After Transmigration: Building a Kingdom in Turbulent Times

Chapter 1134 - 1116: Book Bureaus Spread Across the Land

Aside from Luoyang, places like Xiping and Chen County that already had book offices and schools also received the order to hold examinations, and all students who passed had to go to the book office for half a month of study.

The masters at the book offices taught them typesetting, inking, laying paper, printing and other tasks, and would also pick out promising ones from among them to learn character carving and casting.

During this half-month of study, the schools and book offices collected their preferences, then discussed them together, and assigned each person accordingly.

These students had a unified title—apprentice. They had a six‑month internship period, and only after passing it could they become formal craftsmen.

The status of craftsmen was no longer low now. Zhao Hanzhang valued craftsmen; besides giving preferential treatment and better conditions to craftsmen among the refugees, she also sent people out with heavy rewards to seek heirs of the Mo School, intending to revive it.

In addition, Zhao Hanzhang strictly ordered all children over eight to enter school regardless of status; even the sons of slaves could enter the school and study together, which to some extent diluted class boundaries.

And craftsmen had been given preferential treatment from the very start of taking in refugees, enjoying the same treatment as literate scholars, which sent their status soaring.

Now that the disaster victims and refugees had been settled, who didn’t want to become a craftsman with a skill?

They even privately circulated the saying that people who could read also counted as craftsmen—their "one skill" was literacy and numeracy.

So the students were quite proud of becoming craftsmen.

Besides assigning new apprentices to the new book offices in each place, the book offices and schools would also select one or two senior masters to take them along.

They were called senior masters, but in fact they had only entered the book office one to three years earlier. Now, in the book offices, no matter which task they did, as long as they had a full year of experience, they counted as senior masters.

There was no helping it: the book offices were too new, their workers limited, and any craftsmen of real talent who were found were basically all pulled away to shoulder more important work.

Besides people, each book office would also send a good number of pre‑cast type to the new book offices.

Only then did the stewards of the book offices understand why, though the offices’ type had long been sufficient, Zhao Hanzhang had always strictly ordered the craftsmen at each office not to stop carving and casting type, and had even set a mandatory monthly quota for type.

Each book office’s common‑use characters numbered one thousand, all carved according to the Thousand‑Character Text; aside from these there were some rare characters kept in reserve, but for these basically only three pieces of type were prepared for each character, and some rare characters weren’t prepared at all and would be carved on demand when needed, so every book office had to have its own character‑carving craftsmen.

For the common‑use type, each character had at least ten pieces.

Ordinary book offices would also from time to time carve and cast more, just in case. But no matter how you looked at it, they wouldn’t need to carve type every single day.

Yet previously there had always been specific requirements from above: each character‑carver had to complete a set workload every month, casting a required number of qualified type pieces, and the book offices were forbidden to encroach on this portion of their working time.

In fact, when things got busy—especially when printing textbooks and the court gazette—the stewards of the book offices were resentful. They felt this was pointless labor: with the office so busy their feet barely touched the ground, they still had to go make type they didn’t need.

Now, when Zhao Hanzhang ordered them to bring out their stored type, and stipulated that each book office was to correspond to three new book offices and must send a full quota of type over, they finally realized that Zhao Hanzhang had laid out this plan long ago.

The book offices that had completed their quotas had nothing to fear, and immediately sent people to the storerooms to fetch out the stored type, then began assigning yamen runners to deliver them to the new book offices they were paired with.

As for the book offices that hadn’t completed theirs, they hurried to take advantage of the time while the apprentices were still studying in the office, and immediately ordered the character‑carvers to rush the carving and casting of type; upward, they reported that the type would be sent together with the senior masters and apprentices.

All localities also immediately began picking sites to build book offices, and ran to the paper workshops to buy paper and purchase various materials, just waiting for the masters to take their posts.

Besides book offices, Zhao Hanzhang also allowed each region to start building paper workshops, but the basic requirements for workers in paper workshops were not so high; they didn’t need to recruit via the schools.

To make paper, what you needed first was great strength, and only then dexterous movements, so you could recruit workers directly from among the common people.

The paper workshops in each place were also training workers to send to the new workshops; for those nearby, County Magistrates who had secured a spot for a new paper workshop could even select good workers and send them to the old workshops to study.

This in turn reduced the relocation and settlement costs for craftsmen.

Generally speaking, it was best to place the book office and the paper workshop in the same location, but in actual operation, in order to balance the power of each county, the Inspectors would always put them in two separate counties.

These weren’t great or bustling provinces like Si Province and Yu State. In other states, the population was small and the economy depressed; by placing them in two different counties, each county could gain some vitality. If you put both in one county, wouldn’t all the benefits go to that one county?

From the perspective of long‑term development, that would be inappropriate.

In Si Province, besides Luoyang having a book office and paper workshop, Zhao Hanzhang had set up book offices and paper workshops in three other prefectures and counties; not to mention Yu State.

Yu State’s Xiping Book Office and Paper Workshop were already famous throughout the realm. Word had it that the books published by the Xiping Book Office were sold nationwide and were highly sought after in Jiangnan and Jiangdong as well, and the paper workshop was the same.

Hmph, the Xiping Paper Workshop had a total of twenty‑eight kinds of paper, yet the craftsmen they sent out only knew how to make five kinds, all of them common paper; as for the better‑quality, more precious varieties, they brushed people off, saying the craftsmen’s time in the workshop had been too short, so they couldn’t learn them yet.

In the end, wasn’t it just that they were afraid others would steal their business, and from then on those kinds of paper could only be bought from them?

It was said that even the Luoyang paper workshop didn’t have so many varieties and such expensive paper.

The Chen County book office and paper workshop in Yu State were also quite good; in addition, other prefectures and counties had three more book offices and paper workshops, making Yu State the province with the most book offices and paper workshops at present.

Other provinces, at most, had one book office and one paper workshop, and many provinces had none at all yet.

Just thinking about it made people unable to hold back their envy of Zhao Ming.

Liu Kun had also taken advantage of the chaos of war to seize the quota for one book office and one paper workshop; after weighing it over, he decided to place the book office in Peng City. A book office was a fine thing—best kept under one’s very nose for easy control.

As for the paper workshop, he had wanted to put it there too, but his subordinates’ argument also made sense: he couldn’t let Peng City eat all the meat and only leave broth for another county. Only if the other counties had hope would they not stir up trouble.

So he mulled it over and in the end fixed on Ling County of Xia Pi Kingdom.

Zhao Hanzhang had people send the construction blueprints for book offices and paper workshops to all the provinces, so the book offices and paper workshops across the realm really did look like branch offices; the interiors might not be absolutely identical, but they were at least seventy to eighty percent alike.

The differences lay only in some details.

Everywhere, people built book offices and paper workshops at the fastest possible speed, and then began purchasing materials according to the lists.

The craftsmen for the paper workshops arrived first, but the bark, grass stems and other materials for making paper needed soaking time, so the book offices still had to procure paper from other paper workshops to start with.

Once the type and the various craftsmen for the book offices arrived, they could begin work at once. The State Governors, Prefectural Governors and County Magistrates all took this very seriously and personally went to the book offices to watch them print their very first edition. Mm, what they test‑printed was this month’s court gazette.

Of course, there were all sorts of minor imperfections in the printing process, but overall it was a success.

So they waved their hands boldly and said on the spot: "Print more copies of the Thousand‑Character Text and New Mathematics. From now on, the textbooks for our state’s schools will come from this book office. We won’t need to line up and scramble to buy them from other offices anymore, nor spend on travel costs!"