It's funny. When the war between the East Coast Republic of China and the British reached its most critical moment, the white elite group of La Plata, led by the Rodriguez family, collectively distanced itself from the East Coast people, fearing that it would be hit by British ships. At that time, they not only closed the maritime trade channel in Colonia, but also took the opportunity to raise the prices of urgently needed materials on the East Coast, and asked the East Coast people to lower the price of exported goods. In short, they were ugly.

After the East Coast signed a peace agreement with the British in March this year, they saw that the powerful East India companies had no choice but to deal with the East Coast, and finally they had a very awkward peace deal. The La Plata people completely knelt down. In order to make up for their previous mistakes, when they saw that the East Coast Republic lacked funds to develop, sixteen families led by the Rodriguez Chamber of Commerce jointly provided a low-interest loan of 200,000 yuan to the East Coast Republic of China. The annual interest rate was only a low point, which was the meaning.

Since these La Plata people are so sensible and still want them in the future, the East Coast people will naturally no longer pursue the bad things they had before, and both sides will reconcile again on the surface.

Compared to the embarrassment of the La Plata people, the Almeida family in San Vicente, Brazil became much smarter. During the war, they got along happily with the British and provided supplies to British ships. On the other hand, they secretly conveyed important information to the East Coast people. After the war, a large number of industrial raw materials that were urgently needed on the East Coast were immediately credited to the East Coast Port, which was sold well at both ends and took advantage of them.

Of course, after the war, they also saw the huge potential of the East Coast Republic and did not forget to continue investing to maintain the relationship between the two sides. Several Brazilian head-to-face families of St. Vicente joined forces to provide a low-interest loan of 150,000 yuan to the East Coast, with an annual interest rate of one cent.

With these two loans totaling 350,000 yuan, the Executive Committee successfully paid off some of the Ming Dynasty immigrants. Then, after roughly estimating next year's fiscal revenue and expenditure, the Executive Committee boldly asked the Portuguese to double the number of Ming Dynasty immigrants transported to the next few years. At the same time, construction started to build two flute-shaped merchant ships and an escort gunboat in one go.

The construction of these three ships caused a competition between the Dayuhe Naval Shipyard and the Zhenhai Shipyard. In the end, the Executive Committee set a balance. The orders for the two merchant ships were given to the Dayuhe Shipyard and the orders for the guard gunboats were given to the Zhenhai Shipyard. After the order was issued, not only did the two shipyards immediately start production preparations, but some supporting manufacturers that rely on the shipyard to survive, such as anchor chain factories, ship rig factories, canvas workshops, barrel making workshops, cable workshops and other companies also began to make active preparations.

In order to ensure the smooth completion of the three ships, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the State Council specially established a commercial bank, United Industrial Credit Bank, which specifically provides commercial loans to some domestic state-owned enterprises and private workshops to promote domestic industrial development. United Industrial Credit Bank has a reserve of 300,000 yuan. Among them, the Ministry of Finance invested 240,000 yuan and the East Bank Company invested 60,000 yuan. Compared with Northwest Reclamation Bank, United Industrial Credit Bank is a joint-stock commercial bank, and the East Bank Company's shares account for as much as 20%, which is a sign of the further deepening of the penetration of the country's economy by time travelers.

After the establishment of United Industrial Credit Bank, it immediately issued several loan businesses, the most important of which was a loan of 3,000 yuan to provide start-up capital to the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory.

Speaking of this gunpowder factory, we have to mention that the Executive Committee is now determined to get rid of the gunpowder trade that relies on foreign countries. The self-production of saltpeter, one of the important raw materials for gunpowder, is very important. There is a lack of natural saltpeter ore in the East Coast Republic of China, so it has no choice but to seek manual access.

Although some of the travelers in the past knew that they could extract nitroso soil from toilets and cesspools, no one continued to study it in depth. First, because there were few people who knew chemistry among the travelers, most of them were either transferred to study important coal chemical and glass industries, or they were transferred to the Corps Fort to teach, resulting in no successors in this project; second, because the project itself is dirty, tiring, hard, and may get sick. In addition, the channels for purchasing gunpowder from Europe are still smooth, no one has been too concerned about this project. No one has ever mentioned that he would produce gunpowder by himself, but these proposals have been submerged in various other projects that are as numerous as a cow, and have not received enough attention from the superiors.

In the late stage of this war with the British, the East Coast Navy almost used up most of the country's gunpowder stocks, and the situation was once very critical. It can be said that if the British had persisted for a few more months to six months at that time, the situation might have been completely different.

After experiencing this gunpowder crisis, the people of the East Coast finally learned their lesson. While vigorously hoarding gunpowder and increasing inventory, they began to try to produce their own products to get rid of their dependence on gunpowder imports from Spain, France and other countries. The main components of black gunpowder used in the East Coast are potassium nitrate, sulfur and carbon. The carbon problem is easy to solve, and potassium nitrate and sulfur are a bit difficult, because neither of these were produced in the East Coast before.

Sulfur is imported from Chile, while nitroso soil (mainly ingredient potassium nitrate) was purchased from France. Not only is the high cost, but the output is limited. Therefore, after trying to make gunpowder for a period of time, the East Coast gave up and began to import gunpowder directly from Europe (mainly Spain). Of course, this kind of approach is definitely undesirable now, so the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory was established.

As the name suggests, the main thing this factory produces is gunpowder, or rather black gunpowder. The sulfur, one of the two main raw materials for black gunpowder, can only be imported due to the lack of natural sulfur ore. Fortunately, Chile is not far away, and there has been a lot of sulfur flowing from La Plata into Colonia. Someone had previously proposed to recycle the sulfur in the coking oven gas of the coking plant (mainly sulfur in hydrogen sulfide gas), which can not only avoid air pollution, but also turn waste into treasure, and the best of both worlds.

This process of recycling sulfur is not complicated, but the processing of its production equipment still exceeds the current industrial capacity of the East Coast Republic. Perhaps only after large-scale hydraulic presses, steel rolling mills, machine tools and other industrial tools are complete can we get a glimpse of the mystery here. However, the industrial department is also actively studying alternatives, that is, how to use existing technology to bypass these problems when large-scale reactors and other equipment cannot be produced, so as to achieve the recycling of waste sulfur in the gas.

The problem of sulfur may not be solved for a while, but with the arrival of several new Ming Dynasty craftsmen, the production of nitroso soil has made great progress. The methods of these Ming Dynasty craftsmen are not new, they use the traditional compost method. They are shattered a large amount of animal feces and urine, and then placed on a clearing ground with high moisture content and good ventilation in the soil, and then sprinkle a large amount of wood ash on it. If the temperature is appropriate, after a period of nitration reaction, a thin layer of white crystal-like substance can be scraped off the land, which is nitroso soil. After the scraped nitroso soil is selected and purified, it can obtain potassium nitrate with extremely high purity.

This nitration reaction is very simple. Because animal feces and urine, the corpse contains a large amount of nitrogen acid, and under certain conditions, it can react with nitrate bacteria in the soil to produce nitric acid, and then nitric acid reacts with potassium rich in wood ash to produce nitrate - potassium nitrate. The artificial compost method is just to provide such a condition and place suitable for the occurrence of this reaction.

After this method was proposed, the technicians in the chemical industry immediately conducted a small-scale experimental production, and the results proved that this method was completely feasible. In fact, this was not surprising, because Europe and the Ming Dynasty did this at this time.

Since the method is feasible, the next step is to start large-scale production. On November 15, just when Guo Zili's exploration fleet was still drifting on the sea, a large factory building had been built in the wasteland outside the northern Jushu Village in Ping'an Town. This is the nitroso earth workshop of the Northern Gunpowder Factory. A large number of doors and windows were opened on the walls of the factory to maintain ventilation and breathability; and in the factory, a row of ten acres of nitroso fields had been opened. The workers dug a shallow pit of ten acres on the ground, poured with concrete at the bottom of the shallow pit, and covered with a layer of thin soil.

On November 16, the trial production of the nitrosoil workshop began. The workers smashed the animal feces collected from nearby areas and evenly laid them on the thin soil of shallow pits, and then sprinkled water into the soil to maintain the moisture and humidity in the soil. The ventilation conditions of the factory are good, and a lot of glass is installed on the top of the nitrosoil field so that the sunlight can pass by. With such excellent conditions, the nitrifying bacteria in the soil should be able to gradually react these nitrogen acid-rich substances into nitrite and nitric acid.

In the following period, workers often sprinkled some wood ash above the nitrate field, which provided an opportunity for the nitric acid gradually generated in the soil to react the potassium rich in the wood ash into potassium nitrate. At this time, the east coast area began to gradually enter late spring and early summer, both temperature and humidity are more beneficial to the nitration reaction.

On December 31, under the gaze of many technicians of the chemical team and factory workers, the first collection of nitrate soil in the nitrate workshop began. At this time, a thin layer of nitrate soil had been formed above the nitrate field, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate. The workers carefully scraped the layer of nitrate soil and collected it into the container. After the collection, they continued to fill the soil, compost, and sprinkled wood ash into the nitrate field to allow the nitrate field to continue to react.

The scraped nitrile soil was quickly taken for simple decomposition, cleaning, purification, and then weighing and calculating the obtained pure potassium nitrate. The final result was surprising - the ten acres of nitrile fields scraped out more than three tons of pure potassium nitrate in total. If these three tons of potassium nitrate were combined with carbon and sulfur, it could produce a full four tons of gunpowder. This amount was already amazing. You should know that the "August 10" class battleships only needed less than 200 kilograms of black gunpowder to fire at a volley, and eight tons of black gunpowder was enough for war monsters like the "August 10" class to hit more than 20 volleys.

In addition to using these potassium nitrates as gunpowder, they can also be used as chemical fertilizers and nitric acid. The value is huge! The production of the nitrate workshop was a great success!
Chapter completed!