Soy Sauce, Steel, and Smashed Stuff

 Wuzhen's official website boasts of 25 attractions within the town.  Most of these attractions are based upon the local history.  The town is a bit of a living history museum, kind of like a Connor Prairie (in Indianapolis) or a Colonial Williamsburg (in Virginia).

The first two photos, above and below, show the soy sauce factory.   The process starts with soy beans, wheat, and other grains.  These are ground, mixed, boiled, pressed, cooled and mistreated in a number of other ways which I cannot remember.  The resulting paste is then put into the clay fermentation vats that you see in the photos.  The mouth of the vats are covered with silk mesh (more on that later) to keep out the bugs and then topped with black, conical hats made from woven bamboo.

The initial processing of the grains takes only a few days and then the fermentation continues for another 6 months after.   When we visited, they were still fermenting a batch made earlier in the year.   The grain processing areas were idle, but we got to tour and look at the old equipment.  Most of the action was in the fermentation yard where the workers had to stir the contents of each vat.  You can see the muddy paste in the photo below.   Unfortunately, you can't smell it....the whole area was redolent with the odor of rotting soybeans.  It didn't smell all that bad to me.  To the owners, I suppose it smelled like money being made.

When fermentation is done they filter and press the soy sauce from the paste.  The liquid that separates without any help is bottled first and considered to be the best.  It's intended for table use as a condiment.  The liquid that is taken by mechanical pressure and steaming is bottled second, and is intended for cooking.  There is a little shop out in front of the factory where they are happy to sell you as much as you like of both types. 

There were lots of shops selling locally made candy and snacks.   The more interesting of these shops featured guys smashing stuff with big wooden hammers.  The fellow above is making sticky rice candy.  You can see the mass of rice in the stone bowl.  Behind and to the right you can see a metal container of water into which the hammer would be dipped from time to time, to keep it from becoming glued to the sticky mess.The photo below is another shop where sesame candy is made.  The fellow here is smashing sesame seeds and peanuts and other goodies to make the candies. 

Both shops are eager to sell you their products.  I'm taking it on faith that they sell what they make.  I suppose, though, that they could just as easily be supplied by a modern factory in Shanghai.

The next two photos show the steel foundry.  This was very cool because it involved flames.  Really big flames.

The steel foundry had two small crucibles, one of which was used for the demonstration.  The workers loaded an initial charge of coke and the started the fire.  The crucible had a tap hole at the bottom.  They used long steel rods to clear the ash from the tap hole so that flames shot out from it two or three feet.  Then one of the braver fellows dodged the flames and plugged the tap with wet clay.  Scrap iron was shovelled into the top of the crucible followed by some lime, followed by more coke, followed by more iron, more lime, more coke, and so on.  After 3 or 4 repetitions, the workers took a tea break for about 25 minutes to let the contents melt. 

The clay plug around the tap hole must have shrunk as it cooked because by the end of the tea break there were once again flames shooting from that area.  They workers used their long steel rods to break away the plug.  Then a guy came forward with a ladle....roughly equivalent to a gallon bucket on the end of a bamboo pole.  He positioned it under the tap hole.  Then a couple of the bigger guys came forward with a 4x4 length of wood and used it as a lever to tip the crucible toward the ladle.  Molten steel shot out in a yellow stream.  The guy with the ladle yelled, and then the guys with the lever let the crucible rock back to vertical, and then the stream of liquid stopped, and then the crucible fellow carried his load over to the sand mold area and poured the contents into one of the molds.  (Sorry...forgot to mention that there was a section of the floor with pre-prepared sand molds, about 20 feet from the crucible.) 

A side note:  If this were a commercial steel operation in the U.S., then the workers above would be looking at about 15 to 20 O.S.H.A. safety violations. No hard hats, no safety glasses, no respirators and no steel-toed shoes.  (Although they did wear leather spats to keep their tennis shoes from getting burned.)

They repeated the casting process three or four times...at least that we saw.  You see one ladle full of molten steel and you've seen them all.  We all moved out toward the gift shop at the front of the workshop.  There you could buy the purported products of the foundry - lamps, pots, skillets, and other junk. 

The specialty of the foundry, though, was the cutlery.  They sold a range kitchen knives that cost anywhere from $5 to $500.  The foundry was so proud of their cutlery that they featured a larger-than-life knife in their shopfront advertising, shown below.