In early summer, as soon as the sky clears up, the dogs start to stick out their tongue coating and burrow into the shade of the trees.
People can only stay indoors, reading books and listening to music to lengthen the day.
Only on this day in Yingtian Mansion, when the sky was clear and the sun was shining brightly, a group of young boys were lining up to enter the newly established Yingtian Industrial School, dripping with sweat.
That's right.
When Zhu Yijun agreed with Sun Wei, the governor of Yingtian, to set up a school to cultivate technical craftsmen, he specifically named the school Yingtian Industrial School.
Xu Minshi did not delay. In order to increase his official power as soon as possible, as soon as he received the approval, he immediately recruited and assessed a large number of young people to enter the industrial school.
Most of these young people are the children of common people in the south of the Yangtze River. They have read some books and know a few words. However, due to limited family conditions, they basically only read a few books and did not show much potential in the imperial examinations. They stopped studying and were reduced to Idle labor at home.
The reason why there is idle labor is because Jiangnan in this era originally had more people and less land. In addition, due to serious land annexation, the per capita arable land area was very small. Therefore, if there were several brothers in the family, if they did not go to work in towns or work for large households, Being a part-time worker will only cause the labor force to be idle.
And because of the idea of relocation, unless they are poor people at the bottom who are under great pressure to survive, most would rather be unemployed vagrants in their hometowns than go out to make a living.
Nowadays, the emergence of industrial schools has naturally solved the employment problem of some idle labor, especially those who have read some books.
Zhu Yijun did not interrupt the reforms in the Zhang Juzheng era, and even extended the reforms from the economic field to the military and ideological fields as the emperor. Under such circumstances, the giant ship of the Ming Dynasty seemed to be moving rapidly in a direction different from the original history. Moving forward.
Government-run industries have begun to see signs of industrialization, and private factories have also begun to move in this direction.
…
"The sincerity of numbers is applicable to all countries!"
"So if you want to know how to manage weaving work, you have to learn it. Even if you want to know how to manage your family's finances, you have to learn it."
Shangyuan County.
The girls’ school next to the Liu Family Ancestral Hall.
Gu Qinglian, a woman in a fragrant-colored blouse, was holding a wooden stick and teaching a room of girls in front of her, while talking about some of her own opinions on arithmetic.
It turned out that Zhu Yijun opened mines in Mongolia, carried out infrastructure construction in the pass, such as building watchtowers and official roads, and increased subsidies for military households in Jiubian. A series of measures such as Zhu Yijun's cotton industry market in the Ming Dynasty has been growing rapidly, which also made Liu The number of large water-powered spinning wheels in the Quexian family has been increasing rapidly.
Therefore, the Liu family did not go bankrupt because the water-powered spinning wheel, like the historical Spinning Jenny, used multiple spindles to spin at the same time, causing a large number of women whose families relied on spinning to make a living, nor did they give up because of insufficient market. The large spinning wheel technology has returned to the single-spindle spinning model that requires less human technology but is more suitable for natural economy.
This way.
Liu Quexian's wife Laidi also had to personally train more women with higher cultural and technical levels to manage yarn farms and operate large-scale spinning machines for herself, so as to solve the problem of insufficient senior technical female workers and management talents.
Therefore, because Liu Quexian was already a court official and she had been granted a royal title, Laidi had a high status in the Liu clan, so she opened the Mingde Girls' School in the clan to teach the girls of the clan and relatives to read. Foreign women will be recruited to study, but they will have to pay a fee.
However, because Laidi taught these women essentially for the greater development of her and Liu Quexian's textile industry, the content of the teaching was not focused on women's virtues, but on arithmetic and literature.
Because factory management requires a lot of calculations and coordination, it also requires accurate expression, and whether it is oral expression or written expression, it requires stronger literary abilities.
Now, Laidi invited Gu Qinglian, the sixth girl adopted by Wang Changgeng, to be the teacher in the school to teach these young girls how to read.
Gu Qinglian was originally the daughter of the Gu family, an official family in Nandu. Later, she was taken as a concubine by Wang Changgeng because her home was confiscated. She had gained a lot of knowledge from miscellaneous studies since she was a child, and she was able to teach the girls in the Liu family's weaving workshop. Come up with your own opinions on arithmetic.
Due to the long days and short nights, Laidi saw this scene after noon, and took down an official newspaper from the newsstand in the school to read, and prepared to see if there was any news about Liu Quexian.
As a result, she saw an official newspaper report that the imperial court had set up a steam power research and development center at Shozuo Temple. She became interested and thought about what steam power was. If steam power was used to drive a large spinning wheel, it would be more powerful than her own water power. Are spinning wheels more efficient?
The reason why Laidi is concerned about this issue is that the Liu family is no longer the only one in the Jiangnan weaving mill that uses water-powered spinning wheels.
Although many wealthy gentry did not dare to seize the Liu family's property because Liu Quexian was already an official of the imperial court, they still used various means to find out why the Liu family's cotton cloth was cheap, and began to build large water-powered spinning wheels. If you want to continue to grow bigger and stronger in the textile industry, you need further innovation in technology.
but.
For the Liu family, the driving force for technological innovation is not that great right now, mainly because the cotton market is still expanding rapidly, and the major internal weaving mills are mainly focused on expanding production scale, and have not yet had the energy to improve production technology. , after all, the latter requires more time cost.
The cotton industry market has indeed been expanding. Every year, merchants in the Ming Dynasty ordered large quantities of cotton cloth from the mainland for customs or overseas.
Especially after Haojing was taken over by the Ming government and through Wang Xijue's reforms, the trade routes to Goa and Luzon were operated by domestic merchants under the name of the Ming Shipping Department, which directly further expanded the export volume of Ming cotton. .
Because the cotton industry in these places cannot compete with the Ming Dynasty at all. The cotton they produce is neither cheaper nor as high-quality as the Ming Dynasty's cotton. Therefore, the Ming merchants can trade with overseas indigenous people better than second-rate traders like Xiyi Fanshang. After Shi Geng dared to lower the price, the cotton market in these places could basically be directly occupied by Daming's cotton cloth.
Back to the topic.
Because of this, after just taking a look at the latest official news, Di put this idea behind her and only gave instructions to her maid:
"Instruct the weaving workshop to recruit more girls from poor families and train them as new weavers. They can be employed for only five years without having to buy out their bonds. They can take four days off every month. They will also be paid during the training period. They will be given half of the wages of the weavers. ! So that we don’t have to place orders again and end up with not enough weavers.”
The maid held up her hands and said yes.
"Weavers from other provinces who come to our Wang family weaving workshop and are willing to work for more than ten years will be given a settlement allowance of ten taels of silver dollars, and those who have been working for less than five years will be given a settlement allowance of five taels!"
"If a family member needs to find a job, our Wang family will help them find a job."
In Zhejiang, the Zhang family, a large weaving family, is even more exaggerated. In order to grab people to expand the scale of production, they will not hesitate to pay high prices for housing expenses to recruit people from other provinces. Zhang Han, the official minister of the Ministry of official affairs, personally made the decision because he knew very well that if the Zhang family If we wait a little longer, the huge profits in the cotton industry brought about by the New Deal will only be taken away by other wealthy businessmen.
(End of chapter)
