The Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty was extremely rebellious

Chapter 23: Greed for Pleasure
Wanshou Palace is the palace renovated when Prince Yan was enfeoffed as a vassal. It was rebuilt from the Prince's Eastern Palace during the Yuan Dynasty.

After the Prince of Yan successfully pacified the country, he built a larger Forbidden City and prepared to move the capital. The original Prince of Yan's Palace became the Western Palace.

Later, during the Jiajing reign, in order to deceive Emperor Jiajing, Yan Song spent more than three million taels to renovate the Western Palace and turned it into the Wanshou Palace, which was dedicated to Jiajing's practice.

In fact, the Wanshou Palace was originally a fully functional royal palace with more than 1,600 rooms and palaces, and all the necessary facilities, just like a small imperial palace.

After Wanli moved into the Wanshou Palace with Queen Wang and Yongnian Earl Wang Wei's family, he seemed to have changed completely.

He seemed to have become particularly playful, drinking and eating meat without restraint.

He would get up early every morning and follow Yongnianbo Wang Wei and his family to build a waterwheel. He had a lot of fun playing with hammers, saws, chisels and other tools.

When it was time for dinner, he would drink wine and eat meat with the family of Yongnian Earl Wang Wei, his uncle Li Xuancheng, and even Shan Sinan and Chengguo Duke Zhu Yingzhen, chatting and enjoying the meal to the fullest, not considering himself an emperor at all.

He was just like an ordinary person with his family, free and unrestrained, without any airs of an emperor. He was very friendly and easy to talk to, and never lost his temper.

In fact, this is his nature. He was like this before the eighth year of Wanli. At that time, he was free and happy with a few trusted eunuchs.

But one day, his crime was exposed. He was drunk and started fighting with a eunuch with a sword. He chased the eunuch and danced wildly, accidentally cutting off the eunuch's hair.

Feng Bao filed a complaint, and Empress Dowager Li became furious. He was tortured half to death, and those eunuchs who were trusted by him were exiled to the Jingjun Army, and there was no news of them since then.

Human nature is sometimes suppressed by cruel reality. When many people are young and ignorant, they follow their own nature, free and unrestrained.

As a result, when they grow up and face the cruel reality, they have to bow their heads, suppress their own nature, and live a miserable life.

If history had continued to develop, Wanli's life would have become increasingly depressing until he was so angry that he refused to attend court.

But things are different now.

He has already taken control of the Beijing Camp, the Embroidered Uniform Guard and the Imperial Guards, so there will be no problem in protecting himself.

The young uncle Li Xuancheng also came back, and the Yongnian Earl Wang Wei and his family also came. There were more and more trusted people around him.

He can finally release his true nature and live as his original self.

At this moment, the soul of an ordinary person in the future was integrated into his mind. When he was with his own people, he felt more free.

As for how to treat Empress Dowager Li and those civil servants with ulterior motives, that is another attitude.

He pretended to be an extremely rebellious teenager, acting recklessly. If things didn't go his way, he would lose his temper and even order people to be killed.

Because he knew very well that being an emperor who followed the rules would not only make it impossible for him to control those civil servants, but he would also be imprisoned by those civil servants with ulterior motives using the rules. Not to mention regaining the imperial power, he would not even have personal freedom.

He had to act like an extremely rebellious teenager and throw a lot of random punches before he could beat these old bastards to death with his random punches.

Of course, this mess was not really a mess. He just did whatever he wanted to do to benefit himself.

The reason why he released his nature and had so much fun at this moment was actually to paralyze Zhang Siwei and make this guy think that he was really not doing his job and was having fun.

He was really playing, and Yongnianbo Wang Wei and his family were really making water wheels.

Yongnian Earl Wang Wei is indeed an elite craftsman who has been able to hold the position of Deputy Envoy of the Ministry of Works and Wensi Academy. His carpentry skills are so good that they are simply breathtaking.

Wang Jun, Wang Dong and Wang Bing also kept their ancestral skills and were very skillful at carpentry work.

With the combined efforts of the four, the waterwheel, which was two or three meters in size, was taking shape at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The main body of the waterwheel uses a mortise and tenon structure, and the support is a standard square material that is ten feet long and as thick as an arm, with a raised wedge sawed out on one side.

Then a waist-thick piece of wood is processed into a twelve-sided shape, and two grooves are chiseled at both ends of each side.

Finally, twenty-four ten-foot-long wooden pieces were inserted into the twenty-four grooves to form two circles. The two circles were then reinforced by connecting them like a spider web with wedge-shaped wooden pieces. The main body of the waterwheel was then completed.

Next comes the bucket and drive shaft.

The water bucket can hold 20 kilograms of water and can be fixed diagonally on the outside of the waterwheel.

The drive shaft is a round piece of material as thick as a thigh, one end of which is sawed into a square protrusion. Then a groove of corresponding size is chiseled out in the middle of the waist-thick wood of the waterwheel body, and the groove is inserted into the groove and fixed with iron nails. The waterwheel part is almost completed.

Next comes the stone-pounding part, which is actually not difficult. Just fix some cam-like wood on the drive shaft.

As for the hammer, it is fixed to the front end of a seesaw-like object, and the rear end of the seesaw is connected to the cam on the drive shaft.

The drive shaft rotates with the waterwheel, and the cam will lift the hammer. When the cam reaches the end, the hammer falls, and then the cam starts to lift the hammer again, and this cycle repeats.

This waterwheel could actually power more than just one 20-jin hammer. The drive shaft could be lengthened to hold three sets of hammers on each side. Because the waterwheel had twelve buckets filled with 20-jin of water, the hammers' rise and fall were driven by the movement of two opposing buckets. In less than three days, Yongnian Earl Wang Wei and his family had completed the components of a simple hydraulic stone pounder.

As for assembly, it is very simple. There are many soldiers in the imperial court, and they can easily lift the largest waterwheel body. The other small components can be lifted by two people.

The sun set in the west around 5 p.m. that afternoon.

There is a waterwheel about two or three meters high standing on the bank of Taiye Lake to the east of Wanshou Palace. Under the reflection of the red clouds in the sky, it actually looks a bit like the rural charm of the south of the Yangtze River.

This waterwheel can still move because there is a rope connected under each water bucket. The imperial guards take turns pulling the rope, and the waterwheel will turn accordingly. A water bucket can only hold 20 kilograms of water, and a imperial guard soldier can easily pull it up.

Wanli was so excited as he looked at the six sets of iron hammers that kept rising and smashing down.

This one actually doesn't meet the requirements, because the hammer doesn't tilt up to a very small degree. Even a drive shaft as thick as a thigh equipped with a cam can only lift the hammer about an inch before it falls down.

In other words, the current degree of tilt is equivalent to the blacksmith lifting the hammer and smashing it down, and the hammer must be lifted at least seven or eight feet high when swinging it for forging.

This is not a big problem. They just need to find a way to make the extended arc of the cam about eight or nine feet long. The current extended arc of the cam is only more than one foot long.

However, this cannot be tried in the palace.

If he tried it in the palace, Zhang Siwei would definitely know what he wanted to do.

Moreover, there was no large enough space in the palace, nor a river with sufficient thrust, so it was impossible to try it.

He had to take people out of the palace to try, and coincidentally, he also wanted to leave the palace.

Wanli stood in front of the waterwheel and looked at it for a while, then thought about it carefully and asked, "Father-in-law, how big can this waterwheel be?"

This is it.

Yongnian Earl Wang Wei thought for a while before explaining in detail: "I have only made two kinds of water wheels. One is this twelve-dou one, which is about two or three feet high, and the other is the twenty-four-dou one, which is about five or six feet high.

I heard that in some places the largest waterwheel has a capacity of 36 buckets, which would be at least 80 or 90 feet tall when erected, probably as tall as a small mountain."

Is eighty or ninety feet high very high?
That is equivalent to about 20 to 30 meters high.

The Ferris wheels of later generations seem to be two to three hundred meters high.

However, due to material limitations in this era, being able to build a waterwheel that is twenty or thirty meters high is already a remarkable achievement.

Wanli asked with great interest, "Can that 36-bucket waterwheel actually drive 18 iron hammers weighing 20 jin?"

Yongnianbo Wang Wei estimated: "A 36-bucket waterwheel can probably drive 18 50-jin iron hammers without any problem. The key is that it consumes a lot of materials and is difficult to build.

I think that if Your Majesty wants to make it easier, it would be better to build three water wheels with a capacity of twelve dou. The four of us can build three water wheels with a capacity of twelve dou in just a few days.

If it's a 36-bucket waterwheel, it might not even take ten days or half a month to build, and it's extremely difficult to erect. It would weigh at least tens of thousands of pounds, and I wonder how many people would be needed to erect it."

This does make sense.

Wanli thought about it carefully, then asked, "How many carpenters and blacksmiths do you think can be mobilized near the capital?"

This is too much.

Yongnian Earl Wang Wei estimated, “When Yongle moved the capital, he mobilized over 100,000 craftsmen to build the imperial city and the capital. Later, because the craftsmen needed to take turns, most of them stayed near the capital.

Moreover, after more than a hundred years of reproduction, most of the remaining ones have almost reached the original scale of more than 100,000 households.

The largest number among them are carpenters, estimated to be at least 30,000 households, and fewer blacksmiths, probably around 20,000 households. Because most of these craftsmen are not registered in Northern Zhili, the exact number can only be known after the Cabinet and the Ministry of Works issue a conscription letter.

If His Majesty only recruits skilled craftsmen in their prime, then he can recruit at least 30,000 carpenters and 20,000 blacksmiths. If His Majesty recruits all the craftsmen and their families who can work, he can recruit at least 80,000 to 90,000 carpenters and 50,000 to 60,000 blacksmiths.

Can I have tens of thousands of tricks?
Zhang Siwei would definitely not agree.

This guy said that as long as the imperial edict does not violate the laws of the Ming Dynasty, he will not obstruct it, but the laws of the Ming Dynasty here do not refer to the real laws of the Ming Dynasty, but whether it is disadvantageous to this guy.

If the imperial edict he issued was unfavorable to Zhang Siwei, this guy would definitely not approve it!
Is there nothing I can do if this guy doesn't approve?
Wanli thought for a moment, then decisively said, "My dear uncle, draft an imperial decree. The weather is too hot. I want to find a place outside the palace to build a summer resort. I order the Ministry of Revenue to raise two million taels of silver and the Ministry of Works to mobilize 20,000 craftsmen to prepare for the construction of the summer resort."

what?
There is no way Zhang Siwei would agree to this!
Sure enough, not long after, the imperial edict was returned by Zhang Siwei along with a draft bill.

The draft said: Your Majesty, please forgive me, this is a pursuit of pleasure, a waste of money and labor, and must not be done.

(End of this chapter)