Chapter 48

"Come on, I'll take you to find the boat builder!" Huang Hai, who was in his fifties, was more lively in temperament and had not let the hardships of life dull his curiosity. Hearing Hong Tao speak so confidently, he also wanted to see what was different about the boats in Hong Tao's hometown compared to the boats of the Tanka people.

Leaving the row of connected boats belonging to the Weng family, Huang Hai and Hong Tao continued west along the coast in a small wooden boat. After traveling about half a nautical mile, they found two connected boats and three stilt bamboo houses on a small bay. This was the boat builder, the Wen family, that he had mentioned.

The Wen family, spanning three generations, had a large population, but none of them went out to sea to fish. They specialized in building and repairing boats, and they only served the Tanka people, not outsiders. Throughout Hainan Island, there were only four or five families who could build and repair boats, all of whom had inherited the skills from their ancestors. The Wen family was the best among them. The connected boats they built were sturdy, stable, and watertight. However, their connected boats were also the most expensive, priced at 500 guan, made entirely from oil椎 wood from the mountains. If properly maintained, they could last for several decades and could be used as houses when not sailing far out to sea. For a Tanka man from Hainan Island, buying a connected boat made by the Wen family at his wedding was a lifetime investment, more cost-effective than the concrete and steel apartments of the future.

The Huang family and the Wen family were old friends, though this generation had no marriage ties, the previous generation had a familial relationship. In fact, the Tanka people often married within their community because the Song Dynasty government did not allow them to marry other ethnic groups. This, combined with the poor transportation of the time, meant that even a distance of a hundred miles was considered far. It was because of Huang Hai's connection that the old patriarch of the Wen family reluctantly agreed to let his youngest son accompany Hong Tao in his endeavors. If it were an outsider, they wouldn't even be allowed to look, let alone build a boat. After paying a deposit, they would just have to wait for the boat, with no questions asked about the construction process. This skill was their livelihood, and if it were stolen, they would starve.

The youngest son of the Wen family was named Wen Qi, as he was the seventh in his family. His grandfather was called Wen Er, which sounded like a brother, so they added "Lao" to make it Wen Lao Er. In Song Dynasty China, most people with little education used their birth order as their names, so on the street, you could encounter many Wang Xiaosan and Li Xiaosi, and it was hard for strangers to tell who was who.

Wen Qi had two older brothers and two older sisters, so why was he the seventh? It was simple: two of his sisters had been drowned because the family couldn't afford to raise so many girls! Throughout Chinese history, there has been a preference for boys over girls due to the underdeveloped productivity, as only boys could provide more labor. Raising girls meant preparing dowries when they reached their teens, and once married, they belonged to their husband's family, a loss. In many impoverished areas, not just among the Tanka people but also on the mainland, if a family had too many girls and couldn't afford to raise them, they would rather not let them suffer in this world and would drown them.

Some might say that these parents were too cruel and cold-blooded, and if it were them, they would raise their children no matter how hard it was. But this is called talking without feeling the pain. In their eyes, eating bran and vegetables might be the hardest, but for many people in this era, eating bran and vegetables was considered a happy life. In the Qing Dynasty, many rural people in China only ate two meals a day: a bowl of porridge and a bowl of rice, with no side dishes, all millet. Such families were considered well-fed, and many couldn't even afford two meals a day. Asking them to raise several girls and prepare dowries when they grew up was beyond their means.

Then someone might say, if you can't afford it, don't have children, and if you have them, take responsibility! This is also talking without feeling the pain! In ancient China, people worked from sunrise to sunset. After 6 or 7 PM, with no TV, computers, or radios for entertainment, and no food in their stomachs, they couldn't go to the park to dance, so they could only make babies in bed. Otherwise, eating and sleeping, then working, and sleeping again, was no different from animals. There were no family planning methods back then, so if they got pregnant, they had to give birth, and how else would they get boys? You couldn't ask Song Dynasty pregnant women to have an ultrasound to keep the boys and send the girls to the hospital to be aborted.

Wen Qi was actually only 23 years old, but he looked like he was almost 40. Why? He had premature white hair, a head full of gray, and long hair. Hong Tao thought he looked very cool. If he let his hair down and washed it with some fancy shampoo and styled it, it would be more artistic than Zhou Xingchi's gray hair. Hong Tao found him interesting, and he found Hong Tao interesting too. He probably hadn't seen a Tanka person so tall with a buzz cut, speaking in such a strange tone and not understanding Tanka language, so Huang Hai had to translate for him.

"What kind of boat do you want to build? I'll make a model first..." The next morning, Wen Qi took Hong Tao and Huang Hai into one of the bamboo houses on the beach. There were no rooms or full walls, and it was surrounded by various tools, making it more of a workshop than a living space. In this workshop, Wen Qi, through Huang Hai, told Hong Tao that he needed to know the design of the boat.

"Do you have any blueprints? Blueprints from previous boats, can I see them?" Hong Tao couldn't draw blueprints, he could only sketch a rough design, and he couldn't guarantee the scale. So he planned to borrow some ideas. If there were similar models, he could modify them, saving a lot of trouble.

"These are the models!" Wen Qi was straightforward, not at all concerned about the technology being leaked. He turned and lifted a piece of old sailcloth, revealing a row of models.

"Ah! Models? You build boats with these?" Hong Tao looked and understood. The Wen family didn't use blueprints but models instead. These models were scaled-down versions of the finished boats, with the key data known only to them. Even if someone took the model, they wouldn't know the critical measurements, such as the size of the keel and the thickness of the ribs, making it impossible to build the boat.

What to do if he couldn't borrow their blueprints? Hong Tao had a plan. Making a model was no big deal; he could make a carrier model in elementary school. Let's do it, no talking, just showing off some skills! Immediately, Hong Tao and Wen Qi took the tools for making models and started working in the workshop. Although Wen Qi couldn't speak Mandarin, he understood a lot. Hong Tao only needed to tell him the width, length, and thickness of the boards and planks, and his skilled hands would use various carving knives to shape the soft paulownia wood. Hong Tao only needed to assemble the pieces, and they worked together quite well, a testament to the默契 between experts.

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