The snow had stopped, and the brick-burning plans had begun. The brick kiln built beside the river was not very large; each firing could only produce a few thousand bricks. Since these bricks were for building the city, they were relatively large. If they had been house bricks, they probably could have fit more than ten thousand in one firing.
After personally inspecting two batches of bricks, Luo Chong handed the work over to the tribespeople. In truth, they did not need to work every day. They basically only did it once every three or four days. First they loaded the kiln, then the firing took a day. After that, they poured in water to cool the bricks, which took another day. Finally, they removed the finished bricks and loaded in a new batch of brick blanks.
Luo Chong had thought nobody would be willing to do this work in winter, but the truth surprised him. The tribespeople fought to do it.
Only later did Luo Chong figure out why. Moving bricks was hard physical labor, so he never skimped on the food of those who carried them. Moreover, anyone who helped move bricks could eat three meals a day. Those who did not had to stay behind and study Chinese characters, and if they failed to learn well, their dinner would be cut in half. So everyone scrambled to move bricks. This was simply ridiculous.
The days passed one after another like this. They studied Chinese and Chinese characters each day, fed the horses, antelopes, and rabbits, and moved bricks once every few days. Their lives were ordinary yet fulfilling.
Whenever they were not busy, everyone chatted in Chinese. They had no choice but to use it, because many things could only be expressed in the Chinese Luo Chong had taught them. Their original tribal tongue simply had no way to describe those novel things.
Some people also made ornaments to decorate themselves, and most of them were men. Bone necklaces, stone necklaces, feathers, and all sorts of things were piled onto their bodies with abandon.
Luo Chong did not understand why. Later, the Elder told him that to prevent the deterioration of the race caused by close-kin mating, many tribes gathered together after spring arrived to hold matchmaking gatherings. Any men and women who had just reached adulthood could participate. If the woman found the man pleasing to the eye, she would follow him back to his tribe.
And the standard for being pleasing to the eye was whether you were strong enough, how powerful your tribe was, and whether it had plenty of food. These things could be judged by the bone ornaments on the man's body.
If you carried an especially long thighbone as a weapon, your tribe definitely had the strength to hunt large beasts, and it also meant your tribe would not lack food. If you were covered in bone ornaments, that showed your tribe had plenty of food. Otherwise, where would you get so many bones?
Well, that made an absurd amount of sense. Luo Chong was rendered speechless.
Actually, it meant much the same as animals courting. Deer competed over whose antlers were bigger and longer, while bulls and rams locked horns with each other. Even little birds first built beautiful nests to attract females back to lay eggs. Humans were the same, except that people at this time valued the amount of food above all else.
But was the Han Tribe short of women? Obviously not, all right? What the Han Tribe lacked now was men. What were all of them getting so worked up about? Weren't there already more than enough women in their own tribe? Luo Chong looked down on them.
This time, however, Luo Chong had wrongly blamed them. Everyone knew their tribe had plenty of women, and that those women came from three different tribes, so they could hardly be considered close kin. There was no need to look outside. It was just that, after growing so large, making ornaments every winter had become a habit.
Besides, Luo Chong had presented everyone with a new problem this year. In the past, many of their ornaments had been worn on their heads, but this year everyone had bound up their hair. All at once, they no longer knew how to decorate it, so they could only make necklaces to hang around their necks.
At present, Luo Chong was the only person in the entire tribe who bound his hair with a snakeskin hair tie and inserted a bone hairpin. The others had even fewer ornaments on their heads. They merely found a strip of material to tie up their hair, without even a hairpin, specifically so they could be distinguished from the Chieftain.
Luo Chong also felt that something seemed to be missing. The ancients had also been accustomed to wearing hats. From the style of a hat, one could tell what a person did. Besides hats, there were all kinds of hairpins—and, right, crowns.
Thus, Luo Chong developed crowns as another ornament. In addition, since carpentry tools had also been made, he had Mutong produce a batch of wooden combs.
A crown was also a hairband. It bound the hair on top of the head into a bun, and the crown was the band fitted over that bun. Crowns were mostly made of gold or silver, leather, or jade. Some were even mixed materials, such as jade inlaid with gold or jade inlaid into leather. Their styles varied greatly, making them very attractive ornaments.
There was no problem with everyone wearing crowns. If they wanted to distinguish themselves from the Chieftain, they only needed to use different styles and materials.
Since ancient times, gold had been a symbol of nobility. The Han Tribe had no gold, but it did have copper and tin. These materials were the same color as gold and silver, so Luo Chong's crown was made of copper.
First, they carved a crown out of a wooden board. They could carve patterns and characters onto it, or hollow it out and carve flowers. Luo Chong's crown had hollowed floral designs. This also reduced its weight; a solid copper band would have been too heavy. It also bore the character "Han."
After the wooden board was carved, they pressed it into a lump of clay to leave an indentation, which was used as a mold. Then they poured in molten copper. What came out was a thin copper plate with hollow designs. They wrapped the plate around a wooden rod as thick as a wrist and hammered it into a circle, then secured it with a copper hairpin.
With the "golden" crown on his head, Luo Chong naturally became a cut above the rest. This time, he had traded a bird gun for a cannon. Since he had upgraded himself, he could not leave the tribespeople's heads bare, so he made Dashu a silver-colored one out of tin. Its design was a tree, and Dashu loved it.
Under Luo Chong's guidance, the other adult men also made some leather hairbands, and even wooden ones, along with bone and wooden hairpins. Luo Chong also handed out the lungfish's huge front teeth that he had brought back from his previous trip. They were all ground into various shapes and stuck onto the hairbands.
From then on, the Han Tribe had a new rule. Children could only bind their hair or wear hairbands, but they could not insert hairpins. Adult men could wear crowns or hairbands, but they had to insert hairpins. This was how adults and minors were distinguished.
The women now had combs, so they no longer wore only ponytails. Adult women had to coil up their hair and could use wooden combs or hairpins as ornaments. Underage girls could tie their hair into ponytails, wear it loose, or braid it, and they could also use hairpins as decoration.
As a strategic resource, metal could not possibly be used to make ornaments for everyone. Therefore, Luo Chong distributed metal ornaments as rewards. Anyone who had contributed to the tribe had a chance to receive one.
After a series of reforms, one only had to look at a person's head in the Han Tribe to tell their identity and age group, or whether they had ever rendered service to the tribe.
Qu Bing's hairband had also been made by Luo Chong. It was wood wrapped in python skin, with a copper clasp bearing a cloud pattern. Luo Chong had awarded it to him for learning Chinese characters the fastest. Qu Bing was extremely happy and touched the copper clasp on his head whenever he had nothing else to do. He was the first child among the youngsters to own a metal ornament.
In truth, Luo Chong had worked so hard on ornaments not merely to distinguish the tribespeople's social ranks, but for that matchmaking gathering.
Of course, he was not going there to find a match. He wanted to meet people from other tribes and see whether he could arrange some trades.
In the past, the Han Tribe's salt had all come through trade with Baldy's tribe. Now that Baldy's tribe was gone, Luo Chong wanted to find a new seller before they located a salt mine.
The pottery of the Han Tribe was extremely valuable, after all. Luo Chong not only wanted to exchange pottery for salt, but also hoped to buy some people and bring them back. If he relied on the fewer than two hundred people currently in the tribe to reproduce, even several generations from now they would not be enough to fill Luo Chong's city.
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