Chapter 1608: The Complete Localization of Beihai Province
Li Xuan also had his own considerations in making the choice to stay in China.
Today's Beihai Province is completely different from the Beihai Province in the early years. Since the Empire officially landed on the Beihai Islands and established a province, the Empire has implemented a very thorough localization policy in Beihai Province.
The most important of which is large-scale immigration!
Not only did they immigrate from the mainland of the empire to the North Sea Islands, but they also moved the indigenous people from the North Sea Islands to the Southeast Asian islands.
This large-scale immigration has continued for so many years, and the scale is getting bigger and bigger. In the 28th year of Xuanping, 300,000 people immigrated to Beihai Province in just one year, and nearly 100,000 indigenous people from the Beihai Islands were also relocated.
To the islands of Southeast Asia.
As a result, the number of native immigrants from the empire in the North Sea Islands has reached 1.5 million, while only about 500,000 of the original natives remain.
And among these 500,000 people, most are actually women.
Because the battles between many daimyo in the past few decades have caused many casualties among the local indigenous people, the average life expectancy has dropped again and again. In that kind of social environment, it is impossible for many elderly people to appear, and the young and middle-aged have also suffered heavy casualties.
After the Empire landed in Beihai Province, most of the remaining young men were members of the army of many famous people. After the defeat, they were captured as prisoners of war, and then sent to the Nanyang Islands for reclamation or mining.
In the subsequent immigration operations organized by the empire, the focus was also on organizing local young and strong indigenous people to migrate to various Southeast Asian islands.
As a result, most of the remaining indigenous people are only women and children.
At the same time, the empire vigorously promoted marriage policies in the local area, encouraging immigrants from the empire to marry and accepting local indigenous women.
As a result, most of the local indigenous women became the wives and concubines of imperial immigrants.
After many measures, the current total population of Beihai Province, although there are still about 500,000 indigenous people, there are actually very few pure indigenous families, only tens of thousands at most.
Under this circumstance, Lin Xuan believes that the localization of Beihai Province has achieved initial results, and Beihai Province can be completely included in the local scope.
It's just that although Lin Xuan plans to do this, he will not stand up to promote this kind of thing personally. He will only give a tacit attitude and let the ministers below do it.
It was the credit of the emperor Li Xuan that it was done well.
If they don't do well, it will naturally be the fault of those ministers, and Li Xuan will take action when the time comes.
Li Xuan's request for Beihai Province to allocate some steam engines and other mechanical equipment was ignored, which instantly aroused the enthusiasm of the courtiers who paid attention to the matter in the court.
In an instant, many related discounts were sent to me.
However, Li Xuan still will not make any public statements.
Half a month later, many officials from Beihai Province once again jointly petitioned for the allocation of some machinery and equipment to prepare for the construction of the first silk reeling factory on the Beihai Islands.
At this time, it also received support from many ministers in the country.
At the same time, the industrial and commercial circles, especially the domestic textile industry, also have different opinions on this. Some of the capital that plans to invest and build factories in Beihai are naturally supportive, but some manufacturers that do not plan to invest in Beihai are naturally opposed to it.
Because Beihai Province requested to build a silk reeling factory, the many competitions caused are naturally related to the fact that the raw silk production in Beihai Province is increasing year by year.
After Beihai Province was established as a province, due to the impact of import and export controls, the local area could only develop agriculture and fishery. As for mining, there were only a few gold and silver mines.
As for other industries, due to the lack of mechanical equipment, they can only rely on pure manual work, and there is basically no hope for development.
Under this situation, the governor's office of Beihai Province focused on agriculture, especially the raw silk industry, in order to develop the local economy.
Excellent silkworm seeds and mulberry trees were introduced from the local area and large-scale mulberry tree planting was carried out.
After years of development, Beihai Province has now become one of the top five cocoon supply provinces in the empire. Although its total output is not high compared with other provinces in the country, it is only a tenth of Zhejiang's cocoon output at best.
Just one of them.
But for a Beihai Province with a population of only two million, it is already pretty good.
However, it is worth noting that although they are vigorously planting mulberry and raising silkworms, because they do not have a reeling factory, they can only rely on manual reeling, which is costly and inefficient. Therefore, many silkworm cocoons are directly transported to China for reeling processing.
Busan County in Liaodong Province relied on its geographical advantage of being close to Beihai Province to obtain a large amount of silkworm cocoons from Beihai Province, and then reeled and processed it, and finally established the largest raw silk production base in several provinces in the northern Datang.
However, Beihai Province, especially the local large-scale cocoon merchants, are naturally not willing to play the role of raw material suppliers. They want to process the cocoons directly on site, and then process them into raw silk and transport them back to the mainland to obtain higher profits.
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This is why Beihai Province has always wanted to set up a silk reeling factory.
Regarding this, even within the empire, opinions are not very unified. It is not an issue of localization, but a dispute of interests.
As for Li Xuan, it basically doesn't matter. Anyway, Beihai localization is something he plans to implement. Now it's just starting with the raw silk industry.
Although Li Xuan's attitude was not stated publicly, anyone with some political consciousness can understand it.
The current situation in Beihai Province cannot be blocked by insufficient localization.
Since there is no way to stop the localization of Beihai Province, the best way is to follow the trend.
Localization means localization, and whether import and export controls are relaxed, they will immediately go to Beihai Province to set up a silk reeling factory, cooperate with local farmers, and purchase silkworm cocoons.
Just like what they are doing in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas of China, maybe they can take the opportunity to expand their market share.
Today's textile industry is still the largest industry in the empire, and the raw silk industry is also very important.
Although the textile industry is dominated by the cotton spinning industry, supplemented by sheep spinning and raw silk, the cotton spinning industry is the core industry and is related to the clothing issues of hundreds of millions of people in the empire.
But the raw silk industry is also very important. Various silk fabrics woven from raw silk have always been high value-added products. Silk is not only sold well overseas, but also has a huge domestic market.
Even though the empire's clothing is now influenced by military uniforms, people's daily wear, especially work clothes, has begun to favor slim-fitting and narrow-mouth clothing, and a large amount of wool fabrics are used.
However, the role of silk clothes is still irreplaceable, such as the official uniforms of officials, the student uniforms of various government-run schools, and the clothing worn by the middle and upper class people in formal occasions. They are all biased towards the traditional wide-sleeved robes of Confucian clothing, and for
This kind of formal wear, anyone with some money in their pocket will have a set of silk robes.
Not to mention that the comfort of silk clothes as underwear is irreplaceable.
Then there is another very important application: silk stockings. Many powerful people in Europe and the West like them very much. They are very popular when exported to Europe.
At the same time, in addition to being used as clothing, raw silk is actually an important strategic material!
This thing is also used by the military as a propellant wrapping material for large-caliber naval guns. Especially after the Navy entered the era of rifled guns, the propellant bags of the Navy's large-caliber rifled artillery were basically wrapped in raw silk.
Raw silk is actually not too important to today's imperial economy. After all, it is just a luxury accessory. Without it, it will not affect people's livelihood. However, it is related to the livelihood of thousands of farmers.
Therefore, several major raw silk producing provinces in China are very concerned about the raw silk industry.
The same is true for Beihai Province!
Taking the raw silk industry as a breakthrough point, and with Li Xuan's acquiescence, the Yushufang quickly ended the quarrel and then officially submitted a proposal to liberalize the import and export controls in Beihai Province.
Li Xuan’s instructions: accurate!
After Li Xuan approved it, the news spread quickly throughout the country through the Tang Dynasty Newspaper and caused a sensation.
Even Beihai Province received the news in just four days and took action quickly.
Being able to receive the news in such a short period of time is naturally inseparable from the current vaporization of the Tang Empire.
Railways and steamships together not only became the empire's personnel and material transportation network, but also became a channel for information transmission.
A letter departs from Jinling City and can arrive in Shanghai within one day via railway. Then it can cross the East China Sea and arrive at Gokanazaki Port in Beihai within three days via the Post Office's fast steam mail ship, and then it can be delivered to Osaka in about two days.
port.
In other words, the emergency document can be guaranteed to be delivered from Jinling City to Nagasaki within four days.
Of course, if we want to continue eastward and pass to Osaka, the capital of Hokkai Province, we will have to travel for two more days.
Trains and steamships revolutionized the empire's transportation connections.
So much so that the empire's postal system has undergone tremendous changes. In the early years, in order to deliver military reports and official documents, the empire established a huge system of post stations across the country, using a large number of horses and personnel to maintain information transmission.
But since ten years ago, trains and ships have been gradually adopted as means of transportation on a large scale. The speed has been greatly improved and the cost has been lower.
Without trains and ships, the transfer of information within the empire would not have been so fast.
After the news arrived in Beihai Province via trains and ships, the dignitaries in Beihai Province were naturally overjoyed, and then made preparations to introduce more immigrants and build factories.
Not only silk reeling factories, but also other factories, such as shipyards, fishery processing plants, wood processing plants, etc.
Although Beihai is barren, it is now completely empty and has a population of more than two million, which means countless business opportunities.
The influx of a large number of businessmen with capital and technology will drive more inland people to migrate to Beihai Province, further increasing the proportion of local immigrants.
If this continues, in the future, Beihai Province, like other places in China, will completely become an inseparable part of the Chinese nation!