Li Zhi was introduced by Matsuura Jinshin and bought a business store in Hirado. He unloaded all the goods on the ship and stored them in the store's warehouse to sell them slowly. If you rush to sell goods on the dock, you won't be able to sell them at a good price.
, only by selling slowly in stores can you get better profits.
Li Zhi left Zheng Kaida and thirty sailors in Hirado to take care of the business store, while he led the Nova back to Tianjin.
Before returning to the voyage, Li Zhi bought some Japanese products. He bought some of each kind and returned to Tianjin to test the waters and see how the sales went. The product Li Zhi was more optimistic about was copper. The price of copper in Japan is cheap. If he sells it back to the Ming Dynasty, he can probably get a lot of it.
profit.
On July 22, Li Zhi led the Xinxing back to China.
The boatmen of the Nova paddled the ship and slowly left the port on the channel in the port. When they reached the deep water area, the boatmen started the steam engine, and the Nova made a loud whining sound and headed northwest.
We didn't encounter any problems along the way. The Xinxing sailed for six days and returned to Dagu.
After returning to Tianjin, the first thing Li Zhi had to do was to expand the soap workshop and textile factory.
After this trial voyage, Li Zhi knew that the most profitable sea trade products were his own soap and Lijia fine cloth. If the scale of these two factories were expanded, he could earn a lot of money from Japan.
Li Zhi first went to visit Mr. Xue, who sold alkaline noodles, and wanted to buy more alkaline noodles with him. But the reply he got made Li Zhi stunned.
"Governor Zuo, I have bought almost all the surplus output of Xiangyang's alkali noodle mines and sold them all to you. If there are more, we can only raise the price to steal the supply from other alkali noodle users. However,
As a result, the price of alkaline noodles will go up, and it will cost more than a penny or two, which is very uneconomical."
"And even if you raise the price, you won't be able to grab much. After all, the total output is only so much."
Li Zhi is very disappointed. It seems that before the invention of the industrial alkali production method, it was impossible to use soda ash on a large scale, and the supply of raw materials could not keep up. But with Li Zhi's current industrial base, large-scale industrial soda production is still not possible. Li Zhi
The soap workshop cannot be expanded any further.
Li Zhi thought about it and decided that he could only make money from the textile factory.
Today, the textile factory has 1,770 workers, purchasing cotton to produce Lijia fine cloth, and producing 31,000 pieces of cotton cloth every month. It seems to be quite large. But in the face of the huge ocean trade,
This kind of output is very insufficient. Li Zhi's Nova can carry 100,000 pieces of cloth in one ship. The cotton cloth produced by the textile factory in one month is not even half the quantity of the Nova. And the Nova can go back and forth from Japan in twenty days.
once.
Not to mention that Li Zhi also has a ship being built.
Li Zhi decided to greatly expand the textile factory.
This is a huge project that cannot be completed overnight. First of all, Fanjiazhuang City has been filled with various buildings, and no more factories and dormitories can be built. To hire more people, a new city must be built outside the city.
Li Zhi decided to expand the new city in the south of Fanjiazhuang City. The north of the new city and the south of the old city were connected together, and the scale was as large as the old city of Fanjiazhuang. Li Zhi sent people to make a measurement plan for the new city wall, preparing to hire farmers to build the new city when they were off-farm.
city wall.
At the planned new city site, roads, factories and dormitories were built first. Although there was no city wall protection for the time being, Li Zhi's Tiger Guards were enough to deter Chu Xiao and protect these new construction facilities.
Li Zhi hired more than 3,000 masons near Tianjin, expanded the cement workshop, and began to build new factories and dormitories on a large scale.
The factory was built first. At the same time, Li Zhi hired more than 500 carpenters and blacksmiths to start producing parts for Jenny spinning machines and flying shuttle looms, striving to build a batch of production capacity as quickly as possible.
On August 20, a new factory building that could accommodate a thousand people had been built, and the first batch of looms, spinning machines, and gins were in place. Li Zhi began to recruit people.
The first batch of people recruited by Li Zhi first faced the families of workers in various workshops. Many family members of old workers had not been looking for work outside, but were spinning and weaving at home. In this way, the income of these workers' families was reduced.
Limited, not even as good as Li Zhi’s newly recruited tenant farmer families. Li Zhi wanted to liberate these idle workers’ families from old-fashioned looms and spinning machines and join the ranks of industrialized production.
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Gu Laoer paced back and forth in the living room of the villa he shared with the He family, anxiously waiting for news from his wife.
My wife went to the expanded textile factory for an interview, but she hasn’t heard back yet.
Gu Laoer is a worker in Li Zhi's textile factory. He has been working in Li Zhi's factory since the seventh year of Chongzhen. Before entering Li Zhi's factory, his family was very poor and could not open the pot. Gu Laoer applied for a job in the textile factory.
Two days ago, the three members of the Gu family were hungry for two days. Later, Gu Laoer pawned his winter clothes at the pawn shop and then bought rice and came back to eat.
But since Gu Laoer entered the textile factory, the situation of the Gu family has changed drastically. Not only did they have enough to eat, but they also rented a villa together in Fanjiazhuang and lived an "upstairs and downstairs" life.
Over the years, Gu Laoer has been eating meat for three meals in the factory cafeteria. He is no longer the skinny monkey he was before. Now he is slightly fatter and has a very strong body. At the age of twenty-six, he is well-organized no matter what he says or does, and he looks very confident.
He is the backbone of the family.
Gu Laoer was waiting there, and his eldest son Daxi ran out of the room upstairs with a piece of cow gold candy in his mouth. He lay next to the cradle and looked at his sister for a while, and Daxi decided to go play with his father. He looked upstairs for a while
, seeing his father downstairs, he wanted to climb down the stairs.
Daxi is now three years old and is Gu Lao Er's first child. In the past, Gu Lao Er's family was poor and he did not dare to share a house with his wife and have children. But since Gu Lao Er worked in a textile factory, Gu Lao Er and Gu Lao Er
The daughters-in-law moved in together. Not long after they moved in together, the Gu family's daughter-in-law became pregnant and gave birth to a big, fat boy. Not only that, last year, the Gu family's daughter-in-law gave birth to another daughter, and now Gu's second daughter has a son and a daughter.
Gu Lao Er has a monthly income of twenty taels from the factory, plus the money earned by the Gu family's wife weaving at home, the Gu family has an income of more than thirty taels a month. This money is enough to support three adults and two children, not to mention Gu Lao Er is not here yet
When eating at home, the family of five lives a life of food and clothing.
The Gu family's daughter-in-law is naturally frugal. She not only keeps the family of four fed and clothed, but also saves more than half a tael of silver every month. In the past four years, the Gu family has saved more than 30 taels of silver. Three
More than ten taels is a lot of money. Gu Laoer is very proud when he thinks of this savings.
The only thing that worries Gu Lao Er is that his wife is unwilling to rent a villa by herself and insists on renting a house with another family. The son is three years old and lives in a room with his grandmother. The one-year-old daughter sleeps in a cradle with Gu Lao Er.
In the room, the family and the He family share the living room, kitchen and latrine, which is a bit crowded.
However, it does make sense for a daughter-in-law to be frugal.
When Gu Laoer saw his son climbing up the stairs, he quickly went up and hugged his son, patted his son on the head and said, "Don't crawl around when you are happy, you may fall!"
Daxi looked at his father and said with candy in his mouth: "Where did mother go?"
Gu Laoer said with a smile: "Your mother is going to interview for a job in the factory. If she gets the job, we will rent a whole villa!" After thinking about it, Gu Laoer said: "That would be great for you, you will have your own room.
Got it!"
Daxi clapped his hands and said, "Daxi wants his own room. Grandma snores so loudly at night!"
