the world is at stake

Originally, the horizontal spindle could only spin one yarn, but Xinhua Rebel relied on a group of carpenters to build a prototype hydraulic spinning machine with [-] spindles in three rows up and down in half a month.

The carpenters were stunned again, and even a few rural women who were called to do the experiment didn't know what to say.For thousands of years, one thread has been used for one spinning machine, but now the efficiency has been improved by leaps and bounds because of changing the horizontal position to the vertical position.

A group of people are like logs, watching the spinning machine work for hours, it seems like a dream.

Some people laughed, some cried, and some were sobbing.

The members of the mechanical team came to see it. Apart from pointing out the defects in the details and the direction of improvement in the next step, they just gave a few words of encouragement and hoped that the craftsmen will continue to work hard.

Xiao Jinlang came over, laughed a lot, said a few words of encouragement, and gave a reward of [-] yuan to all the carpenters involved in the research and development work, asking them to make persistent efforts.

Zhou Qingfeng was purely curious. He knew the name of the 'Spinning Jenny', but he didn't know what the machine looked like.He didn't even know why the spindle should be vertical and not horizontal.

After taking a few glances at the spinning workshop, the old man said "oh", indicating that it was so.He happily patted the shoulders of the craftsmen, saying that they did a good job, and then left.

This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a leap forward in productivity.There was an uproar in Xinhua Town, but the "Masters" also said "Oh" after knowing it, indicating that they knew it.

The formally manufactured hydraulic spinning machine was improved into one hundred spindles, and only three or four female spinning workers could operate it in shifts.The cotton gin gets the cotton fibers, all of which are sent to the spinning machines to become yarn, which is even better than hand-spun yarn.

Later, the appearance of the shuttle type hydraulic loom was a matter of course.

The artisans responsible for 'inventing and creating' are numb.They also follow the old man's style and only respond to the appearance of new machinery with an "oh", indicating that they have built something.

Shocked?Shocked indeed.

I couldn't figure out why, so the masters ordered a few times and asked the craftsmen if they could do it?The reason is very simple, that is, you have to turn a corner, and then an invention that shocks the past and the present appears.

With handlooms, skilled workers can weave at most eight inches long and one foot wide every day.But Xinhua's hydraulic loom has a cloth width of three feet, and its weaving speed has increased by dozens of times.

The water-powered shuttle is so fast it really feels like flying.

In mid-August, the first batch of Xinhua cotton cloth was officially sold.

In the past, a piece of white cotton cloth in Songjiang was worth three qian in silver, and a piece of sansuo cloth was worth six qian and fen in silver.There is also a high-grade cotton cloth called "twill cloth", and the fine ones can get one tael of silver for each piece.

Now the 'Holy Light' team didn't make much effort, and didn't even send the main force of the team. They relied on ideas and blueprints, and let the existing craftsmen use their brains, subverting the entire textile industry of Ming Dynasty.

The price of all kinds of cotton cloth plummeted to a third of what it had been before.Because the price is unimaginably cheap, businessmen from all over the world flock to purchase frantically.

Because the 'Holy Light' team has little demand for silver, but a very high demand for raw materials.Whoever can deliver the raw materials can get cheap cloth.

For a while, the Wusong River in Qinglong Town was full of cargo ships, and they tried their best to transport pig iron, coal, wood, cotton, etc., just to buy the cloth produced in Xinhua Town.

By September, the scope of Xinhua Town continued to expand, and the number of craftsmen and workshops doubled rapidly.New hydraulic looms are being assembled and produced every day.

No matter how much goods the new weaving factory produces, the cargo ships on the pier can immediately pull them all away.

Some of these cloths were sold along the river to Bashu, some arrived at the capital and Jiubian through the canal, and some were sent to Quanzhou and Guangzhou along the coast, and even shipped to Dongying and Southeast Asia.

As for the millions of cotton ginners, weavers, and weavers in Jiangnan who lost their jobs, what should we do?

The practice of the 'Holy Light' team is to continuously raise the purchase price of raw materials and do everything possible to crack down on middlemen.

Because the families of many textile practitioners are also grain and cotton growers.

In the past, the huge profits monopolized by grain merchants, cotton merchants and cloth merchants were given to the lowest-level workers by the Xinhua rebels blessed by industrialization.

The price of seed cotton in the six prefectures of the south of the Yangtze River has been raised by more than three times, and the price of cotton cloth itself has been reduced to one-third of the previous price.

Zhou Qingfeng led a team to inspect Songjiang Prefecture, surveying every village and every market, and confirmed that the income of some farmers not only did not fall, but increased.

However, the great changes in the textile industry in Jiangdanan still caused great changes and shocks in the society. Many people could not adapt and lived in embarrassment.The surplus labor is either used to raise chickens, ducks, pigs and cattle, or to be used in other service industries.

Troublers are indispensable, and there are indeed poor ones.

The 'Sacred Light' team earned millions of dollars of silver in just two or three months of cotton picking, and generously donated hundreds of thousands of silver dollars to help the poor.

But more and more people are unemployed, and social security will deteriorate rapidly.Zhou Qingfeng was also as big as a bucket during the armed patrol.Sprinkling money is far from solving the problem. The real solution is to create new jobs for the surplus labor force.

"What the hell, did we do something wrong? The burden of starting this textile revolution and creating hundreds of thousands of unemployment is still on us."

Once this person loses his job, he has to look for work everywhere.

But the entire Songjiang Prefecture is a small-scale peasant economy, and the only one that can provide a large number of jobs is not Xinhua Town?

Standing on the road of his own town, Zhou Qingfeng noticed that the crowds in March and April reappeared.But this time it is not a poor wave of homeless people, but a restless wave of migrant workers.

The original Xinhua Village has already surpassed Qinglong Town in scale, and even the county seat of Shanghai County does not have so many people.In the future, there is no need to call Shanghai County, but Xinhua County directly.

"Why do people like to run towards us when something goes wrong?" Zhou Qingfeng stood on the newly built guard tower at the intersection, expressing his confusion at the mess he had made.

Chapter 27 The Plague

Wanli 44th year, October.

The temperature in the imperial capital dropped to four or five degrees.The city is quiet, every street is guarded by soldiers, all passers-by are checked, and ordinary people are forbidden to move around.

White paper lanterns were hung on the doors of many houses, swaying in the cold wind.There is even a white paper seal on the door, prohibiting entry and exit, which is particularly gloomy and desolate.

Notices were posted on the streets, saying that the plague broke out in Tongzhou a few months ago, and it had spread to the whole of Northern Zhili, and it was spreading to the south.The capital is close, and there are many infected people.

Plague does not distinguish between high and low, whether it is princes, nobles or ordinary people. If you are infected, you will suffer from vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness and brain fever.It can be a few days soon, or a few months later, and there are many dead.

Tongzhou is the northernmost point of water transportation, and the whole north relies on it to transport food, cloth and other daily necessities from the south.The population flow in this transportation hub is extremely high. Once the plague spreads, both the north and the south of Ming Dynasty will suffer.

The epidemic loomed in April and broke out in June. In order to escape the plague, a large number of people ran desperately into the imperial capital.By the time the court officials reacted, 10,000+ people had already entered the capital from Tongzhou and the eastern suburbs.

These people have no food and clothing, and are extremely poor. In summer, they can hide in the corner of the big family's house to beg for food.But when the weather turned cold, men, women, and children all shivered, lamented, trembled, complained, and died one by one.

The Inspection Department of the Five Cities was ordered to put up some porridge tents earlier, but it was too long to help.The soldiers in the city could only collect the corpses every day, and hurriedly transport them outside the city to burn and bury them.

At the beginning, hundreds of corpses could be collected a day; when the weather turned cold in October, the plague seemed to be weakening, but the carts collecting corpses were loaded day and night, and it was impossible to count how many people died.

The epidemic occurs every year, and the bureaucrats of Ming Dynasty have long been familiar with it.It's just that today it fell on me, and I hurried to escape again.

Fang Congzhe, the chief assistant of Fang, couldn't escape, and was handling official business in the West Duty Room outside Wenhua Gate. He casually grabbed a copy of the local paper pond newspaper on the desk, glanced at the beginning, and started cursing.

"Suppress thieves, how many thieves can't be dealt with by such a big Songjiang Mansion?

It has been more than half a year, and the whole of Nanzhili can't find a team of officers and soldiers who can fight.It's October now, and it's freezing cold. Who wants to send troops at this time? "

Fang Shoufu smashed the pond newspaper on the table, so angry that his brain hurts.

Emperor Wanli stayed in the Forbidden City for decades and did not go to court, and he devoted himself to being an otaku.He doesn't deal with government affairs, and the chief assistant is also very embarrassed.Without the imperial decree, it is impossible to transfer troops, and Nanzhili can only solve it by itself.

It can be solved for more than half a year, "the bigger the thieves are, the more they can't be controlled."

This matter is not done in spring and summer, and it is even more impossible in autumn and winter.Now the plague is breaking out in the capital, people are dying every day, officials are fleeing, and it can't be solved.

Because the plague has spread into the palace, even Wanli has been recruited.

Recently, news came out from the palace that His Majesty was seriously ill and the imperial physician was at a loss what to do, fearing that something unbearable would happen, so I asked Fang Shoufu to make preparations.

What can be prepared for this?It's nothing more than the death of the emperor, and a new emperor will go up.

Crown Prince Zhu Changluo has been on standby for 15 years and is ready to take over at any time, and he can't wait.

Exasperated, Fang Shoufu grabbed the local pond newspaper and took a few glances.

In the second Opium War of 'that year', the British and French allied forces learned the lessons of the 'first' and directly won Tianjin, an important place for water transportation, forcing the Manchu government to negotiate.

The south of the Yangtze River is a place where the tax burden of Ming Dynasty is heavy. Once there is chaos, the north of Ming Dynasty will also be hungry.

But before Fang Shoufu could come up with an idea, a little eunuch stumbled towards the Wenhua Gate, rushed into the west duty room and shouted: "Master Shoufu, it's not good, Your Majesty's Dragon Yu has returned to heaven!"

Ah... The Tang newspaper in Fang Congzhe's hand fell to the table with a thud - it's over, the Jiangnan matter can't be settled within half a year, the important thing now is to help the new emperor ascend the throne.

Similarly, infectious diseases from Tongzhou traveled south along the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal and spread along the way through water transport ships.In July, the 'Holy Light' team got the news from the boatmen, sailors and merchants along the way.

Xinhua Town has a lot of people coming and going, and sporadic patients have appeared since the beginning of spring.

Although there is no 'modern' diagnostic equipment, Academician Li of the medical team personally led a team to check some patients, and then definitely reported to the standing committee of the team...

"From the perspective of symptoms, plague, cholera, measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia, dysentery, these infectious diseases are mixed together. It can be said with certainty that our opponents have at least once been active in Tongzhou and released the virus."

"At present, apart from isolation, we have no good way to deal with it. We can only strengthen health supervision and let the source of infection perish by itself.

The only good news now is that the Yangtze River has become a natural obstacle to block infectious diseases. Patients in the north often fail to cross the river and fall down.Very few can reach us. "

Academician Li's words were full of helplessness, which meant that he could only wait for the infected patients to die.With too few people in the team, it is difficult to take care of yourself and not others.

The members of the team have no objection, what can be done is to spread the word as much as possible, let the public understand the horror of the plague, and do a good job of prevention and control - [-]% of the infected people will not say that they are infected, and will run desperately towards a safe place .

The difficulty is to block the patient.

"We are doing a lot of infrastructure construction, the crowd is highly dense, and there is a lot of traffic." Xiao Jinlang was quite distressed by this, "epidemic prevention is extremely difficult."

After the team decided to develop the steam engine in the first half of the year, it did not completely abandon the textile industry.Facts have proved that the primary textile equipment is very simple, and with the guidance of the mechanical team, local craftsmen are also capable enough to manufacture it.

As a result, cotton from the six prefectures in the south of the Yangtze River poured into Xinhua Town this year, and merchants in the cloth business along the coast also rushed to buy goods.

Industrial production is not the development speed of the agricultural society doing addition, or even multiplication, but an exponential increase.While commodities are being produced at low cost, a large number of backward jobs have been eliminated.

In order not only to make Jiangnan society into a mess, the 'Sacred Light' team can only take the initiative to stand up and do one thing-to work for relief and to carry out infrastructure construction.

Building bridges, paving roads and building houses are basic operations.

Build factories, build ports, build docks, and even build a brand new city.

Xinhua Town was being upgraded to Xinhua County, but Zhou Qingfeng had no choice but to stand up and lure the flood of unemployed farmers and people who had fled to the Wusongkou area where the Huangpu River empties into the sea.

The northern cold wave is heading south.On the tidal flat construction site, hundreds of male and female laborers are carrying stones like cattle and horses to build the wharf.

Zhou Qingfeng patrols the construction site with construction drawings every day to ensure the quality and quantity of construction tasks.Facing the laborer whose back was bent, he called out behind him: "Little sister Wang."

The girl from Sixteen Seven came running quickly, "Boss Zhou, I'm here."

"The temperature has dropped again, and the supply of meat has to be doubled. In addition, winter clothes must be distributed as soon as possible, so that the workers who come to work cannot freeze to death or get frostbite."

Wang Xiaomei looked at Zhou Qingfeng's fingers, knowing that her boss loved the workers the most, she nodded repeatedly and said, "I have to wait a few more days for the winter clothes. I'll go to the kitchen right away and ask the cook to add more water."

Ever since they intervened in the textile industry by means of industrialization, the 'Holy Light' team has become extremely rich.Merchants from all over the world almost sent money to their door, begging Xiao Jinlang to accept it.

The cotton cloth in Xinhua Town is of high quality and low price, and it sells well wherever it is shipped. As long as you get the supply, you will make money.And this year's bumper grain harvest has made farmers more abundant and willing to spend money.

By the way, Zhou Qingfeng tore up the agreement with Songjiang Mansion and refused to provide it with taxes in the controlled area.The reason is readily available-the government is incompetent and has failed to restrain the hostile behavior of wealthy businessmen and gentry.

The 'Holy Light' team exchanged cheap cloth for a large sum of money and food, and then replaced the government functions.A large number of unemployed farmers were recruited to become cooks, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons.

There are even new jobs such as babysitters, couriers, clerical, logistics sorting and terminal operations.At worst, there will always be heavy physical work on the construction site.

There is even a soap factory in Xinhua Town, which mixes cottonseed oil and caustic soda obtained from plant ash to produce washing products.Soil soap is selling very well, it can even be said that as long as it is produced in Xinhua Town, it is selling well.

Old jobs disappear and new industries emerge.For example, women were rarely seen in heavy physical labor such as blacksmithing in the past, but now that hydraulic machinery has appeared in large numbers, the same work can be done by women.

This was not possible in the past.

At noon, Zhou Qingfeng picked up the wooden whistle and blew it for a while.The shift began on the construction site, and the exhausted workers got off the pier and staggered towards the newly built kitchen.

The kitchen is a simple big room surrounded on three sides, with more than a dozen large iron pots on the earthen stove.The hot food has just come out of the pan, and you can smell the aroma of oil and water just a few steps away.

Salted fish is the main course and the only meat that the 'Sacred Light' team can serve in large quantities.Now dozens of fishing boats of all sizes are employed by the team to fish in the offshore.

The current coastal fishery resources are extremely rich, and the sea is full of fish.But ordinary fishermen's boats are too small to catch them.In addition, there are fishing bullies in fishing villages, who control fishing gear and boats and limit fishing capacity.

Zhou Qingfeng obtained a "big boat" of at least [-] tons from Nanjing, and organized fishermen with more than ten people to go to sea in a team.

The large-scale fishing net transformed by the mechanical group can be released tens of meters below the sea level, and the retraction is no longer purely by manpower, but a pulley block that can cooperate.

The benefit of technical and organizational improvements has been a surge in catches.

Perch, pike, octopus, large yellow croaker, small yellow croaker, and green-boned bluefish, and even unknown miscellaneous fish, whatever the fishermen catch, Zhou Qingfeng leads the team to eat.

In addition to salted fish, there are also many shellfish.Children in fishing villages by the sea have recently learned to bring wooden barrels to the seaside, and pick up clams, clams, meretrix meretrix, etc. when they see them.

Shellfish alone costs five catties for a penny.As long as you work hard, you can earn two or three cents a day.

In addition to fish and shrimp, you can also get a lot of things like 'sea intestines' and 'octopus' in the sea, all of which are super high in protein food.Even dietary fiber can be obtained from 'sea cabbage', you can earn as much as you eat.

The only trouble with eating seafood is that the catch is perishable. Once caught, it must be processed as soon as possible. The main reason is that it must be cut open and pickled immediately after being caught. Shanghai is not far from Yangzhou and Yancheng. As long as you spend money, you will not be short of salt. of.

As far as the current environment is concerned, the food in the sea is endless for the 'Holy Light' team, it just depends on whether they can get it.A [-]-ton fishing boat can sail around the mouth of the Yangtze River for two days and bring back more than ten tons of fish.

Zhou Qingfeng was blowing wind at the wharf at Wusongkou, and a fishing boat that had caught fish was docking.Baskets made of bamboo strips contained marinated sea fish, and they were carried out one by one.

The boss of the boat was laughing, this trip would allow him to earn enough income for the past six months.The sailors on the same boat are also responsible for the side of the boat, laughing, and fishing is very hard and dangerous, but the joy of making money is always pleasant.

A fire was burning in an earthen stove on the bank, and a woman filled firewood to blow the wind.The cook simply cleaned the sea fish one by one, chopped them into pieces and threw them into a big iron pot to braise.

Tired for a long time, the male and female workers sat down at the wooden table in the kitchen, and the steamed brown rice, pickles, and braised fish pieces were served.

Sea fish has few bones and high protein content, which is the best supplement for heavy manual laborers.The laborers who built the wharf were feasting, sweating profusely, and refilling their meals.

Many people came to work on the construction site for a month. Not only did they not die of exhaustion, but they became much stronger. They also earned four or five silver dollars, which was enough to buy some clothes and furniture for their families, and even repair houses.

Zhou Qingfeng walked around the construction site, looking at the river.He is well aware that there are signs of a large-scale outbreak of infectious diseases in Yangzhou across the river, but fortunately the low temperature weather is curbing its spread.

Affected people's activity ability is greatly reduced in low temperature weather, and then they die soon.