On the third day of November in the third year of Chuping, it snowed heavily, and snowflakes began to rustle on the ground in Qingzhou.
The auspicious snow heralds a good harvest, and the people of Qingzhou are all in high spirits.
Some people say that there is no scientific basis for the saying that auspicious snow heralds a good harvest, but in fact, it does have scientific basis.
If the snow is very heavy and covers the entire wheat field, the snow will keep the soil warm and prevent it from turning into frozen soil and freezing the roots of the wheat to death.
Moreover, there are many minerals in the snow water. After the snow melts, it can provide the wheat fields with moisture and trace elements needed for plant growth, which is of great help to the growth of winter wheat.
So whenever it snows, the people are both happy and miserable. The happy thing is that snow has a great effect on wheat, and there may be a bumper harvest next year, but the sad thing is that snow means the weather will be colder.
However, Qingzhou is much better this year. The Qingzhou business group only sold quilts and cotton-padded clothes to every household at a price slightly higher than the cost.
Quilts and cotton-padded clothes are extremely expensive, with a quilt costing 5,000 yuan and a cotton-padded coat costing 3,000 yuan.
This is the external selling price.
The internal price is relatively cheaper. After all, Qingzhou is now very prosperous due to its salt production, and the government also provides winter subsidies, which makes it affordable for every household. Every household has at least one quilt.
The production of quilts and cotton-padded clothes is enough to prevent many people from freezing to death in Qingzhou this winter, especially the old and young with poor health.
This is already the limit of what the Qingzhou government can do.
no way.
Although the output of cotton clothes in Qingzhou increased steadily, Su Shuang and Zhang Shiping opened cotton processing plants and textile factories in Luoyang, recruiting a large number of workers to develop the textile industry.
But the cost of these cottons is not generally high.
Labor costs, transportation costs, planting costs, and processing costs, Lin Lin summed it up, a cotton-padded jacket costs nearly 2,000 yuan from the production of cotton to the completion of the clothes.
Some people may not have any idea about this amount of money. To put it simply, two thousand yuan is the income of an ordinary family in the Han Dynasty for three months. A quilt costs four thousand yuan, which is equivalent to half a year's income of an ordinary family.
I can only buy a quilt.
Calculated in later generations, a cotton-padded coat would cost close to 10,000 yuan, and a quilt would cost 20,000 yuan. It was simply a luxury item and the price was astonishingly expensive.
Even the salt production chain in Qingzhou has been very developed, and the sales network has developed to all parts of the country. When the government got rich, it spread money freely, hired people to build construction projects everywhere, reclaimed water conservancy, and hid wealth among the people.
In addition, people in Qingzhou receive discounts on buying cotton-padded clothes and quilts, and they also use various methods to help them volunteer for relief, so a family often can only buy one quilt to cover themselves.
Some people may say that it is too dark for a quilt to be sold so expensively.
However, what needs to be understood is that this was the late Eastern Han Dynasty when transportation was underdeveloped and warlord leaders were everywhere.
The cost of a cotton coat has been reduced to 2,000 yuan, or because the Western Regions have begun to plant cotton on a large scale, and there is no need to buy it from Shendu, which reduces the transportation cost from Shendu to the Western Regions.
Otherwise, the cost will only be higher.
For example, when cotton-padded clothes first appeared in Qingzhou, Chen Mu had Su Shuang and Zhang Shiping poisoned themselves with cotton. There were only 70,000 to 80,000 pieces of cotton at a cost of more than 200 million yuan.
As cotton-padded clothes spread, the Central Plains region began to have a demand for cotton, which naturally prompted merchants in the Western Regions to start thinking of ways to supply it.
According to cottonseed documents unearthed in later generations, cotton has been planted in the Changshi Mansion of the Western Regions, which is also the Xinjiang region of my country, as early as the Western Han Dynasty, but the scale of production was not very large and it was not popularized.
But that’s how business is, the relationship between demand and supply will always exist side by side.
A few years ago, Su Shuang and Zhang Shiping formed a partnership with some big businessmen in the Western Regions, bought a large amount of land south of the Tianshan Mountains in the Western Regions, hired people, and officially put it into production.
After several years of operation, it has reached a small scale.
However, cotton is produced from Changshi Mansion in the Western Regions, transported to Luoyang, and then sent to processing plants and textile factories. After a series of operations, the cost is sky-high.
But there was nothing we could do about it. First of all, the transportation industry in ancient times was not developed, and transportation was all dependent on horse-drawn carriages. The roads were not very smooth. It would take three or four months to travel to Luoyang from the Western Regions.
To put it simply, the more you work, the more you get, and the less you work, the less you get. Even the businessmen from the Western Regions who cooperated with them praised Zhang Shiping and Su Shuang for doing things fairly and honestly, so that many powerful businessmen from the Western Regions were willing to cooperate with them and work together for the cause.
Contributing to the economic construction of the Western Regions.
In addition, all the warlords along the way have to take care of things. Even if the one-time transportation volume is very large, they can't withstand the exploitation at all levels. All the warlords have to take a share of the pie. They have to take care of things all the way up and down, so that a small cotton coat can...
Close to the cost of a silk dress.
The only good news is that the current Western Region is vast and sparsely populated, and the ecology has not been destroyed. It is full of green mountains and green waters, with lush vegetation, and is in a warm temperate zone. It has unique conditions for cultivating and planting cotton. The large-scale production of cotton.
At that time, the output was still very good.
It’s just that the relationship between the local ethnic groups is relatively complicated, with the Han, Qiang, Huns, Wusun, Sai, and Yuezhi being the main ones. The Qingzhou Business Group did business here because they were unfamiliar with the place and suffered a lot.
In order to build a good relationship with the clan, they also spent a lot of money. It took several years to recruit many nobles from the Western Regions to join the group, and then it gradually became stable.
Nowadays, the line from Luoyang to the Qinling Mountains is actually still controlled by the Qingzhou Army. The biggest problem is how to deliver the cotton produced. For this reason, they can only spend money to bribe warlords such as Han Sui, Ma Teng, Li Jue and Guo Si.
Only with help can I send it to Luoyang.
However, precisely because of the high transportation costs, cotton, which was originally very cheap in later generations, was extremely expensive in the Han Dynasty.
You know, the price of an ordinary coarse linen garment in the Eastern Han Dynasty was only 200-500 yuan. Clothes that can cost 2,000 yuan are called brocade clothes, which are clothes made of silk.
The only ones that are more expensive are clothes made of more exquisite raw materials such as damask, Luo, silk, silk, and leather sweaters. The prices are basically between 3,000 and 10,000.
There is no upper limit on fur clothing. Like Chen Mu's expensive white fox fur, even rich people who are willing to spend millions may not be able to buy it.
So now the people in Qingzhou can afford to wear cotton-padded clothes and cover themselves with cotton-padded quilts, which is actually subsidized by the profits from sea salt.
However, it is not free. If you want to get the subsidy quota, you have to work, perform corvee service, build roads everywhere, and build water conservancy facilities. It is an alternative type of work-for-relief.
The result of this is that Qingzhou's infrastructure is still quite good, the road transportation is developed and very convenient, and the troop transportation speed is very fast.
In addition to the popularity of cotton-padded clothes, brick factories and cement factories are also being built.
These two things seem very modern, but in fact brick factories existed in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the bricks of the Great Wall have remained standing for thousands of years, and there are even brick kiln ruins unearthed more than 3,000 years ago in Hebei.
Cement was invented during the ancient Roman period. The raw material was limestone, and the School of Chemistry had long studied the appropriate ratio. It happened that there was a large open-pit lime mine in Linzi, which in later generations was known as the Shandong Hutian Limestone Mine.
With bricks and cement, roads and sturdier houses can be built.
It's a pity that there is a lack of steel. The iron produced from the iron ore must be used to make weapons. Otherwise, Qingzhou would dare to build a highway now.
But in fact, there is no point even building a highway now. After all, the purpose of highways is for cars to run, and now there are only horse-drawn carriages and no cars.
The weight of the horse-drawn carriage is much lighter than that of the car, so it only needs gravel roads laid under ordinary cement to make it smooth for the horse-drawn carriage to drive, which is enough.
Times are developing and technology is advancing.
In fact, the wisdom of the Han people is no worse than that of others. As long as we provide them with ideas and directions, they will be able to research more things sooner or later.
However, Chen Mu was not satisfied with this. Not only did he continue to ask the various colleges of Taishan Academy to work hard, he himself was also ready to officially go to the academy to teach and participate in research in this area.
The main reason is that the current progress is too slow. In terms of the level of scientific and technological development, it is not as good as it was during the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties in many aspects. We must continue to work hard.
Although the things that Qingzhou has developed now, such as cement bricks and cotton-padded clothes, seem to be very good, soap, glass, gunpowder, better papermaking techniques and better methods of frying steel are also in the process of being researched and will be developed soon.
But there is nothing truly epoch-making.
Because the above-mentioned things either existed in ancient times, or can be easily realized by relying on ancient technology, they are not new.
What can really promote social progress is the steam engine.
Steam trains and steam ships are the innovative forces that change the world, and are the things that truly allow Han people to travel around the world.
Chen Mu dreamed that in his lifetime, the Han's technology would be able to reach the industrial level of Europe in the 19th century, that is, in 1800, so that the Han's soldiers and horses could go to any corner of the world.
However, even if the steam engine was built now, he would not dare to use it.
Productivity is not enough.
If you want the steam engine to work, you must free a large number of working people to enter factories and start the industrial revolution.
However, this will lead to farmland being abandoned and food shortages.
Therefore, before launching the industrial revolution, we must first solve the problem of food and clothing for the people.
How to solve it?
Of course, the entire Jiangnan area was conquered so that there would be Champa rice everywhere in the area.
In the Song Dynasty, hundreds of millions of people could be fed by relying on Champa rice, which proved that the output of Champa rice could indeed feed such a large population.
Moreover, the Agricultural College is currently studying improved Champa rice varieties and conducting hybrid experiments based on the theoretical knowledge of biogenetics taught by Chen Mu.
If Champa rice can be continuously improved, cultivated from generation to generation, and take root in the Han Dynasty, in a few decades, the Han Dynasty may be able to feed hundreds of millions of people.
At that time, it will be the time when the industrial revolution really begins. Productivity will increase, industrial levels will improve, industrial chains and technology will be upgraded. Steam trains and steam ships will travel around the world and collect various raw materials.
If the development of a top-secret book that Chen Mu is writing now is followed, maybe within a hundred or two hundred years after his death, the Han people will be able to use televisions in the fourth century AD, which is the period of the Five Husties in history.
, the radio is on.
It's just that all of this can be regarded as an idea in Chen Mu's personal mind. Everything is difficult at the beginning. The current Qingzhou Group is just a corner. Even if it unifies the country and restores the glory of the Han Dynasty, it will only officially start the Long March.
Just the first step.
Therefore, the revolution has not yet succeeded, and comrades still need to work hard!