The Sui Emperor did many major things in his life, including the construction of a super-large granary, the Huiluo Warehouse. But does this Huiluocang really have a level that cannot be surpassed today? This is an exaggeration.
Judging from the reasons for the construction, Huiluocang is a national project built in line with the trend of the times. It was the Sui Emperor who had such an idea, and the people had such a technology, so there was this huge warehouse.
In the fourth year of the Northern Zhou Dynasty (569), a child who would be "beautiful and wise" was born in Chang'an. He was yang guang, the second son of Yang Jian and Dugu Jialuo. Yang Guang was awarded the title of Duke of Yanmen County at a young age because of his father's merits. In the first year of the Kai Emperor (581), Yang Guang, who was thirteen years old at the time, was made the King of Jin, and the official was the governor of the Pillar State and the Prefecture. Soon after, Yang Guang was appointed as the General of Zuo Wuwei and appointed shangshu ling of Shangzhu Guo and Hebei Province. Although these positions are more superficial and have no real power. However, being able to obtain such a gift still shows that Yang Guang has enough thoughts and is very pleasing to people.
Yang Guang's mind was meticulous, and he could know a little bit from his rivalry with his brother Yang Yong for the position of crown prince.
Emperor Wen of Sui had sent people who were good at looking at faces to look at his sons privately. In the end, the person who met told Emperor Wen of Sui that Yang Guanggui was indescribable. Soon, Emperor Wen of Sui personally went to Yang Guang's mansion. As a result, Emperor Wen of Sui found that his young son, Fuzhong silk and bamboo dust, and even many of them had been damaged. When Emperor Wen of Sui saw this scene, he thought that this son did not like to have fun, so he praised Yang Guangguang. Since then, Yang Guang has paid more and more attention to covering himself up, and slowly won such a good reputation as "ren filial piety".
In order to please his parents, Yang Guang was close to his wife and did not indulge in concubines; every time he went to the court, he took a simple carriage and treated the ministers very reasonably; he repeatedly smeared Yang Yong in front of his mother... In the end, Yang Guang took the position of crown prince from his brother.
In the fourth year of Renshou (604), in order to build the fortifications of Luoyang, Yang Guang recruited hundreds of thousands of peasants from Shanxi and Henan. In the first year of Daye (605), Yang Guang again built Luoyang. This move is like to build Luoyang into an impregnable super metropolis. So how do you guarantee the logistics of the city? Need food and send it from abroad? Natively planted? Or, build large granaries to store slowly? Obviously, in view of the status and reality of Luoyang, Yang Guang chose to build Huiluocang locally.
As a national center, Luoyang, in Yang Guang's view, is obviously not suitable for agricultural base, just like today's Beijing, beijing as the national center, some are more political resources than agricultural resources. Therefore, in Yang Guang's view, relying on local grain production every year is not enough to ensure the food security of Luoyang. And if we build large-scale transportation projects just to transport the daily grain needs of Luoyang, it is obviously too expensive and the gains are not worth the losses. Therefore, repairing the granary in the local area and slowly accumulating it became the most appropriate method under the technical level at that time.
And modern times do not have those constraints that the Sui Emperor needs to entangle.
We have more developed transportation, if necessary, can use the existing logistics resources to allocate. Therefore, from the super-large granaries of the Sui Dynasty to the small and medium-sized granaries scattered everywhere in modern times, this is a kind of progress.
Judging from the scale and skill of the construction of the granary, Huiluocang was indeed the embodiment of the advanced level at that time. But today, it is still inferior to contemporary grain storage technology.
Huiluocang is 1,000 meters long from east to west and 355 meters wide from north to south, and the overall area is equivalent to 50 standard football fields. There are 220 known cellars in the whole warehouse, but it is estimated that there should be about 700 in total. It was a huge project, unimaginable at the time. But our level of technology today, if needed, can also build such a large project. At present, the largest grain reserve in China, the central grain reserve Sanhe directly under the central grain reserve, has reached the scale of 350,000 tons at the beginning of this century. Huiluocang is indeed unsurpassable in ancient times, but in modern times, it is only a big project.
The warehouse of Huiluocang needs to be built by digging a pit first, then grilling the wall of the cellar with fire, and then coating a layer of green paste mud, laying a layer of wooden boards, and laying a layer of mats on wooden boards. Now our grain warehouses are already concrete buildings.
Modern granaries are built more efficiently and less environmentally constrained.
In terms of the technical content of construction, modern times are far ahead of ancient times. What was returned to Luocang was to combine and use some materials at that time. Just like bronze is complex, it is only a bronze, and the difficulty of production will not be higher than that of current aviation parts or high-end electronic chips.
Huiluocang did use the most advanced technology at that time, but that technology was very primitive and backward in contemporary times.
We say that Luocang is incomparable, on the one hand, it was indeed the world's leading at that time. On the other hand, it is our admiration for the creativity of our ancestors. They have done such a miracle with their hands, and we use words like "difficult to surpass" to express our admiration, which is actually nothing wrong, isn't it?