That afternoon, Liu Guangzheng led his entourage out of the city to inspect the construction of the blast furnaces beyond the walls.
The court had the Ministry of Works, which specialized in construction. Whether repairing the imperial palace or mending the city walls, it was always the Ministry of Works that handled it. So long as a palace received regular maintenance, it could stand for centuries, even a millennium, without issue.
This showed just how many master craftsmen the Ministry of Works possessed.
Throughout the dynasties, emperors had never shortchanged themselves when it came to food, clothing, housing, and travel.
And when these craftsmen were put to work building blast furnaces, even though Liu Guangzheng had provided only a rough sketch, the master craftsmen of the Ministry of Works had still spent just over a month adding a tiny little billion details to the plans before officially beginning construction. By now, the blast furnaces were already more than halfway complete.
The blast furnaces were built beside the Grand Canal outside the Capital City, intending to use waterpower to drive the bellows and thus raise the furnace temperature.
Two furnaces had been built. One was for desulfurizing coal and dry-distilling it into coke, preventing the iron from sulfurizing and losing strength. The other was the smelting furnace itself.
The traditional furnaces of this era simply could not reach the temperatures needed to melt iron. Producing good iron was not only laborious and time-consuming, but yielded pitifully little—and iron was the foundation of industrialization.
By Liu Guangzheng's estimate, this single great furnace, once completed, might produce in a year an amount of iron equivalent to thirty percent of the nation's total output in the past.
And this was only the first one, a pilot project. Once the iron was smelted and some