to confirm the operation personally before he could evaluate the impact of the new production method on the labor workload of the people.

After finishing all this, a whole morning and noon had passed. When I took some time to eat some dry food, the sun was already slightly setting, around the beginning of the hour of Wei (a little after 1:00 p.m.).

Fortunately, the last village Liu Bei inspected was right next to the Han Canal, not far from the mouth of the Han Canal where it flows into the Yangtze River.

And that place happened to be where Zhuge Jin was tinkering with his new invention, so Liu Bei hurriedly ate two whole-grain cakes and a piece of dried meat and prepared to go inspect Zhuge Jin's achievements.

……

Just a quarter of an hour later, Liu Bei arrived at the estuary where the Hang Canal and the Yangtze River meet, a dozen miles southeast of Guangling City.

Guangling City is an important town on the ancient canal. It is the confluence of the Yangtze River and the Hang Canal. Naturally, there are prosperous towns and port docks.
The riverside was crowded with people and countless dock workers were busy there, so much so that Liu Bei couldn't find Zhuge Jin and his party for a while.

During the Han Dynasty, there were no locks on the canal, and the water level difference between the artificial canal and the natural river was a big problem, so river ships and canal ships could not be used interchangeably.

When the canal boat sailed from Huaiyin to Guangling, it had to unload and load the cargo onto the river boat again. The same was true when the river boat sailed north. It was this characteristic of the ancient canal that led to the prosperity of Yangzhou City for a thousand years.

Liu Bei searched for a long time, and finally Sun Qian saw a few familiar faces. He quickly led Liu Bei over and asked, "Where is Mr. Zhuge? Aren't you helping Mr. Zhuge make bamboo nets? Why are you here alone?"

Liu Bei looked in the direction of the voice and saw Sun Qian questioning a group of merchants and sailors. Next to them was a large hard arc-shaped net made of interlaced bamboo strips, with some strange-shaped accessories on the upper and lower sides.

There were sharp thorns at the places where the bamboo strips were crossed and fixed, formed by the splitting of bamboos. Liu Bei saw at a glance that there were fish stuck on some of the thorns. The sailors took the fish off one by one and threw them into the canal nearby.

Liu Bei was startled and looked in the direction of the movement, only to notice that there was a row of large wooden stakes next to them, with a lot of hemp ropes tied to the stakes, and at the other end of the hemp ropes were large bamboo baskets floating in the canal.

He was relieved then, because it turned out that he didn't catch the fish and then throw it away, but put it in a fishing net to keep it there first, so that the fish would die slowly.

In later Chinese textbooks, "罾" is often directly translated into "fishing net", but this is actually a bit inconsistent. In ancient times, things made of soft fibers were called "nets", while 罾 are often hard, and are considered to be "large bamboo frame scoop nets" and bamboo "fish guards".

Liu Bei was relieved to see these gains, realizing that Zhuge Jin's little invention must have worked. It was unexpected that this bamboo net could catch so many fish.

The group of people also saw Liu Bei, saluted him respectfully, and then answered Sun Qian's question:

"The master said that there was a high tide today and he was afraid that the fishing nets would be washed away, so he took the people to a place upstream and said that they would wait until the tide passed before going down.

We were collecting the old fishing nets we had set yesterday and recording our catches at high tide, and sure enough, several bamboo fishing nets had been washed away.”

After listening to this, Liu Bei added, "It seems that the harvest is very good. This thing is really useful. Why didn't you report it earlier?"

The other party replied respectfully: "The catch from these few nets was about 300 to 500 kilograms, and today we have already caught over 1,000 kilograms. The master said there is still a lot of room for improvement, so it has not been reported."

When Liu Bei heard this number, he was shocked at first, and then even more shocked: "How can you catch a thousand catties a day and still not succeed? How many bamboo nets did you use in total?"

The other party said that he had downloaded dozens of pictures in the past few days, and the number was increasing day by day. The gentleman also improved and adjusted several versions.
On the first day, we only caught a few hundred kilograms. After five days of continuous improvements, the amount has increased more than ten times.

Liu Bei was stunned, then asked with relief: "What's your name? Who did you follow originally?"

The man bowed and said, "My name is Tang Guang, I am from Yuzhang. I was born as a fisherman in Poyang in my early years, and later sailed for a wealthy merchant on the river. A few years ago, my former master was killed by pirates in Lujiang, and I ended up living in Guangling. Fortunately, Mr. Mi recruited people who are good at sailing, so I was able to make a living. The other day, Mr. Mi assigned me to you to help you steer the fleet. Seeing that I was diligent, you kept me by your side to do some work, and these days you have ordered us to cut bamboo and make fishing nets."

Liu Bei nodded, thinking that it was from the Mi family merchant fleet, no wonder their attire was somewhere between that of merchants and sailors.

Liu Bei was in a good mood, so he encouraged him: "It is a great opportunity to work with Mr. Zhuge. If you are willing to listen to his advice, even if you are a sailor or a fisherman, it is not difficult to achieve wealth and honor. Take us to see the master."

Tang Guang quickly led the group to the river several miles upstream, and Liu Bei saw a bigger scene.

There were at least several hundred people on the shore, busying about, being directed and directed by Zhuge Jin, waving a palm-leaf fan.

Liu Bei trotted over to greet him: "Zi Yu! I haven't seen you for a few days. You have done great things at home! You even kept it a secret from Gong You!"

Zhuge Jin turned around quickly, patted the dirt off his hands, and said modestly: "These are just a few tricks that have not been fully improved. What's the point of talking about them?"

Liu Bei boasted with a smile: "Just now, a few nets over there caught a thousand kilograms a day. Isn't that good enough? If we can promote this, our army's food shortage will be alleviated by a large margin! The people of Jing and Wu can make up for the rice, rice, soup and fish with the catch, and at least they can eat half less grain."

Zhuge Jin: "What the general saw just now was the one I revised two days ago. Of course, it is barely acceptable. If it were the versions from four or six days ago, it would be completely inadequate."

Liu Bei had not had time to study the principle of this new fishing net. Tang Guang and others were not well-educated and could not explain the reason. Now that Zhuge Jin had explained it, Liu Bei was naturally very curious and humbly asked what improvements had been made.

Zhuge Jin then asked someone to bring over a few discarded "historical versions" nearby and explained the principle.

"This thing is called a 'drift gill net'. It uses the characteristics of migratory fish in rivers and seas. The net is placed directly on the bottom of the riverbed to intercept the tide. When the tide is high, the sea fish will migrate into the river, and when the tide is low, they will return to the sea and bump into the net. There are also barbs formed by forked and split bamboo on the net, which can trap large fish."

Zhuge Jin came up with this idea more than ten days ago, and the source of his thinking, to be honest, was inertia - in his previous life, he liked to play historical strategy games in his spare time, such as "Age of Empires", and he also liked to watch documentaries in games.

In the Age of Empires series, there is a technology in the Feudal Age called "Longline Fishing", and there is also a technology in the Castle Age called "Drift Net".

The game's historical research is pretty good. The technology in the second era basically corresponds to the Sui and Tang dynasties, while the third era corresponds to the Song Dynasty, and the fourth era corresponds to the Ming Dynasty.

Although playing games does not directly tell people the technical details, there were many fishing guys among his colleagues in his previous life. When Zhuge Jin talked about games with others during team building, his colleagues told him what these technologies were.

In other words, in China, longline fishing with multiple hooks on one rope was not invented until the Sui and Tang dynasties, and drift nets that were placed directly into the river to catch migratory fish were not invented until the Southern Song Dynasty.

The people of the Han Dynasty still fished by fishing with a single-hook fishing rod, casting a net by hand, or using a liftable bamboo-frame fishing net. That was all.

Because the fishing technology was so primitive, the ecological environment was well protected. The fishery resources in the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers were even more than after the ten-year fishing ban in later generations. The insignificant amount of fishing by humans did not put any pressure on the ecology of this era.

That’s why the Records of the Three Kingdoms says that Yuan Shu’s army recruited too many soldiers and had insufficient food in Huainan, so they had to rely on picking up river clams to fill their stomachs. Yi Zhongtian even mocked this on his show. But who could blame the fact that there were indeed so many river clams in the Huai River at that time?

Liu Bei was originally in Huaibei, and there was only one Si River outside Xia Pi City. The fishery resources were not rich, which led to Liu Bei not expecting such a great harvest.

His new territory now, Huaiyin can intercept the Huaihe River and the mouth of the Hangou River, and Guangling can intercept the Hangou River and the mouth of the Yangtze River. This is the best location for fishery resources in the entire late Han Dynasty, and is very suitable for the use of new technologies.

After explaining the basic principles of drift nets, Zhuge Jin told Liu Bei why this location was so good: "To maximize the value of drift nets, there must be a daily migration cycle, and it is best to take advantage of the tides.

However, the large rivers that are usually affected by the tides are too wide and deep to be used for drift nets. At most, the nets can be set up in the shallows of the river and then the nets can be exposed to the surface after the tide goes out to pick up a few fish. However, the fishing nets will most likely be washed away by the tide.

However, the two ends of the Hang Canal are naturally migratory fishing grounds. The Hang Canal was an artificial canal dug by King Fuchai of Wu, so there was a big problem, which was that it could not ensure that the water levels at the two ends connecting the Yangtze River and the Huai River were the same.

The two estuaries of the Han Canal are higher in the north and lower in the south. When the tide is low, the southern estuary becomes shallower. Due to the drop in the water level, the water from the Huaihe River in the north will rush southward into the Han Canal, Sheyang Lake, and then into the Yangtze River. If it weren't for the large lake Sheyang Lake in the middle to regulate the water level, the water in the southern section of the Han Canal would have been drained by the Yangtze River.

But nowadays, we can use the estuary of the Han Canal to cast nets for fishing. The depth of the Han Canal is much shallower than that of the Yangtze River and other natural rivers, but the water flow is not small. We can hang large stones at the bottom of the drift net to sink it to the bottom to ensure that it will not be washed away. In this way, as long as a big fish swims past or even rushes through the estuary, we can catch them all in one net!
However, today is a high tide day, and the water is too rough. I didn't dare to cast the net just now. I want to wait until the peak of the tide passes before casting the net, and focus on catching the wave of fish at low tide. If the general is interested, you can watch the tide with me, and see how much fish can be caught after the tide goes out. "

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(End of this chapter)