Late Ming Dynasty: Special Forces in 1645

Looking at the truckloads of grain and silver coins being transported back from Fenglingtou Town, Li Chengming sighed: It's unimaginable that such a small town has accumulated so much wealth!

The only explanation is that this town has mines.

Raiding houses is still a quick way to make money. If they raided a few wealthy households in every town...

Li Chengming shook his head. This method is not advisable. One cannot rely on robbery to make a living; this is not the right way.

The rich own vast tracts of land while the poor have nowhere to stand. This is inherently unreasonable. We cannot simply solve this injustice by confiscating property. Instead, we must rely on top-down institutional reforms to prevent injustice. This is the right way.

But if anyone dares to obstruct the implementation of the new policy, we won't hesitate to raid their home again.

Li Chengming thought to himself: It took only twenty days to implement the new policy in Fenglingtou Town. There are still too few people. The most urgent task is not only to recruit a large number of people who can read and write and keep accounts, but also to establish our own talent training system!

During this period, Li Chengming established the Xingfu Army Military Academy and appointed himself as its principal.

The military academy stipulated that all officers of the Restoration Army must master the reading and writing of 120 Chinese characters within one month.

If you can't master it, then downgrade to a lower level!

Once the officers mastered reading and writing Chinese characters, they taught them to the soldiers below them.

To reduce the difficulty, Li Chengming also decided to teach using simplified Chinese characters directly.

Li Chengming hesitated for a long time about using simplified Chinese characters in teaching.

Simplified Chinese characters did not first appear in this era; they have existed since ancient times and were formed during the development of Chinese characters. They represent one direction of simplification for Chinese characters.

Simplified Chinese characters are mainly derived from cursive script, while traditional Chinese characters are mainly derived from regular script.

For example, in the famous "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion", more than one-third of the characters are simplified Chinese characters.

Therefore, it was as natural for many scholars in ancient times to be able to understand simplified characters as they were to understand cursive script.

A blank sheet of paper is easier to draw on, which was the biggest reason why Li Chengming ultimately decided to promote simplified Chinese characters.

Most of the officers and soldiers of the Xingfu Army came from the lower classes and couldn't read a single character. They wouldn't even know the character for "one" if a carrying pole fell over. When teaching them, using simplified characters not only greatly reduced the difficulty of teaching, but also avoided any resistance.

The same applies to promoting simplified characters to the lower classes in the future. The lower classes don't recognize any characters, so the simplest way is the best for them.

As for resistance, the resistance to the implementation of simplified characters will come from educated people and vested interest groups.

Those people not only don't think about lowering the difficulty of reading and writing, but they actually increase the difficulty of literacy, because it is more beneficial to them.

Therefore, some characters have become more and more complex over time, and some characters with the same pronunciation and meaning have even branched out into several characters, which has greatly increased the reading and writing threshold.

Knowledge monopoly is what the vested interest groups want to do.

From the Xingfu Army to ordinary people and then to scholars, this is Li Chengming's plan to promote simplified Chinese characters!

In addition to literacy classes, the Military Academy also offered arithmetic classes.

In the arithmetic class, Li Chengming directly introduced Arabic numerals, which are simple and intuitive to read and write, and should be promoted even more than simplified Chinese characters.

Without the adoption of Arabic numerals, it would be impossible to implement modern calculation methods, and the establishment of basic industries would be out of the question.

The ancients valued skills over techniques. Li Chengming believes that to change this, we must start with the most basic education!

First, promote simplified Chinese characters and Arabic numerals, then teach modern basic theories, and finally summarize a set of effective practical methods to truly implement and use them.

The Military Academy teaches almost everything except military science.

What's the use of teaching military theory if someone can't even read a single character? If you want practical experience, the training grounds will teach it; military academies don't teach specific tactical operations.

In addition to focusing on literacy and arithmetic, the curriculum will also cover natural sciences, history, and current affairs. Students are not required to master these subjects, but they should have some understanding of them to broaden their horizons.

The Restoration Army conducted military training during the day and studied and wrote at the Military Academy at night.

At one point, the Xingfu Army bought up all the candles and lamp oil in Xinzhou City, causing the price of lighting supplies to skyrocket.

Besides Li Chengming, the chief instructor, there were other assault team members and four recruited scholars as instructors.

Originally, the four scholars were somewhat resistant to being taught simplified characters, but after Li Chengming reasoned with them, appealed to their emotions, and offered them money and silver, they gladly accepted the instruction in simplified characters.

The military academy thus began to flourish.

On the other hand, the implementation of the new policy in Fenglingtou Town has been basically completed. The summer grain harvest has just been completed, and the first round of land tax is being collected.

The Fenglingtou Steel Plant, which Liang Zicheng was in charge of preparing for, has also started construction.

With the help of two thousand prisoners led by Huang Longkun, the steel plant was quickly built.

After all, there are two thousand people, which is one-fifth of the population of Fenglingtou Town. With more people, there is more strength, and the efficiency is very high, whether it is road construction or mining.

The problem lies in the steelmaking facility in Liangzicheng.

Although Liang Zicheng knew a lot of theory, this was his first time doing something like this, and there were no sophisticated instruments to assist him like in a laboratory.

First, they tried to refine a small batch, but it was ruined!

Post-hoc analysis revealed an error in the estimation of the iron content in the iron ore.

They quickly started a second batch, which also failed!

The reason is that the blast furnace air supply is insufficient, which causes the temperature to not reach the tapping temperature of the molten steel.

Let's learn from our experience and keep up the good work!

The third furnace adopted the bottom-blown air converter steelmaking technology using alkaline refractory materials and alkaline slag, directly blowing in hot air that had been heated in a small furnace, thus increasing the furnace temperature.

The third furnace did not have the same problems as before, but the molten steel had too high a sulfur content and was too brittle!

Therefore, they considered desulfurization during steelmaking, and since there was a large amount of limestone in the area, they decided to use raw calcium oxide for desulfurization.

Through continuous improvements to the process and summarizing experiences, it wasn't until the ninth furnace that molten steel meeting the requirements was finally produced.

Half a month had passed by then.

Moreover, Liang Zicheng has made the steelmaking process and procedures very complicated, which makes it inconvenient to expand production on a large scale!

Therefore, Liang Zicheng then optimized the process flow to reduce the cost of directly producing molten steel.

This took another half month.

Although it took a lot of time, it was all worth it.

The molten steel produced can be used directly to forge swords and spears, and its performance is several times better than that of steel produced by the crucible steelmaking method during the Ming Dynasty!

The first batch of molten steel, personally refined by Liang Zicheng, was first poured into long strips and then forged into bayonets.

A total of five hundred bayonets were forged.

Meanwhile, Liang Zicheng hadn't just been smelting steel during the past month; he had also sent people everywhere to search for manganese ore.

No manganese ore was found, but a considerable amount of pyrolusite was found near the iron ore mine.

Using these limited manganese ores, and with the help of Huang Longkun, they successfully refined silicon-manganese steel, which was then rolled into springs to manufacture the mechanisms of flintlock muskets.

All the components for converting the matchlock musket into a flintlock musket are ready.

The design for converting the matchlock gun into a flintlock gun was overseen by Li Chengming, who also hired skilled craftsmen from the city at high salaries to carry out the modification.

Apart from the spring mechanism, the other parts of the flintlock musket are relatively easy to craft, and flint is also quite common.

So once the springs from Liangzicheng were produced, it wasn't long before 500 flintlock muskets were modified.