Chapter 40: Easier Known Than Performed
Everyone felt they had gotten a good deal, and that was what mattered. The basis for this unconventional transaction was the arrival of summer.
The peaches were about to ripen and various tubers were ready to be harvested. The tribes could live by gathering, which allowed people like Hua to stay and study for a few days without worrying about their own clan's affairs.
Summer was always easy to get through; winter was the struggle. Every tribal leader learned to see farther ahead.
This year was a "big year"—the mountains were full of hazelnuts and acorns, meaning they would not go hungry in the winter. But experience also told them that a big year was always followed by a small year; the trees might not bear any fruit at all the next season. They had to think about the tribe's survival for the winter a year from now, which was why they hoped their people could learn how Chen Jian's tribe lived.
Chen Jian didn't share this worry. He had no plans for his tribe to live on acorns next year. Besides, he anticipated that this winter would surely bring a glut of greedy wild boars that had gorged themselves on so many acorns they swelled up and died.
The various foods they gathered were more than enough. A heavy rain a few days ago had caused the Grass River to swell, flooding some of the normally dry forks. He and his tribe had blocked the mouths of these forks with a weir of wooden stakes. When the water receded, the fish would be trapped. All kinds of grasshoppers and the pupae from scoliid wasp combs could be fried and eaten. With more people, feeding everyone was not a problem at all.
So on the second day, when a few more people from another tribe arrived wanting to stay for several days, Chen Jian discussed it with his clansmen and readily agreed.
All sorts of stones were exchanged for clay pots. The rule had been that only different types of stones could be traded, but now there were some overlaps. Chen Jian still accepted them, but he told the traders to remember the stones they brought, as they couldn't trade the same types again.
Those men felt they probably wouldn't have any new stones to trade next time anyway. If they wanted more things, they would have to use something else.
Over the next three to five days, eighty to ninety people arrived in succession, with at least a few representatives from each tribe. The tribes that sent more people learned from the experience of the first few, realizing that a small group couldn't carry back enough pottery to make the long journey worthwhile.
When most people still found it superfluous, pottery rings were introduced as an intermediate product for barter. Chen Jian didn't expect a currency-based economy to appear overnight. Creating a coin was easy; getting people to accept it was hard. It would take several years, perhaps even a decade, for these tribes to accept the concept of currency as a universal equivalent.
His presence was only accelerating the process of history, not controlling it. History was made by people, and their ways of thinking could only be changed subtly. Relying on the spontaneous development of trade, God only knew how many years it would take for the concept of a standard equivalent to emerge. The immediate effect was that the visitors found Chen Jian's methods strange, but they still accepted this mode of transaction.
After storing the goods for their respective tribes, they followed Chen Jian and his people with great curiosity, ready to try a different way of life. Since Chen Jian had decided to use these people as the base for his future community, the foundation of a nation, he naturally hoped their population would grow as large as possible.
The main interest of these visitors was food, so on the first day, Chen Jian had the women take them to the river to fish. He himself led his own clansmen to prepare for future developments.
The copper ore was a hundred miles away—not impossibly far, but not close either. In the next two or three years, three things were most important for the tribe.
Planting, Bronze, and the Destruction of the Meteorite Tribe.
Chen Jian had heard from his grandmother about their migration. His people had journeyed from the southeast decades ago. He had no idea what the technological level of the tribes there was now. The flow of information was painfully slow, and his own tribe was clearly the westernmost offshoot of a larger southeastern culture. Without his influence, as the population grew over many years, they would likely have continued migrating west to disperse.
Was the west empty? Or were there other ethnic groups that were not a branch of their own? That question was a distant one, but the Meteorite Tribe to the northeast was a real and present threat.
They had simple sponge iron, a strong and intelligent leader, and they maintained their tribe's population through a system of tribute. The longer they were left alone, the greater the probability they would discover agriculture, and the greater the threat they would become. Once they did, they could leap directly to a primitive slave society. Because of the disparity in arms, the ratio of slaves to slave owners could be quite high. They were located to the east, and there were surely other tribes further east of them. Technology from his own tribe and from the east would gradually spread to them, and that would be a disaster.
To prepare for war, one needed enough time free from subsistence tasks. Planting could solve the problem of time. Simple bronze tools could improve the efficiency of planting. Conversely, a stable food supply from planting could provide enough non-foraging time for smelting bronze.
The three goals were intertwined. The preparations for planting were already underway. All that was left was to smelt and cast bronze.
How many steps did it take to cast bronze? Ignoring the complexities of alloying copper, tin, and lead, Chen Jian had thought it was very simple. It was nothing more than reducing copper ore with charcoal at a high temperature and pouring the result into a mold.
But when he actually planned to do it, he found it immensely difficult.
Just as when he taught Yu Qian'er how to build a house, he wrote four key words on a piece of bark: copper ore, high temperature, charcoal, and mold. But when he started breaking down what was needed for each step, he was dumbfounded. What he had originally thought could be completed in four steps now filled a large piece of bark with densely packed notes.
Because he understood the principles, he was even more in awe of the legacy left by the ancients who had just walked out of the wilderness. The tasks listed on the bark were staggeringly cumbersome, far from the simple process he had imagined.
For **copper mines**, the following had to be considered: food acquisition technology to ensure the tribe had time to mine; stone tool drilling technology for making rollers or mortars to crush the ore; the wire-and-sand cutting technique, used to process large stones into mortars; and weaving wicker baskets to carry the ore.
For **high temperature**, he needed: fired bricks to build the kiln chamber; enough animal bones to make shovels for digging the kiln pit and mixing clay; the bricklaying technique for building a vaulted dome, which would create a roof that didn't require supporting columns and could raise the furnace temperature; charcoal production, since chopping wood was too difficult and charcoal could be crushed to burn hotter; boiling salt, used for tanning leather; and firing pottery to make the rings and nozzles for simple bellows, which would be made from the tanned hides.
For **charcoal**, he had to consider building brick and charcoal kilns. This was the shortest list, but it involved the most difficult construction. A single mistake could cause a collapse, killing people. He had no slaves yet, so he had to consider the safety of his tribesmen and himself.
To **pour the mold**, he needed to prepare in advance: firing pottery to make a crucible, in which the refined copper could be re-melted in a high-temperature furnace; making a long-handled tool to hold the crucible, as wood would burn and stone would shatter at such temperatures, and holding it with bare hands was impossible; and having enough beeswax to make a wax mold, which would be covered with clay and heated. The beeswax would melt and drain out, leaving a hollow structure into which the molten copper could be poured to be cast.
Chen Jian stared at the list on the bark in a daze. And this was all before even considering the most difficult problem of the copper-tin alloy ratio. He found it hard to imagine how many hardships the ancestors who first used bronze had endured to create such a splendid culture.
For every item on his dense list, he ticked off what they had already accomplished and circled what they had not. This was just the theory; when they actually started working, they would encounter all kinds of unforeseen problems.
Take, for example, firing charcoal, making bricks, and building a domed, onion-shaped kiln roof. In his previous life, building a vaulted arch was the key test of a qualified rural bricklayer. A bricklayer who couldn't build a proper arch wasn't a good one. It was a skill that relied on experience and practice; deducing it from scientific principles was even more troublesome. He didn't have that skill; he could only learn through trial and error.
It took a full day to dig two kiln pits on the downwind slope of the river outside the village—one for pottery and one for bricks. Acorn had already started using simple tunnel kilns to fire pottery, but the breakage rate was still very high. This was the perfect opportunity to improve the design while building the brick kiln.
"Knowing is easier than doing..."
Squeezing the bark in his hand and looking at the freshly dug pits, Chen Jian felt a sense of unease for the first time, and he knew this feeling would only grow in the future. With the social division of labor and the advancement of technology, the days of devising strategies with casual confidence were over.
His clansmen were waiting for him. He silently clenched his fists, steeling himself, and began instructing them to use mud to build the surrounding walls.
The walls were simple enough to build straight by stretching a rope as a guide and raising the height layer by layer. The clansmen were used to building houses, so their eyes were fairly accurate.
The walls were soon finished. Chen Jian chose a few of the younger men to assist him, while the rest went to build the walls of the other kiln. The clansmen were gradually beginning to specialize in their work. Considering the future need for a professional mason, the candidates would have to be cultivated from these few men.
He picked up a heavy stone shovel, stood on the newly piled wall, and laid the first block of mud at a slight inward angle.
The men below served him mud and bricks in an orderly manner. In an era of apprenticeship, these apprentices who passed bricks and mud needed talent and a keen eye to learn the craft quickly. Otherwise, they might spend their entire lives doing nothing but manual labor.
As an experiment, the dome's span for this kiln was not very large, only a little over two meters. If he could get this right, he would try a wider span next. The sticky yellow mud was applied, and stone flakes were stuffed into the gaps to squeeze the mud tight, extending the curve and closing it in, little by little.
It was easy to know if the structure was sound. Since these mud bricks were not bonded by mortar, after building a few curved layers, he would climb up and step on it to see if it would collapse. If it collapsed, it proved the angle was wrong; it was only being held by the sticky mud and had to be dismantled and remade.
For one entire day, the few tribesmen who passed him bricks and mud watched Chen Jian build and dismantle, dismantle and build again, toiling back and forth. The clansmen building the wall on the other kiln not only finished their task but also started making bricks using smaller pottery molds. In the distance, rows of freshly made bricks were already laid out on the flat ground to dry.
As the sun began to set, Chen Jian looked at the result of his day's labor: zero.
With a self-deprecating smile, he waved his hands at his clansmen. "Let's go. Head to the riverside and line up as usual."
For three consecutive days, it was the same story.
Most of the visitors left. They had learned what they wanted. Their own lands also had river forks and tree bark. With pots, they could render fat and preserve meat with salt. Compared to the exhaustion of making bricks and mud these past few days, they decided fishing and hunting was a better use of their time. They returned home with what they considered sufficient knowledge, imagining the jubilant welcome their tribes would give them.
Some, however, remained, wanting to learn and see more. A few had even grown to love life here. Although it was tiring, there was a different feeling to it. From their point of view, everything was wonderful. The only thing they couldn't understand was why Chen Jian had been building with mud blocks for several days in a row, only to dismantle his work every time he finished.
Hua, who had been observing from the sidelines, saw a different problem entirely. It was astounding, he thought, that this tribe could afford to have more than a dozen strong young men spend days on such a task.
In his own tribe, even if the ancestors had taught them how to fire bricks, they would never have the time. They had to scramble for food every single day. How could they possibly do anything else, let alone toil for days without any immediate results?
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