"Using news of a few gold and silver mines overseas, you want to take away four hundred million taels of silver?
Even if there's news of overseas gold and silver mines, wouldn't we still need to send troops to capture them for the Great Ming? To send troops, wouldn't we first need the Five Military Commissions to expand their forces?
Do they think I, Liu Huaiwen, am an idiot?
And also, my little girl, whom I've raised for seventeen years, has actually been targeted by Zhu Erdan long ago?
Fine, officially, I, Liu Huaiwen, shed hair in court for your Zhu family. Privately, your Emperor Zhu's brother wants to elope with my little girl?
This is simply too much of a bullying!
The more Liu Huaiwen thought about it, the more furious he became: "If Zhu Erdan dares to elope with my little girl, I'll break his legs!"
Zhu Jinsong's face immediately turned dark: "Uncle Huaiwen, I said Erdan took my little sister, not that he dared to elope with her. If he had that courage, I would break his legs first, it wouldn't be your turn."
Liu Huaiwen snorted in dissatisfaction: "Why wouldn't it be my turn? If he and my little girl end up together, I'll be his father-in-law. It's only natural for a father-in-law to beat his son-in-law, isn't it?"
Zhu Jinsong also snorted: "Alright, alright, I won't argue with you about this. Anyway, at most, I'll give you four hundred million taels for the national treasury, the rest will go to the imperial treasury. I want to increase investment in the Royal Academy and universities. Without this money, what will I use to do it?"
Liu Huaiwen was stunned and asked: "Four hundred million taels, all to be thrown into the Royal Academy and universities?"
Zhu Jinsong nodded and said: "I want to turn this four hundred million taels of silver into forty trillion taels of silver. Half of it will be entirely invested in the Royal Academy, and the other half will be used for the construction of prefectural schools and universities."
"It's not too late to invest now. If we wait a few hundred more years, when other barbarians develop, even if we want to invest money, we might not be able to achieve any results."
Now is indeed a good time to invest money, because the world's technological level is what it is. The Great Ming has already surpassed and led in many aspects. What needs to be done next is to continue investing money to maintain the advantage.
If it's later, when other countries have developed and built their own patent barriers, it will be difficult for the Great Ming to achieve results even if it wants to invest money.
However, Liu Huaiwen still felt a pang of heartache – that was four hundred million taels of silver!
As the saying goes, one is influenced by one's company. After spending a long time with Zhu Jinsong, Liu Huaiwen also liked to study other people's things, both good and bad, and then 'take what is good and follow it, and change what is not.'
Liu Huaiwen had exchanges with Pierre, Macartney, Thomson, and others, and studied how the financial systems of England, France, and that fool Eagle's family operated.
The problem was that precisely because he had studied them, Liu Huaiwen felt doubtful about life.
Although these countries also attached great importance to education and scientific research, he had never heard of any country like the Great Ming, which poured money into infrastructure and basic education.
For example, these countries invested about four percent of their fiscal revenue in education, and this included basic and higher education. In the Great Ming, the investment in basic education such as social schools and county schools alone accounted for about ten percent of the fiscal revenue.
Now, this Emperor Zhu felt that investing in infrastructure and basic education was not enough, and he wanted to pour money into scientific research and university education?
After thinking about it, Liu Huaiwen couldn't help but advise: "Your Majesty, money doesn't grow on trees. There's only one Grand Secretary He in the world. After this money is spent, what will happen in the future?"
Zhu Jinsong, however, said: "That's why I want to use this four hundred million taels of silver to make money from money. As long as the Royal Academy can maintain its leading position worldwide, the national treasuries of other countries will be our Great Ming's leeks."
"For example, precisely because the steam engines developed by the Royal Academy are more advanced than the steam engines of the European barbarians, they have to buy from us. Precisely because the firing pin guns developed by the Royal Academy are more advanced than the flintlock guns, we can sell firing pin guns to the whole world."
Liu Huaiwen also accepted Zhu Jinsong's statement.
After a while, Liu Huaiwen looked up at Zhu Jinsong and said: "Let's talk about the gold and silver mines."
...
Being an emperor is a very tiring job.
Although his wives are all peerless beauties chosen from one in ten thousand or even one in a million, and although he is rich and his word is law, his word can bring prosperity or ruin a country, being an emperor is truly tiring.
Just like now, as soon as Zhu Jinsong was persuaded by Liu Huaiwen to give away four hundred million taels of silver, he was then entangled by Liang Xiude, the leader of the Royal Academy.
Liang Xiude's purpose in finding Zhu Jinsong was simple: the Great Ming's current oil reserves are not just insufficient, but quite sufficient, and even the Royal Academy's consumption cannot be met.
Don't doubt why the word 'oil' appears in the Great Ming, because the first person to name oil was Shen Kuo, who wrote "Dream Pool Essays," dating back to the mid-Northern Song Dynasty.
"Dream Pool Essays · Oil": Fu and Yan prefectures have petroleum, old saying "Gao Nu County produces脂水," which is this... I know its smoke can be used. I tried to sweep its smoke to make ink. It was black and lustrous as lacquer, and pine ink could not compare. This thing will surely be widely used in the world.
This is just the naming of oil.
The application of oil has historical records dating back to the Western Han Dynasty. According to the "Book of Han," in the Shaanbei region during the Western Han Dynasty, local people began to collect and use petroleum for fire.
By the Han Dynasties, the Central Plains had begun to use it for lighting and lubricating axles, and even since the Northern and Southern Dynasties, petroleum had become a good medicine for treating hair loss and other diseases in traditional Chinese medicine. During the Song Dynasty, graphite and paraffin wax made from petroleum were indispensable luxuries for the wealthy class.
Of course, in principle, good things must be prioritized for military use, and the most important use of petroleum is fighting wars.
Compared to the scene of ancient Greeks setting fire to oil on the battlefield, the Central Plains developed "fierce fire oil cabinets" specifically for spraying oil flames, and the Song Dynasty developed "tube barriers" fueled by oil, which were Song Dynasty versions of incendiary bombs.
The Song Dynasty document "Yesterday's Dream Record" records that during the Song-Xia War, the Song Dynasty army's first task when building fortifications was to dig trenches, usually digging deep trenches several zhang long and wide, specifically for storing petroleum needed for combat.
During the Qingli reign of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Central Plains developed the impact drilling technology, a technology that uses simple tools for deep drilling, which is the predecessor of modern oil industry drilling technology. In the sixteenth year of Zhengde in the Great Ming, the first formal oil well of the Ming Dynasty was built in Jia Prefecture, Sichuan.
Up to this point, the application and extraction of petroleum and other technologies in the Central Plains still led the world!
This advanced oil extraction technology was also written into the scientific treasure "Tiangong Kaiwu" by Song Yingxing during the late Ming Dynasty, becoming another testament to the brilliant scientific and technological achievements of ancient China.
Unfortunately, the enlightened and wise rulers of our Great Qing were not interested in science and technology, but preferred literary games. Including "Tiangong Kaiwu," all books involving science and technology could not escape the fate of being banned and destroyed.
Even more unfortunately, while the Great Qing could ban the dissemination of these books domestically, it could not stop their popularity overseas. A large amount of advanced craftsmanship was thus lost, and later learned by others and improved. A large number of bronze players successfully upgraded to king, while the original kings were played into scrap iron by the Great Qing.
When the Great Qing wanted to drill its own oil wells after the "Treaty of Shimonoseki," it was stunned to find that all oil-related technologies, from oil location exploration to extraction technology and equipment, were gone.
Of course, Zhu Jinsong is not particularly concerned about the "kings and bronze" or "scrap iron" at the moment, because Zhu Jinsong has recovered the password of the original king's account, and the Great Ming has come online again, and there will probably be no more troublesome matters like scrap iron in the future.
What Zhu Jinsong is concerned about is why the Great Ming's oil is not enough.
Although thanks to the divine operations of the enlightened and wise rulers of the Great Qing, the Great Ming's oil extraction technology did not improve at all for more than 150 years after the Qing entered the pass, and most of the original oil wells were depleted. Now, only a small number of flowing wells can be utilized, so much so that even the Royal Academy's consumption cannot be met.
But then again, the Great Ming is such a vast territory, and there are quite a few flowing wells. Even if the daily output is low, it should be at least a few hundred catties, right?
Can your Royal Academy consume a few hundred catties a day?
Facing Zhu Jinsong's question, Liang Xiude was immediately anxious: "A few hundred catties? A few thousand catties would barely be enough!"
"I have discovered that what Your Majesty calls scientific research is essentially a fancy way of boiling water."
"Steam engines boil water, steam engine locomotives naturally boil water, and all machinery based on steam engines boil water."
"Since it's all about boiling water, why not use oil to boil water?"
"My colleagues and I in the academy are trying to distill and separate oil to see what's inside, and why oil burns so stubbornly. This consumption is bound to be a little larger."
"When we tried, we actually found something – several different oils can be refined from petroleum, and the residue left after refining can be used to pave roads, which is also making the best use of everything."
Zhu Jinsong looked at Liang Xiude with a blank expression.
Zhu Jinsong had no doubt that the great minds in the Royal Academy could distill several different oils, as the pot distillation method could achieve this.
But what did Liang Xiude just say?
The essence of scientific research is boiling water?
Although this conclusion was not flawed, why did it sound so awkward?
Just as Zhu Jinsong was thinking about how to explain the issue of boiling water, Liang Xiude continued: "There have also been some breakthroughs in steam locomotives and lathes recently."
"While pulling the same amount of cargo, the speed of steam locomotives can reach eighty li per hour, nearly double the speed of the earliest steam locomotives."
"Also, the efficiency of textile machines has also greatly improved."
"In short, the money Your Majesty invested in the Academy of Sciences a few years ago has paid off in some way recently."
"Only in the field of electricity, there has been no progress recently."
At this point, Liang Xiude said with great confidence: "However, Academician Fan in the Royal Academy has proposed a new theory. As long as it is verified, the research on electricity can be considered to have achieved a major breakthrough."
"Of course, if Academician Fan's theory comes true, it will still be inseparable from boiling water – that's why I say the essence of scientific research is boiling water."
"It is also because of this reason that the demand for petroleum has become greater."
Zhu Jinsong continued to be bewildered.
After finally sending Liang Xiude away, Zhu Jinsong simply summoned Zeng Cheng and other prominent figures.
There was no other way. The things Liang Xiude brought up almost involved all aspects of the Great Ming, and directly disrupted the plans for the next three years that Zeng Cheng and other prominent figures had just formulated.
The first to be affected were the Railway Department and the Transportation Department under the Ministry of Works.
Next were the Commercial Department under the Ministry of Revenue.
Inevitably, the Five Military Commissions would also be troubled – let alone that there were not many oil fields in the Great Ming, even if oil could be dug everywhere, Zhu Jinsong had no intention of digging.