Some textile workshops in Jinyang Wangfu and Huangzhuang have begun to put into production, producing woolen cloth.

The semi-mechanized industrial workshops using water power have increased the production efficiency of several manor workshops by dozens of times, especially in spinning and weaving, and the output of several textile workshops with only more than 400 people adds up, which is equivalent to one-fifth of the cloth production in Jindi. Li Qi did not plan to sell a large amount of woolen cloth produced in his textile workshop to Jinyang or Hedong. Many poor families rely on the hard work of women to earn some meager subsistence money.

The dumping of industrial goods would soon deprive these impoverished women of their livelihood.

The rich will never have mercy on the poor, and if there is widespread hunger, it could trigger a series of social upheavals. Sometimes, production efficiency is low, and it is also a way to maintain that everyone has something to eat.

Therefore, Li Qi plans to sell most of the woolen cloth produced in his workshop to the grassland.

In ancient times, when the level of productivity was still very low, there was no way to create a universal life of affluence. Some businesses that seemed to be very profitable in later generations were luxury goods that only the rich could use in this era. For example, after Li Qi tinkered with things like fat and perfume, he found that the sales were far less than he imagined.

Even ordinary rich and noble families are reluctant to use perfume, how many people will come to buy it?

In this era, food, clothing, and fighting are the most important things, and the rest, let's wait until we have a full meal.

The backward textile level on the grassland makes most of the nomadic tribes even can't weave cloth, only use wool to roll felt, most of the herdsmen are a felt coat or tattered fur coat in spring, summer, autumn and winter, and those who can afford to wear silk must be nobles, and they are relatively large nobles.

In this era, cotton cultivation was still very small, and the main plant fiber came from various types of flax. The hemp stalks grow very tall, and when people walk in the hemp fields, they will disappear in the hemp forests with branches and branches. The hemp skin on the surface of the hemp stem is the main source of hemp fiber. After soaking and beating the hemp skin, the materials needed to weave the linen cloth can be obtained. After being treated with dilute sulphuric acid, the twisted twine seems to be a little softer than in the past.

Northerners sometimes raise silkworms, but they are small in quantity and scale, and cannot be used as a major industrial raw material.

In the grasslands, wool is so cheap that the shepherds do not get into the habit of shearing their sheep at all, and every year most of the wool is left to fall off and dissipate in the wilderness. Since the excess wool was not easy to transport during the transfer, most of it was left in the camp to be used as fertilizer or for fires. This is a very bad habit, and Li Jiqi plans to cultivate the sense of frugality among the herdsmen, so that they can understand that although wool grows again from the sheep every year, this huge waste is still very shameful.

The grassland is a business, and the profits are very huge, such as a pair of exquisite leather boots of the Han family, which can be exchanged for two cowhides or two sheep when they are taken to the grassland. A horse is only worth three or five taels of silver on the grassland, and as long as it is rushed back to the Han land, it can be sold for more than fifteen yuan, and a good war horse can even be sold for a high price of fifty yuan.

It's just that doing business on the grassland is also very risky, and if you don't do it well, you will be robbed by horse bandits or tribes that often haunt the grassland, and finally end up with both people and money. The caravans that were able to do business on the steppe were very powerful, at least the ordinary small tribes did not dare to fight their ideas.

Li Qi now needed to organize several caravans to come out, and he needed to sell the woolen cloth woven from his manor to the grassland, and then transport back the exchanged livestock, fur or wool and other animal products.

Now, the experiment of firing the "iron red" pigment with pyrite has finally succeeded, and after the pigment has been prepared, the original gray woolen grey cloth is bleached with dilute sulfuric acid and soaked in several large dye vats. After that, it is steamed and fixed, dyed again, and rinsed again, and the woolen grey fabric woven in the workshop becomes a brightly colored dark red fabric.

The dyeing experiment was carried out many times, and after accumulating more than 100 pieces of dyeing waste cloth in the warehouse of the workshop, the entire dyeing process and formula were finally fixed.

Zheng Yu muttered when he saw the stacks of waste cloth in the warehouse: "If only these things could be dyed into black cloth." ”

The problem is that the manor will only be calcined out of iron red now, and as for the "iron black" pigment, there is no clue at all.

If you want to make that thing, it seems that you have to treat the raw materials with caustic soda first......

But how is caustic soda made? Although the principle is known, it still needs to go through a lot of trial and practice if you want to really drum up the product.

The ancestors of the Li family were Turkic, and the relationship with most of the steppe tribes in the north has always been very good, and the Jin army has always been famous for its cavalry, relying on the military horses provided by these steppe tribes every year. However, despite the growing strength of the Khitan tribes, most of the Xianbei, Turkic, Zubu, Tuyuhun, Qiang, Xi and other tribes on the grasslands that were originally subjugated and attached to the Jin army were annexed by the Khitans and began to obey the orders of the Khitan Khan.

Now, the Khitan forces have completely controlled the Luan River valley, posing a huge threat to the northern Jin Dynasty......

Li Siyuan, who was far away in Luoyang, seemed to have forgotten Li Qi, the crown prince who was far away in Jinyang, and was preparing to choose one of the two princes to support him as the emperor. He thinks that Li Qi should be furious after learning the news, but he doesn't know that Li Qi now hopes that he can forget about himself and bury his head in development without interference.

Building embankments, digging ditches, and setting up workshops all involved a huge investment. After the autumn, the 100,000 yuan provided by Wang De, the Yiwu Army's festival, plus the 60,000 yuan of silver that Fu Yanqing and they got from Ren Yuan, had already spent almost enough. The harvest of autumn grain in Taiyuan Mansion did not make more than 30,000 soldiers and horses hungry, but exchanging the woven cloth for money, livestock or grain became a top priority.

Commerce and trade, in between, are actually far more profitable than most people imagine.

It's just that in this year, there are too many people who want to get rich, and the road is very unsafe, and sometimes the grassland people feel embarrassed to call themselves heroes if they don't rob anything. Li Qi's plan could only be that the caravan first travel between Jinyang and Yunzhou to transport goods. Then, north of Yunzhou, new market towns were gradually established to trade with caravans on the grasslands.

Originally, Li Qi was ready to fight steadily, but after the first batch of 2,300 horses of woolen cloth shipped to Yunzhou were exchanged for enough materials for 1,500 people to live for a year, his ambition was awakened.

The grasslands in the north are the real land of wealth......