Chapter 1 Punishment and Torture

The formal appointment of Ye Tao as an official of the Dongping court might be an unparalleled honor for others, but for Ye Tao, it was indeed a punishment and torture. Whether or not he received a salary was secondary. After all, Ye Tao, who could now be considered a wealthy man, wouldn't care about that little bit of pay. But the complicated work was more than he could bear. The Ministry of Public Works and the Ministry of War had a lot of things to deal with recently, especially after the great battle, the restoration of several cities affected by the war, the transfer of troops, reorganization, and other affairs. Zhuo Mang, who had not yet been able to return to Danyang, was implementing a series of deployments on the front lines. In Danyang, in the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Public Works, and the Ministry of Revenue, it was necessary to sort out the various relationships involved in the series of deployments made by Zhuo Mang, allocate the funds that should be allocated, implement the relevant documents and appointments for the transfer of troops and the promotion or demotion of generals, summarize and compile the opinions of the participating armies, allocate the professional talents needed for repairing cities in various places, and so on. Although there were special personnel to handle these matters, many documents still had to pass through Ye Tao's hands. As a participating general, as someone very familiar with the situation, and as someone extremely familiar with engineering matters, there were many things for which his opinion was required. In addition, the work of installing davits on the city walls of all cities to carry goods also required Ye Tao to spend a lot of time training the relevant officials of the Ministry of Public Works. Coupled with the fact that the main building of Iron City, "Iron Furnace Fortress," and the construction of the clock tower in the new district of Danyang had entered a critical stage, he wished he could split himself into several people. Fortunately, everyone still took into account the fact that the recovery from the palm injury he had suffered still had a little tail, and mainly asked him to undertake some clerical work without letting him direct on-site too much, which he could still handle.

While Guan Yinhang was in the military camp, the mosaic business was taken over by the Princess's mansion. For some unknown reason, this time, Tan Weixin actually let Tan Weishi be responsible for this business, and even Tan Weiran was sent to learn the business. Such an arrangement was really incomprehensible. Many people had begun to speculate whether Tan Weixin was preparing to hand over the position of inner palace steward to her younger siblings.

Tan Weishi was very excited to be in charge of something for the first time. Since this was a business that had never appeared before, there was no existing business to refer to. Since there were only porcelain products now, it was certainly possible to divide them into mosaic tiles, one inch square, that could be used for拼花 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs), and tiles that could only be used purely for surface treatment of buildings. But whether they should be classified as porcelain or building materials, Tan Weishi and some commercial experts from the inner palace discussed for a long time without a result. However, it was certain that they would not use the steward's original sales channels. The old master sent by the steward began to dig kilns in the town west of Danyang City, which was used for diversion, to fire refractory bricks, preparing to establish a production base in Danyang. Although Yun kilns could only be fired in Baishi City, stable temperature control was, after all, conducive to improving the quality of ceramic products. The air blowing and temperature control system designed by Ye Tao in Baishi City had become standard equipment on the newly built kilns.

Although she hadn't figured out the business yet, Tan Weishi had grasped one point, and that was that if there was any problem, it was always right to look for Ye Tao. But she didn't expect that it was actually Dai Qiuyan who first got into the state and discovered a key problem.

"Ye-gege, look at these porcelain pieces, the colors are all different, will they work?" Although Dai Qiuyan didn't know much about technical matters, and was even more ignorant about the construction industry that her father was busy with all day long, so busy that he didn't want to go home, she had found something she loved—painting.

Originally, Dai Qiuyan wanted to quietly follow Sophie to learn how to draw blueprints. Although she was very patient and could help Sophie start comprehensively organizing the various blueprints left by Ye Tao, it was, after all, too hard and too boring for a child like her.

However, when Dai Qiuyan saw the charcoal sketches of landscape imagination drawings and some illustrations with more exquisite sketch techniques and light color paintings made with the few guohua (traditional Chinese painting) pigments that were rarely used now, which Ye Tao had clipped into the architectural drawings, it was as if she had been enlightened. After pestering Ye Tao to teach her the whole set of sketching techniques, the quiet natured girl presented more exquisite details in her elaborate paintings than Ye Tao's drafts. After all, Ye Tao really didn't have the mood to lie on the easel for many hours, but for Dai Qiuyan, it was not a problem at all.

Except for occasionally being called by Tan Weishi or Huang Wan to participate in the gatherings of noble ladies in Danyang, she almost never left her home. The time in front of the easel was so fascinating to her. After practicing for two whole years, now, the exquisiteness of Dai Qiuyan's sketches often gave Ye Tao the illusion of black and white photos. And this was still only with charcoal sticks, not with a series of pencils of different grades from 8B to 8h. Not only in sketching, but also in color, Dai Qiuyan now had a good grasp of the true essence of it.

Dai Qiuyan was able to learn sketching and modern color theory from Ye Tao, traditional literati painting from Huang Wan, who came from a family of scholars, and decorative art and animation theory from Cassandra. Although she was only fourteen years old now, her accomplishments in art at such a young age had been praised by many masters in Danyang. A colored ink portrait of Huang Wan painted by Dai Qiuyan was now hanging in Situ Huang Xuping's study.

As soon as the mosaic thing came into view, Dai Qiuyan took a batch of porcelain pieces to make a few simple pictures as a hobby. But in the process of拼画 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs), Dai Qiuyan clearly found that the colors of the mosaics were too unstable now, and it was often impossible to find the desired color. And when a large number of porcelain pieces of the same color were needed, the uniformity of the color of the porcelain pieces often did not meet the requirements.

After Dai Qiuyan raised this opinion, Ye Tao deeply agreed. However, in this era, there was not even a standard color card. How could they determine the color? Moreover, the color of the glaze used in mosaics was different from the color presented after firing. A lot of experiments were needed to configure the desired color at will.

Moreover, some colors were more difficult to obtain, such as blue and purple. In the dyeing workshop affiliated to Ye's workshop, the main source of blue was indigo, and purple, in addition to mixing and matching, mainly came from a kind of sea shellfish. The process of using lavender as a dye was also being explored. However, these could not be used in the glaze of fired porcelain, which could only use mineral pigments. After a period of searching and exploration, Ye Tao finally found a stable source of alkaline copper carbonate material, and then, he was lucky enough to find a source of zircon blue. With these two mineral pigments, pure and stable blue was finally solved. After several experiments, although the color determination work had not been completed, at least the problem of color uniformity was solved with the fixing of the glaze formula. Since purple was relatively less used in mosaic murals, Ye's workshop tested various schemes while trying to collect various minerals. The problem of mineral pigments was very complicated. Zircon blue or alkaline copper carbonate mixed with the commonly used red pigment hematite and fired, the color was complex and difficult to describe, but everyone did not think it was purple.

In order to make the mosaic color spectrum complete quickly, Tan Weishi, in a fit of anger, actually took out a reward to collect various minerals that could be used as glaze. At the same time, she also used a lot of brains to persuade the Danyang city guard mansion to take down a影壁 *ying bi* (screen wall) in a small square in the new district of Danyang. This影壁 *ying bi* (screen wall) was originally intended to find someone to make a brick carving, but now it became a拼画 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs) with mosaics. The designer of the拼画 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs) was Dai Qiuyan, and the content of the拼画 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs) was "Pine Waves and Clouds," which was relatively easy to obtain materials and already had a successful precedent. This high-standard mosaic拼画 *pin hua* (inlaid mosaic designs) would also fully use Yun kiln broken porcelain pieces as materials.

This was not anyone's idea, but Tan Weishi's own idea. Tan Weishi's rather advanced advertising awareness also really made Tan Weixin and Ye Tao啧啧称奇 *ze ze cheng qi* (click their tongues in amazement).

But in this way, the original small mosaic business became big. Seeing that her sister was so attentive to one thing, Tan Weiming persuaded Wang Lan, the Minister of Public Works, to mobilize the Dongping National Mineral Specimen Library, which the Ministry of Public Works had spent a lot of effort to create. It had to be said that the impression of Princess Xiu, Tan Weishi, in everyone's mind was really good. The officials of integrity actually kept silent about this obvious act of using public office for private gain, and there were no accusations at all. It made Tan Xiaopei, who was preparing to defend his daughter's business, feel very bored. But even so, it was still a big project to establish the color spectrum.

What else can mosaics and tiles do besides decoration? This was also the key. Those who could afford to play with mosaics were all big families, and the residences of big families had certain rules, so it was impossible to make them colorful casually. When Tan Weishi complained to Ye Tao about this lack of practicality, Ye Tao smiled mysteriously and said, "Don't worry, I'm making something fun. When it's done, you'll know one use of mosaics."

Tan Weishi ran to Ye Tao's studio almost every day. She looked at the extremely clean studio, which hadn't had anything new for many days, and said disdainfully, "It doesn't look like it. Are you going to help or not? It's not good if I mess up the task that my sister has given me."

Ye Tao said with a wry smile, "Your Highness, you have to be fair. There are six technicians and twelve apprentices in Ye's workshop helping you with the color spectrum and helping you try out glazes. Qiuyan is helping you with murals. I still have a lot of things in my hands. If you don't believe me, go to the Blood Kirin Army's military camp with me."

"Military camp?" Tan Weishi said dissatisfied, "Why does something have to be made in such a faraway place?"

Ye Tao was a little dumbfounded and said, "How far is it? Let's go now, and we'll be back soon."