Chapter 34 What's This?

"What is this?" Guan Yinhang naturally recognized the fragments of Yun Yao porcelain arranged neatly on the wall as a mural, but he didn't know what to call this method of stacking small squares into a pattern.

"Call it whatever you want," Ye Tao shrugged indifferently. He looked a little disheveled now, his overalls covered with wall ash, cement, and tiny porcelain shards. Ye Tao, who had been excitedly working on the mosaic all day, was very tired. Just a moment ago, in a moment of carelessness, the sharp edge of a porcelain shard had cut a gash on his arm.

Although it was indeed the form and technique of mosaics, Ye Tao knew that this name might not be easy to use. It was extremely difficult to transplant this kind of transliterated noun into this era. He couldn't explain why porcelain pieces, cut into regular small squares, would suddenly be associated with three completely unrelated characters.

Guan Yinhang carefully looked at the mural that had already been pasted on the wall, and after a while, he asked uncertainly, "Is it because Yun Yao doesn't have enough colors? I'll have the master craftsmen fire a batch specially for you later."

Ye Tao shook his head and said, "There's no need to fire a batch specially. It would be too extravagant to use Yun Yao products to paste the walls. I just saw that there was a large batch of fragments, so I used a little to play around. The texture of Yun Yao is indeed particularly comfortable, the colors are gentle, and the reflections have a faint transparent feeling. I'll only play with this thing once. In the future, if I want to make porcelain pieces, ordinary kilns will do, there's not much difficulty in this kind of thing."

Guan Yinhang's mind was racing, weighing whether this could become a business, but immediately, he felt a little disappointed. Indeed, he could specially make porcelain pieces of various colors for Ye Tao to play with, allowing Ye Tao to piece together various gorgeous murals, but what about someone else? As the young master of the Guan family, after dealing with pottery and porcelain for many years, Guan Yinhang understood what decorative art was. Decorating porcelain and pottery with glazes or bas-reliefs was a popular form of decoration, but those master craftsmen who designed various decorations and presented various auspicious patterns were those who had a relatively one-sided understanding of fine arts. These people could draw beautiful decorative designs and use their skillful hands to turn what they drew on paper into beautiful decorations attached to pieces of porcelain and pottery, becoming an integral part of those uniquely shaped porcelain and pottery. Even the Guan family's master craftsmen could use glazes to copy the ink paintings and meticulous brush paintings of famous painters on porcelain vases, and even simulate the blurring effect of ink paintings to a great extent. But asking them to draw such things themselves was beyond their capabilities. Perhaps this was the difference between artisans and literati.

"Just pasting this stuff on the wall is just superficial, and I can't come up with more tricks in White Stone City. I don't have my own studio here," Ye Tao said with some regret.

"Besides decorating walls, does this thing have any other uses?" Guan Yinhang asked doubtfully.

"Of course, this thing, when pasted on the wall, especially interior walls, is much better at waterproofing than lime and the like," Ye Tao said with some emotion. In his original era, there were too many kinds of waterproof coatings that could be used on walls. The brands of latex paint were as numerous as the channels on television, and the various products with different functions made the mosaic process one of countless options that people could choose from.

Guan Yinhang frowned and said, "Why would you want to waterproof the interior walls?"

"Well... if I have the chance to go back to Danyang, I'll show you how I use it," Ye Tao smiled mysteriously.

Guan Yinhang couldn't care about so much. Anyway, there wasn't much difference between knowing sooner and knowing later. He pondered for a long time and came up with a simple and intuitive name for mosaics in this era: "Pin Ci" (Pieced Porcelain). When asking Ye Tao how Pin Ci could become a business, he once again admired Ye Tao's outstanding mind in doing business, especially this kind of unconventional business.

Ye Tao's suggestion to Guan Yinhang was to take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, they could launch ready-made decorative pattern products with ten, fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five grids in both length and width. These things could be used alone, on courtyard walls without leaky windows, as a kind of separate decoration, or these patterns could be arranged and piled up to fill entire walls. Simple decorative patterns looked quite good when arranged. In order to cooperate with the use of these decorative pattern products, it was natural to launch entire pieces of monochromatic products to facilitate users in designing and planning patterns. The production of this product was very simple, just pasting porcelain pieces on thick paper or coarse cloth with glue clay. Judging from the current market price and product nature, it seemed more cost-effective to use the cheapest fine linen.

On the other hand, they could simply be a supplier of Pin Ci products, regardless of what patterns others used Pin Ci to create. The key to this business was not production, but promotion. Guan Yinhang could find some busy streets in the city, find some blank walls, and carefully design a batch of Pin Ci murals to attract the attention of passers-by. As long as the reputation spread, naturally someone would want to play with it in their own home, outside their own shop, or in some unknown place. Although the production of this kind of Pin Ci was said to be effortless for any merchant who had mastered porcelain firing technology, as long as Guan Yinhang could guarantee that his own products had the most uniform quality and the richest colors, he would still achieve good sales results. The Pin Ci industry had no technical difficulty, so the key question was whether they could seize the opportunity when this industry was rising, and whether they could guarantee their leading position in the industry when the market tended to stabilize. A rich product line and good after-sales service would become the key at that time.

In addition to these, Ye Tao also suggested that Guan Yinhang try to make glass mosaics. Only a few merchants currently mastered the technology of firing glass. The main problem was that the impurities in the materials could not be removed, but for firing mosaics, impurities were not a problem at all.

Guan Yinhang happily went to envision in detail how to do this business. And when having a large number of conversations with Ye Tao, unknowingly, Guan Yinhang's address to Ye Tao also became the extremely intimate "Brother Ye."

A few days later, Guan Yinhang had to find Ye Tao again to discuss in detail whether the production of ceramic parts could establish another new industry. The composition of the clay that could be collected near White Stone City was very special, with extremely high hardness and excellent wear resistance. For parts of the same shape, ceramic parts had a lifespan more than twice that of wooden parts. And the use of molds to mass-produce uniformly sized parts was much simpler than the production of wooden parts. Although ceramic parts might be slightly inferior to metal parts in terms of impact resistance and accuracy, as long as they were not used in clocks and watches, they would still be very useful in some daily-use machinery or in some large military machinery.

Guan Yinhang's inspiration came from the Yun Yao blower that was made according to Ye Tao's drawings. The coaxial fan composed entirely of ceramic components ran very smoothly. Ye Tao suggested that the finished molds must be carefully preserved so that parts could be produced in the future to replace damaged ones, but practice proved that the properties of these ceramic parts were excellent. In places like coaxial ducts where it was impossible to encounter any impact force, the lifespan of these parts might be as long as a year… To be honest, these days, mainly because no merchant dared to say that things made up of more than two parts would not have problems within a year. Even the Ikea Home Furnishings and Tissot Watch Shop owned by the Ye family only offered a one-year free repair and a three-year paid repair service commitment.

Ye Tao didn't say anything else, he just drew several parts, especially several gears, and then asked Guan Yinhang to trial-produce a batch, and said that as long as the quality was in place, he would directly represent Ye's Workshop to order a batch. While excitedly going to open the mold for trial production, Guan Yinhang did not forget to write these things in a letter and report these things to Princess Zhaohua, Tan Weixin. He had vaguely realized that if these two businesses, Pin Ci and ceramic parts, could be combined with the Guan family's original position in the ceramic industry, technological accumulation, and so on, and with Ye Tao's strong technical support, it was very likely that they would develop into an industry with extremely broad development prospects. And in the letter, he expressed his desire to allocate a considerable portion of the shares held by the Guan family so that Ye Tao could be combined with the Guan family's ceramic industry.

What he didn't expect was that when the princess's reply arrived, it was accompanied by a document. Tan Weixin divided one-third of the four and a half shares she held in Qingning Firm, which was used by the Guan family to sell their own products, and transferred it to Ye Tao. Attached to the letter was a receipt for the Guan family to keep as evidence. And in the letter, Tan Weixin gave Guan Yinhang clear instructions on the development of ceramic parts and other products manufacturing, and asked Guan Yinhang to open a branch of Qingning Firm in Danyang before the Blood Kirin Army assembled, so that after Guan Yinhang returned to the Blood Kirin Army, he could remotely control the kiln area of White Stone City, continuously obtain new technical support, and also obtain more orders. And Tan Weixin said generously in the letter that her things were no different from Ye Tao's things, which made people feel even more Ye Tao's important position in Tan Weixin's mind.

It seemed that a conclusion should have been reached on Ye Tao's "crime," or at least a rough definition had been made. Ye Tao would still return to Danyang, to the booming center of Dongping. Exile or any other disposal method would be a waste of talent and so cruel for such a genius.