The People of Sichuan
This was shortly before Hwiyeom met with the Regional Military Commissioner of Yunnan Province.
In the original history, Britain had unlocked the mass production of steel when Henry Bessemer (1813–1898) discovered the Bessemer process. Hwiyeom, however, had not incorporated the Bessemer method when he established the State-run Ironworks. The Henry Cort-style reverberatory furnace technique he had drawn on was already more than capable of producing steel in quantity.
The secret to making steel and wrought iron in the Henry Cort reverberatory process lay in regulating the carbon content of the iron by adding charcoal. Heat the molten iron long enough without adding charcoal, and the carbon content drops below 0.2 percent, yielding wrought iron. Add a little charcoal so that the carbon content settles between 0.2 and 2.1 percent, and the result is steel.
Controlling that carbon concentration still depended heavily on a blacksmith’s experience, since no properly quantified measuring instruments yet existed. And so blacksmith Yi Min-sang, drawing a handsome salary as the shift foreman of Production Line Number One at the State-run Ironworks—Hwiyeom had called it a “line,” rendering the foreign word in Chinese characters as Luo Yin, and everyone else had simply adopted the term without the faintest idea what it meant—was living very busy days of late.
“You idiot! We finally get a good melt going and you turn it into pig iron?! How much charcoal did you shovel in?! I told you a dozen times—charcoal goes in like salt on a rice ball! Just a pinch!”
“I’m sorry, sir!”
The blast furnace was enormous, and the volume of iron ore fed into it was enormous too. But this was work done by human hands, not machines. The amount of ore was never exactly the same from batch to batch, and the proportion of waste rock and impurities mixed into each load varied as well—so the charcoal had to change every time.
Having somehow fought his way through the morning schedule, Yi Min-sang heard the bell announcing the dinner hour and stripped off his gloves, stuffing them into the pocket of his work clothes. The hemp insect-netting that the Sichuan Agricultural Cooperative had once stockpiled against locusts had been so vast in quantity that it had been recycled in every direction imaginable—and it made excellent fabric for work clothes. Breathable hemp garments that wicked away sweat were essential gear for the State-run Ironworks technicians laboring beside those blazing furnaces.
“Eat up, and half a shichen from now we start the night shift!”
The State-run Ironworks had raised its production targets by half again above the usual rate, so overtime was mandatory. Night work paid time-and-a-half, and for all the hardship, participation rates stayed high.
No matter how much money a man earned, he needed somewhere to spend it—and present-day Sichuan was a province where money went as easily as it did in Suzhou or Hangzhou. As incomes rose, even commoners who had once thought only of survival could now afford luxuries like silk, and they could enjoy tea and Caffa brought in from Yunnan.
Just as under the Ming, the Gyeong Dynasty had enacted sumptuary laws—the so-called Clothing and Diet Ordinances—meant to curb extravagant living. But those rules were observed only in Beijing and its immediate environs; the farther one traveled into the provinces, the looser they became. That had been true in the original history, and it was true in the Gyeong Dynasty as well. Besides, trying to stop the people of Sichuan—the very homeland of silk—from wearing silk was a faintly ridiculous proposition to begin with. Commoners who had spent their lives weaving silk without ever being able to afford a single garment of it now threw themselves into buying silk clothes as if to avenge every year of that deprivation.
Their tables had improved dramatically too. Ordinary folk could now eat meat with every meal if they wished. And if they stretched a little further, they could even buy black pepper imported from the Western Regions. Sichuan offered no shortage of ways to spend money—but the crown jewel among them was the fever for education.
In the State-run Ironworks cafeteria, Foreman Yi Min-sang collected his tray, found a seat, and was joined by a colleague who greeted him as he sat down.
“Oh, Foreman Yi—you on nights again today?”
“Ah, Elder Brother.”
Yi grinned at the greeting from Foreman Gu of Line Number Two.
“The boy’s mother is so relentless about scraping up academy fees that I can’t afford not to work overtime.”
“Aigoo… same story in every house, isn’t it.”
Gu gave a dry little laugh.
“My boy’s enrolled at three academies right now.”
“Three? Which ones?”
“The wife handles all of it, so I don’t know the details… but once he finishes Master Eom’s arithmetic academy, he goes straight to Instructor Park’s essay academy, and after lunch it’s Master Jang’s interview-prep academy, or something like that.”
“Interview-prep academy? There’s such a thing?”
Yi’s eyes went round. Gu answered,
“You’re even more out of touch than I am, friend. Do you have any idea how fierce the competition for Hwieon Academy has gotten? Entrance-exam scores are just the baseline now. People say the interview is what actually decides who gets in. So interview-prep academies that analyze secrets of the interview, past questions, and predicted questions for the next round have been springing up like bamboo shoots after rain.”
“Aigoo. I’d better ask the wife about this.”
Hwieon Academy had introduced an entrance examination to filter the flood of applicants. The competition for that exam—soon abbreviated simply as “the entrance exam”—was so fierce it made the old civil service examinations look quaint.
“Honestly, even if you pass the civil exams, what do you get? The top ten or so, the ones who place as optimus and near it—everyone else ends up in some minor post. Better by far to land a job at Hwieon Conglomerate.”
An official’s salary was smaller than people imagined, which was why local magistrates had always drifted naturally into exploiting the common people. Climbing any higher was brutally hard; unless you came from a powerful gentry clan, even extraordinary talent usually meant watching someone else claim the credit while you did the work. The prevailing view had always been that an official’s post was still better—and in most places it was. Why? Because officials held power. Even a petty clerk in a county office could invent pretexts to squeeze wealth out of the people.
But in Sichuan, that logic no longer held. Corruption among officials had not vanished entirely. Yet the Sacheondang Family ran a Legal Affairs Department that had already taken the head of the Yunnan Provincial Administration Commissioner, and the Sichuan Provincial Administration Commissioner himself openly referred to Hwiyeom as “my grandnephew.” In that climate, who would be bold enough to brandish their pitiful scrap of authority against employees of the Hwieon Conglomerate affiliates—companies owned by the Sacheondang Family—and try to shake them down?
Naturally, every parent in Sichuan had shifted their ambition. No longer was the goal to place first in the civil examinations. It was to enter Hwieon Academy, graduate with distinction, and secure a managerial post in one of the Hwieon Conglomerate’s subsidiaries.
I had to claw my way up from the bottom because I never got an education. My son is going to study hard and start at a high rank from day one.
Whether on the shop floor or in an office, there were rank-and-file workers, middle managers, and senior executives. The senior executives being worked half to death by the demons Hwiyeom kept around him would have wept tears of blood and screamed for a knife if they had heard such talk—but unfortunately, middle-manager Yi Min-sang of the shop floor wanted nothing more than for his son to stroll the golden road of a comfortably paid senior executive.
And it was not only Yi Min-sang and his wife. Every parent’s heart was the same.
“When I get home, I’d better talk this over with the wife—ask her why she hasn’t said a word about sending our boy to an interview academy.”
That night, only as the Hour of the Pig began—somewhere between nine and eleven—did Yi Min-sang come home carrying a takeout order of laziji, Sichuan-style chili chicken, from Baekga-jaengsik. He asked his wife, Madam Park,
“The children?”
“Asleep.”
“Ah, and I went and bought the laziji they love for once.”
“These days they like Dang-style hot pot better than laziji.”
“Is that so?”
“Go wash up. I’ll set the table.”
“Right.”
In the Central Plains, where clean water had always been precious, showering and bathing had never become everyday habits. Present-day Sichuan was different. The Min River, an upper reach of the Yangtze, ran clear enough that comparing it to the Yellow River was almost an insult—and the water that arrived through the aqueduct system Hwiyeom had designed was filtered well enough to serve as bathwater. On top of that, a public fountain near the house made it easy to draw clean water, far simpler than the old days of hauling bucketfuls from a distant well or riverbank.
People who preferred not to wash still didn’t. But the men who worked at the State-run Ironworks spent their days drenched in sweat and coated in coal dust and iron-ore grit; without at least a rough scrub every evening, they could scarcely keep a human appearance. So laborers like Yi Min-sang usually fitted their homes with a shower of sorts. “Shower facilities” meant little more than a screened-off corner of a narrow rear courtyard, a large jar of drawn water, and a ladle—but it was enough.
Yi Min-sang stripped in the “shower stall,” scooped water from the jar, and poured it over himself. He picked up the bar of soap set in the corner and worked up a lather on a rough hemp cloth. The soap, too, was a product of Hwieon Trading Company, manufactured under a patent transferred from the Sacheondang Family’s Innovation Hall—the old Poison Manual Office having been Innovation Hall’s predecessor. His was a mint-scented bar. At first the unfamiliar ritual had felt awkward, but now he found he could not sleep properly without washing with that mint soap.
He scrubbed away the grime, sweat, soot, and dust, rinsed himself again with the ladle, dried off with the towel his wife had laid out, changed into clean clothes, and went inside. On the low table sat the laziji he had brought home, a bottle of liquor, and two cups.
“What’s with the wine?”
“It’s Jiannanchun.”
At the name of Sichuan’s famous premium spirit—an expensive one, of course—Yi Min-sang’s eyes narrowed.
“Special treatment tonight, is it? Something you want to ask me for?”
“Honestly. Anyone listening would think I only treat you well when I need a favor.”
“Ahem.”
Rather than spoil the mood by asking whether that wasn’t, in fact, true, Yi Min-sang broke the seal on the bottle. A pure, clear fragrance rose from it, and he smiled without meaning to as he filled his wife’s cup.
“Have a drink yourself, my dear.”
“I will.”
For a while the couple drank with the laziji as their side dish, trading the day’s news. When the wine had begun to warm them, they came to the real subject.
“Husband… about our Jin-su… I was thinking of sending him to one more academy…”
She broached it with a careful, sidelong look. Having heard the talk at lunch, Yi Min-sang spoke up as well.
“Ah—come to think of it, I had something to say about that myself. What’s this I hear about interview academies springing up lately?”
“You already knew?”
“My dear… I may look like I don’t notice things, but I keep track of how the world turns.”
He put on airs, though without Gu’s tip he would not have known a thing. Madam Park went on,
“These days they say that if you don’t attend an interview academy, you can pass the written exam and still fail the interview. So I was thinking of sending Jin-su…”
“Send him. What’s a little money when it’s for the boy’s education?”
“Are you sure? We’re already spending no small sum on his schooling…”
Knowing how hard her husband worked for every coin, she spoke with a note of apology. But Yi Min-sang would not show her any strain. He thumped his chest and blustered instead.
“Without me, the State-run Ironworks doesn’t run. The work schedule is packed solid through the end of the year, and there’ll be plenty of overtime—so don’t you worry about money. Send the boy to the academy. If he needs more academies, send him to those too!”
“Really?”
“Of course!”
Only then did Madam Park seem to relax. She smiled.
“But why is there so much work all of a sudden? Is our iron selling that well across the Central Plains?”
“No. Everything we’re making right now goes straight to the Dang Family. To Innovation Hall.”
“What? What could the Dang Family need so much iron for? Are they laying another new road somewhere?”
“No—the iron for the railways is wrought iron. What we’re making now is steel. From what I hear, they’re building something called… cannons. I don’t know the details.”
“Cannons?”
This was a world without gunpowder, so even the Chinese character for “cannon” was one Hwiyeom had coined himself. The couple had no way of knowing what a cannon was.
“Well, some say it’s like a small bell, others say it’s a long hollow pillar… but it’s the Dang Family’s business, isn’t it? Whatever they’re doing, it’s for the good of everyone.”
“That’s true enough.”
“So don’t worry—just send him to the academy. I’ll take care of everything.”
“Thank you, husband. I felt bad, as if I were loading more onto you… here, have another cup.”
“Hahaha! Every parent’s heart is the same, isn’t it!”
Had the couple understood in any detail what a weapon called a cannon truly was, they might have felt a tremor of fear about what was coming. Their ignorance, then, was what preserved the happiness of that evening.
Meanwhile, at Innovation Hall—where the steel ingots forged by Yi Min-sang and his colleagues were being turned into cannons—an entirely different problem was giving everyone a splitting headache.