The magnates in the capital did not expect that the nightmare had just begun, and these people in the upper class often knew all kinds of information earlier than the lower classes. For example, last year there were signs of drought in all parts of the country, and this year's data from the provincial newspapers showed that cotton production would be reduced on a large scale, and the officials who controlled cotton and linen would secretly hoard cloth in advance, because the cloth was more durable, so the amount would be larger.

All the evil wolves are gearing up to share in this feast that eats away at the flesh and blood of the people. People must wear clothes, and they must wear cotton clothes in winter, and the soaring prices of these materials make the people helpless to swallow the bitter fruit. There will be a terrifying increase in the price of cloth this year.

When the grain was like mercury and silently infiltrated the entire capital, soon, some people with organizational talents stood out and entered the attention of the top level.

The biochemical special team left by Li Jing assisted the senior brother and upgraded the first batch of masters, and these people were successfully promoted to the disciples of the hospital. These people were given the right to operate the cloth, but there was only one kind of cloth, which was the white grey cloth produced by Li Jing's family.

This is the cheapest and the most sold cloth, the poor can not afford to buy dyed cloth, so they can only buy their own grey cloth to the dyeing workshop to spend more than a dozen dollars to dye it. It's often the largest number of products that generate the most profits, just as Windows simply can't be compared to Linux.

At present, the upper reaches of the Hanjiang River, the good location is occupied by Li Jing's family, and a cement and stone dam has been built, where there is no freezing in all seasons, there is no seasonal limit, and the mountain drop is large, and there is a lot of rain, so you can drive a hydraulic loom to weave cloth on a large scale 24 hours a day all year round.

Although Europe was limited by the Thirty Years' War, the country was exhausted and the people were poor, but the markets in the Americas had been occupied by the Li Jing family, and the Spanish galleons sailing from Entrenchment and Manila carried the whole ship of gold and silver to Nanao Island, and took away the whole ship of cotton cloth.

Now the cotton supply in the local area and the surrounding three provinces is no longer enough, and now the Indian cotton sent from India by the sword team is used. When the Li family's fleet went to India, they brought a boatload of iron and Indian horses and cotton on the return trip. Many Indian merchant ships have also joined the ranks of cotton trafficking, because of the support of orders, India has continued to increase the planting area of cotton.

The grey cloth of the Li family, from spinning to weaving and jacquard, all use hydraulic machinery. Weaving out the quality that is impossible to achieve by hand-spinning and weaving in this era. These high-count cotton gauze fabrics are very strong and lightweight, and there are no joint breakages that are common in hand-spun spending. The homespun cloth is too heavy, there are too many broken points, the thread is too thick, and the wearing feeling is very rough, and even scratches the skin.

The cloth of the Li family is not only larger, but also the yarn used is finer and longer, and the cotton cloth with high-count yarn is light, strong, and smooth, and it is very comfortable to wear. The sun shimmers with a satin-like smoothness, almost giving the illusion that it is silk.

The Spaniards found it to be the best summer fabric in the world. The products not only appeared in the Americas and became the new favorite of the aristocracy, but even entered the royal family and the royal family and the noble court with the return of galleons to Spain and Europe. It became the new fashion, and Europeans dyed it in their favorite colors according to their preferences.

These cloths traveled eastward to Korea and Dongying. The shogunate, which closed itself off from the rest of the country, only opened Nagasaki to foreign trade. It was this window that new cloth piled up like a mountain and poured into the various vassal states in the interior.

With the perfection of the jacquard machine, different printing plates began to appear, and the exported cloth began to appear with special patterns customized according to the customer's order. The Spanish and Portuguese even offered to make jacquard custom for the dark pattern of the family crest of the nobility to facilitate their sales in Europe and the Americas.

If the order is large enough, as long as you design the pattern, the Li Jing family's pattern maker will engrave the plate, and the woven cloth will have such dark lines. With the progress of Lijia textile technology, a global market is being formed imperceptibly.

The cost of such mechanized large-scale production of cloth is only a quarter of that of the traditional native cloth of the Ming Dynasty. Sea freight enables inexpensive large-scale transportation at a much lower cost than land-based ox-and-horse carriage transportation. Even in Europe, the price is not more expensive than the locally produced cloth in Europe, but the quality is far superior, and it directly enters the ranks of luxury jewelry.

From Liaodong to Saigon, a large number of sea ships joined the ranks of trafficking cloth. There are Tan people, pirates, maritime merchants, Europeans, Arabs, East Africans, and various peoples of the South Seas. They have joined the cloth trafficking.

With the development of pyramid schemes, a large number of people from all corners of society entered Li Jing's grasp and unwittingly provided Li Jing with intelligence sources. Complicated and varied information is gathered in a small courtyard house with three entrances in the East Fourth, where a secret intelligence analysis team is operating at a high speed, sorting out valuable information 24 hours a day. This is under the direct leadership of the intelligence chief Li Yi, who is currently in charge of the deputy director Li Ping here in Liaodong.

In order to spy on local intelligence and pass on news, Li Jing began to spend huge sums of money to open inns in various places. The ostensible business is to receive merchants to stay in the dormitory, but in fact it is an intelligence transmission point, and a secret armed base and a safe house for intelligence officers. These inns are in the form of sturdy square, three-storey buildings, with carriages and warehouses on the ground floor, and no windows except for the main entrance. The walls are made of rammed earth, two meters thick, and are covered with bricks. The second and third floors are inhabited. The most distinctive feature is that they all have a tall tower, shaped like a large chimney or water tower of a later factory.

The tower is made of red brick and can reach a height of 50 meters. On top of this are the telescopes and signal tower arms. At the end of the 18th century, an obscure French engineer, Claude Chappe (1763-1805), attempted to design a tall mechanical arm to transmit information over long distances.

With the help of his four brothers, Sharp built 15 towers stretching for 200 kilometers, each with a signal arm, each with more than 190 gestures and more than 190 kinds of information, so that it was enough to correspond every letter in Latin to a pose. Since the signal tower and signal arm are very high, they can be seen from more than ten kilometers away, so they can be used to transmit intelligence. In 1794, the Sharp brothers demonstrated this communication system, which they transmitted information from Paris to Lille, 200 kilometers away, within nine minutes.

The cost of this kind of signal tower is relatively expensive, but at that time, France happened to be at war with Austria and other anti-French alliance countries, and urgently needed this system to transmit information, so it built 556 in one go, and established a huge communication network in France, with the entire network line up to 4,800 kilometers, which may be the earliest communication network in modern times.

Spain and the United Kingdom later set up their own systems because of the effectiveness of signal towers in communication, but they improved Sharp's design to make the posture of the signal arm more visible. It was only after the advent of the telegraph that the role of signal towers slowly disappeared.

The hoarding of cloth in Beijing's cloth shops had just revealed a hint when Li Jing noticed it, and he was ready to play with these greedy guys.

At the end of February, the first batch of 100,000 pieces of grey cloth secretly arrived in Dongbaliqiao Village, just outside the capital. Then Li Jing will frantically hoard grey cloth here. There is a piece of saline-alkali land leased anonymously by the Li family, and a simple warehouse has been built on ten acres of land. Li Jing specially turned the treacherous and cunning Wu Deyu over, the oil mill has already been on the track, and it is a waste of talent to continue to nest there. Now Lao Wu is mainly in charge of the palm oil business from Nanyang.

A war is about to begin.