Datang: From exiled prince to eternal tyrant

Chapter 8 Large-scale Production, Textile Industry

"I hope those rioters are really loyal to you..."

After retreating from the court, Li Shimin, who was walking on Yuhuayuan Road, looked to the southwest and sighed silently.

……

At this time, the city of Chengdu is already full of hope.

Without the help of the gentry, the people who were nominally still under the control of the rebels were enthusiastic about production at this time.

The tall steelmaking boiler is steaming now.

A large amount of ore and coal mined by the people were forged here into crucible iron with modern formula.

Then, while these qualified steels were made into armor and weapons, they were also made into tools for drilling wells.

On the land that was bare due to the raging locust plague, countless well-drilling tools that relied on pedals to rotate the soil were digging wells.

As long as the water conservancy facilities are sufficient, the overall output of the entire Shu Kingdom will increase by at least half in the spring of the coming year.

After all, although there are a lot of rivers here, there are still many fields that lack sufficient water.

And Li Ke's unified organization of production made everyone's land a better land than the previous landlords and gentry.

Increased production is inevitable.

At the same time, almost all the clearings are drying the fibrous grasses collected from the wild.

These grasses are certainly not meant to be eaten.

After they are dried and scattered, they are the raw material of the cloth of this era——sackcloth.

It sounds scary, but in fact, wearing Hanfu does not sting people.

They are twisted into tight threads and then spun into balls of yarn.

Finally, the women will use these sand balls with ancient human looms to weave them into cloth.

The amount of a piece of cloth requires a woman to work for two or three months.

This means that each piece of cloth requires a lot of labor to complete.

However, this method of weaving was superseded.

Numerous windmills are spinning against the wind at this time, and the windmills drive the spinning machine, kneading the plant fibers put into the box into strands of yarn, which come out from the outlet.

The women guarding the thread outlet hold a hand handle similar to a kite flying or fishing rod, and wind the thread onto the handle to become a spindle.

These wired spindles are all sent to the wind loom at the other end of the factory.

This loom is exactly what Li Ke plagiarized the Jenny loom from later generations.

The Jenny loom can be said to be an important product of modern industry. It can weave cloth fully automatically and at a high speed.

Because of it, human beings have the idea of ​​using a steam engine to drive it, so the first industrial reform and the first industrial power, Ingrid, came into being.

Now Li Ke has directly brought it out, and made use of the strong wind and water power of the Chengdu Plain.

As for the vegetable fiber for the spindle, it produces two bolts of cloth every hour.

Cloth was a valuable thing at any time in ancient times. If a woman made it by herself, a passing three-layer cloth would take three months.

And these looms are two per hour, and Li Ke directly set up thousands of looms and more than 3000 spinning machines.

This is enough for all the 13 women in Shu to work day and night.

And the cloth produced immediately had a buyer.

The Tubo people and Tuyuhun and other nomadic peoples who came from Kangding were nodding and bowing at this time, exchanging war horses, cattle and sheep for the cloth produced by the wind loom at the shipping place.

The normal market price is five pieces of cloth and one good war horse, and there are often no goods. After all, Datang’s traditional cloth productivity cannot be supplied by its own people, and there is no export.

Li Ke directly gave super preferential conditions such as five pieces of cloth for pack horses and seven pieces of cloth for war horses. Although the prices of cattle and sheep are normal prices, there are as many sources as there are.

Tubo was the first to go crazy, and kept sending cattle, sheep and horses.

Soon came the Tuyuhun and Zhangxiong kingdoms.

The good news of the unlimited supply of cloth has spread farther to Persia and other places.

Before long, there will be countless caravans coming here.

The wages Li Ke paid to the female workers were also crazy: five kilograms of grain and one kilogram of meat per day, and two hundred copper coins (about 60 yuan) at the end of each month.
The textile factory was very busy, but the female workers inside sang relaxing and cheerful songs.

"Your Highness, why don't you sell the cloth to those chambers of commerce within Datang?"

Just when Li Ke rode his horse in white to inspect and laughed when he heard the singing of the female worker, the horse Liu Zhi who followed behind asked respectfully.

"Hehe, this king is not interested in letting the country know about these things at all."

"Firstly, it's a matter of confidentiality. Secondly, it took women in the Tang Dynasty only three months to make a piece of cloth to support their families."

"Our cloth flows directly into the Tang Dynasty. How many women will be without jobs?"

"Men plow and women weave, men plow and women weave, men plow the fields and women weave. Without women weaving, how many families will suffer?"

Li Ke asked with a smile.

Obviously, this ancient man had never seen the power of industrial dumping.

"hiss……"

Ma Liuzhi suddenly took a deep breath.

In this day and age, if two people in a family work, they have to support four or five children.

You have to have many births to offset the deductions from premature deaths.

If the women had no income from weaving, at least [-]% of the families would fall apart.

"This thing, taken out, is poison to a country."

"It can poison any powerful country to death. There is nothing that this king will not consider dumping in Datang."

"Actually, it's not impossible to sell. The market must be in the hands of the king, and we must arrange the way out for the weaving girls who sell the city, even if they open an affiliated clothing store."

"These princes need to be considerate. Until then, let's just sell them outside."

As Li Ke said, the two came to the bank of the Yangtze River in the southwest of the city.

Countless strong men shouted slogans and desperately pulled a fishing net several hundred meters long.

If it's modern, recognize it right away, it's a trawl from modern times.

The net-casting model of this era is pitifully simple, and almost no fishery resources in any water area have been developed.

The fish and shrimps in the rivers have been multiplying for thousands of years.

However, after the trawl net invented by Li Ke came out, their good days came to an end.

Once the trawl net was hundreds of meters long, it was full of big fish as soon as it was pulled out. This was because Li Ke deliberately asked the mesh of the fishing net to be large so as to let the small fish go.

"His Royal Highness the King of Shu wins!!"

Seeing the big fish full of fish, those strong men immediately cheered loudly.

The fresh fish will be digested in the city of Chengdu immediately, and the excess fish will be made into salted fish and dried fish. With the payment of wages to soldiers and female workers, the surplus will be sold to those inland caravans.

Under Li Ke's operation, the supplies of Shu Kingdom began to rapidly enrich.

(End of this chapter)