Construction Services
Even from the Dang Family’s perspective, a visit from the Provincial Governor and his wife was the kind of event that put everyone on high alert.
“I would like to tour the Dang Family’s Innovation Hall and the construction site of that new-model blast furnace you are building.”
The elders who knew all about the site’s paranoid restrictions on outsiders—and even Dang Un-sang himself—flinched. Hwiyeom, however, answered with a broad smile.
“If Granduncle wishes to see it, of course he must!”
None of the elders was foolish enough to start muttering about “favoritism” after that. Everyone knew that a single command from the Provincial Governor could force the Dang Family to take down its own signboard.
Someday I’ll turn this place into a Dang Family so powerful that even the government has to watch its step around us—just like in the wuxia novels I used to read.
Hwiyeom tucked that resolution away in his heart and personally guided the Governor and his wife.
Like high officials on every construction inspection tour, they peppered him with question after question; Hwiyeom answered every one without the slightest hesitation. Some of those answers even touched on genuine secrets.
“What makes this new blast furnace different from the old ones, that it can mass-produce high-quality iron?”
“We separate the combustion chamber from the melting chamber so we can raise the temperature higher. Every traditional furnace places the melting chamber directly above the combustion chamber. The bottom of a cylindrical structure is the firebox; the furnace sits right on top of it. When you burn fuel in the firebox, the heat rises straight into the furnace above. Naturally, the floor area of the firebox and the furnace are identical. But as you know, the fuel we burn takes up far more volume than the iron ore.”
“Of course—iron ore is heavy, charcoal is light.”
“So for a given amount of ore you can load far less fuel, and that caps the heat you can generate.”
“If you put a hundred catties of ore and a hundred catties of charcoal side by side, the charcoal’s volume is much greater. In an old cylindrical furnace, when a hundred catties of ore go in, you can fit barely forty catties of charcoal.”
“Exactly right. As expected of Granduncle!”
“Then what if we simply enlarge the combustion chamber? Couldn’t we raise the heat without using coal?”
“That’s where the reverberatory-furnace design becomes critical. With the old cylindrical ‘direct-steel’ structure, enlarging the firebox only lets more heat escape straight upward. The total heat that actually reaches the ore never changes.”
“Hmm… then what is this reverberatory furnace?”
“Think of it as a giant oven. The internal structure and design keep the heat from escaping uselessly; both radiant heat and hot blast are forced into the melting chamber.”
Traditional direct-steel furnaces were thermally inefficient because the flames from the wood heated the furnace floor while the hot combustion gases simply rushed out the chimney. Roughly thirty percent of the heat produced by the fuel was used; the rest was dumped into the open air. A reverberatory furnace, by contrast, placed the melting chamber beside the combustion chamber and covered both with a domed roof. Heat generated in the firebox was reflected downward by a ceramic dome and conducted into the melting chamber as radiant heat. Air channels were also built so that every bit of hot blast had to pass completely through the melting chamber before it could reach the chimney. The design used every last scrap of heat—hence the name “reverberatory,” meaning heat reflected and transferred.
“Hoh…”
The Provincial Governor stroked his chin, clearly impressed.
“What if we built and operated a state-run ironworks here in Sichuan Province along these lines?”
Beside him, Dang Un-sang managed only a strained smile. If a state-run ironworks began producing high-quality steel, the Dang Family’s profits would inevitably fall. Yet Hwiyeom’s eyes lit up.
“If Granduncle wishes to produce cheap, excellent iron for the people of Sichuan, how could your humble grandnephew raise any objection? I believe it would be a great benefit to the people.”
“Oh my, listen to the child speak! My lord, isn’t he simply admirable?”
The Governor’s wife made a great show of delight for her husband’s benefit.
“Ahem. Your intentions are truly admirable.”
He had just tried, quite openly, to muscle in on their livelihood; when the boy responded like this, the Governor coughed awkwardly.
Even Dang Un-sang, who trusted his son’s genius, urgently sent a sound transmission.
What are you thinking? This looks as though it will damage our family’s interests…
But Hwiyeom had his own calculations. He answered calmly by sound transmission—thanks to the elixirs and poisons supplied by the Family Head’s storehouse, which he had been swallowing like meals and water, he had recently gained ten years’ worth of internal energy and could now use the technique.
Father, this is an opportunity.
An opportunity? You mean to win the Governor’s favor and protect our profits some other way?
Father, operating reverberatory furnaces will require vast amounts of coal. For a state-run ironworks the quantity will be enormous—far beyond anything our family uses. And every coal mine in Sichuan Province, except for a few state-owned plots, is now registered in my name.
…! You’re right!
If Sichuan ran state ironworks, coal consumption would multiply several-fold—dozens of times over. Realizing that selling coal to the entire province would be far more profitable than making and selling iron themselves, Dang Un-sang’s face brightened as well.
“Since Great-Uncle acts with such noble intent for the people of Sichuan, this nephew can only follow.”
“…You two are making me feel ashamed.”
The Governor cleared his throat several times, then said,
“Let us do this: construct large-scale furnaces that the Provincial Office will manage. We will naturally cover the construction costs, and once the works are complete we will hand the Dang Family ten percent of the profits from the iron produced there. After all, your family’s own production capacity is barely enough to supply yourselves, with only the surplus sold outside. This arrangement should be financially advantageous for you as well, don’t you think?”
“We are truly grateful for Your Excellency’s decision!”
Already beaming at the thought of the coal profits they would rake in, Hwiyeom and Dang Un-sang both raised their hands in delighted welcome of the unexpected revenue share.
After touring the reverberatory-furnace site, the Governor and his wife were invited to the Dang main residence. When the Governor saw the elevated aqueducts that ran along the tops of the walls and branched throughout the compound at head height, his eyes gleamed with interest.
“Is this the structure for those flush toilets that all of Seongdo is talking about?”
“It is. We don’t use it only for toilets. Gravity draws water from the mountain behind us into the compound so that no one has to draw water by hand.”
“Gravity?”
“Water flows from high places to low places, does it not? That force is what I mean.”
“Ah, I see.”
Where the old well had stood there now rose a large water tank; beneath it Hwiyeom had built a laundry area out of cement. Under a row of taps, washboards had been molded into the cement itself. Servant women worked up lather with soap and scrubbed clothes against the ridges, then rinsed them under the flowing water.
The Governor’s wife’s eyes shone like searchlights.
“My goodness! With something like that, the servants will no longer have to haul heavy laundry baskets all the way to the river outside the city!”
“And never having to draw drinking water from a well every time is excellent as well.”
“Child, could you install this at our residence and at the Provincial Office as well?”
“How could I refuse Grandmother’s request? But we are short of hands if we try to run it alongside the furnace project, so we will have to set priorities.”
“What if the Office supplies plenty of slaves and laborers?”
“There are a great many confidential matters involved…”
When Hwiyeom smiled awkwardly, the Governor’s wife turned a meaningful look on her husband. The Governor gave a bitter smile.
“The waterworks and toilets, was it? Let us put the furnaces second.”
“Yes.”
While he was at it, the Governor decided he ought to try a flush toilet himself. He emerged looking radiant and exclaimed,
“This is something we absolutely must have!”
His heavy build and protruding belly had always made squatting over a traditional latrine a trial. Sitting on a Western-style bowl to relieve himself was pure comfort. He no longer had to worry about soiling his long official robes, and above all the clean, odorless toilet delighted him.
While the Governor continued his lavish praise, Hwiyeom was doing mental arithmetic.
Hmm… once we have breathing room I’d like to make toilet paper as well. Honestly, wiping with pumpkin leaves or loquat leaves in the latrine makes me question whether I’m still a civilized man. And it hurts the backside.
Still, with two major civil-engineering contracts suddenly in hand, a period of hard work would clearly turn into a great deal of money.
The real problem is that I started out as a construction company, moved into production-line design and installation, then chemicals, and finally munitions. I’m solid on all that, but I know nothing about mass-producing pulp paper.
His main specialty had been advanced weapons; secondary specialties were large-scale facilities, construction, and the chemical processes that went into them. Toilet-paper production would have to wait.
Which meant the next item on the list was…
I should finally start that scholarship program I’ve been thinking about.
Hwiyeom felt the urge to expand the business further, but the bottleneck was talent. The Dang Family’s management structure was extremely poorly suited to expansion.
The family divides into direct and collateral lines. The direct line is the martial sect that uses poisons and hidden weapons; the collaterals run ordinary businesses. The direct line does operate a few enterprises, but only a handful—there simply aren’t many true Dang blood descendants, so expansion is hard.
No matter how many children they produced, the numbers could never match outside recruitment, and the Dang line had always been sparse in heirs.
So earlier generations didn’t so much run businesses themselves as use their martial strength to protect wealthy outside families, drawing them in. They took in son-in-laws, married off daughters, and built a kind of blood alliance through marriage. That was what turned the Dang Family into the great house of Sichuan.
Merchants, too, needed armed protectors in this lawless world. Hire freelancers and you were lucky if they didn’t turn into bandits the moment you hit a lonely mountain road. Relying on blood kin was the safest method.
Keeping all the secrets of poison and hidden-weapon production monopolized by the direct line is fine. The problem is that this makes the direct line pure consumers—they have no productive capacity. All productivity comes from the collaterals: brothels, transport companies, ironworks, farmland, whatever. And once that happens, the collaterals will eventually threaten the power of the direct line.
Just as every historical nation in peacetime came to resent its army, the same dynamic applied here.
The collaterals sweat blood to make money and grow the family while the direct line sits around doing nothing simply because they were born with the Dang surname. How could resentment not grow?
In normal times, no matter what the collaterals thought, they could not defy the direct line. But when the direct line had grown weak, as it had now?
The guests can throw out the master of the house and take his place.
That was the core problem.
1. Expansion requires people.
2. The direct line is short of heirs.
3. The collaterals cannot be trusted.
Solution?
Raise people with direct-line hands—people who listen only to the direct line and obey!
Family management was, after all, that sort of thing… or rather, family management was exactly that sort of thing.
In any case, that was why Hwiyeom had decided to create the “Spider’s Nest”—an orphanage combined with an educational institution.
“Ah-yeom, what are you thinking so deeply about?”
“Hm? Ah—yes, I’m sorry. I was just thinking about the ironworks construction and got carried away…”
“Hahaha! It’s because your thoughts run so deep that you can come up with such astonishing ideas at such a young age.”
“Really, he is something else entirely. Honestly, if only our own grandson would take after him a little…”
“Not at all—I am the one who still has much to learn from him.”
“Hahaha!”
“Hohohoho!”
In that warm, cheerful atmosphere, Elder Ma Jeonggu barely managed to keep a civil face. He ground his molars together.
This can’t go on. We need to discuss countermeasures.
Murderous intent burning in his eyes, he glared secretly at Hwiyeom.