Hundreds of the sons of the capitalists who came to China in the name of Napoleon set up large machine factories, mainly in the textile and silk weaving industries, because these two were actually also factories that the French could get their hands on, and they could also set up factories for them to set up a shipyard, which were often not up to the capital and technology.

Therefore, it can only be invested in areas with small investment and fast turnover. And most of them have succeeded, thanks to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, two years of recovery in the world market, they ushered in a good time, China's lower labor costs made it impossible for them to produce cotton textiles in France to compete with the British, but to China can be sold back to Europe.

Most of these French business owners who came to invest in China were in France, and their families ran factories, and their class was also a supporter of Napoleon, because it was Napoleon's continental blockade that gave birth to this class in France, and with the fall of Napoleon, this class encountered a cold winter.

The current French factory owners have not only lost a blockaded European market, but they have not even been able to secure their own market under the onslaught of British goods. Through the exchange of information, I learned that some friends have made a fortune by investing in China, and a wave of French investment has risen in China.

Zhou Lang is mixed with these French investments, and the good news is that they have brought new technologies and new management methods, and the popularization of the large factory system and mechanized production that Zhou Lang has been promoting has greatly accelerated. The worry is that they are also taking advantage of the east wind of China to gradually expand, China is not a white country, the French invest in the Netherlands, they will become Dutch, but they invest in China, they basically cannot become a Chinese, in China they are a foreign race behind the barrier!

They also brought the mechanization of silk weaving to China, and before them, China's silk weaving industry has always been the world of handicraft workshops, during the Qing Dynasty, there were 50,000 silk looms in Nanjing alone, and the population of silk weaving was as high as 200,000. Suzhou and Hangzhou are "thousands of machine households, sunrise thousands of silk", hundreds of thousands of silk weaving workers. Guangzhou's silk weaving industry is also quite large. However, most of them are produced in handicraft workshops, and the silk weaving factories introduced through the Ministry of Industry have not yet been promoted.

This process has been accelerated by French investors, as France is the leader of the European silk weaving industry.

The silk weaving industry in Europe originated from the Crusades, which plundered thousands of silk weavers from the Middle East to Italy, where it took root, and Italy soon developed into the only silk producer in Europe. During the Bourbon period, Henry IV, the founder of the dynasty, was dissatisfied with the loss of a large amount of French precious metals to buy Italian silk fabrics, and began to use the power of the state to promote the development of the silk weaving industry.

The king personally formulated a plan for the development of silk, a large number of Yisang land was discovered, sericulture was valued, and the silk weaving industry also developed. With the introduction of a large number of technicians from Italy, silk weavers from places such as Milan and Lucca brought advanced technology, and French weavers were able to produce independently of Italy.

Colbert, the mercantilist commercial minister appointed by Louis XIV, began to lead the quality of French products over Italy through systematic scientific management of Fianfa, the formulation of product specifications and quality standards. A large number of orders from the royal family were used for the decoration of the Palace of Versailles and other courts. The French style of luxury in the era of Louis XIV swept Europe, and the demand for luxury fabrics such as silk fabrics also increased greatly, and the French silk weaving industry began to surpass Italy and lead the European trend.

Before the French Revolution, there were already 18,000 textile machines in operation in Lyon, the heart of the French silk weaving industry. The French Revolution had a huge impact on the French silk weaving industry, the aristocratic class that used silk products was purged, or fled France en masse, and cheap cotton cloth became a popular cloth, resulting in an almost complete halt in the French silk weaving industry, and more than half of the looms were empty.

It was Napoleon's rise to power that brought about a turnaround in the French silk weaving industry, and Napoleon ordered the wearing of Lyon silk fabrics by celebrities, and ordered large quantities of silk fabrics for his various hotels. The rest of the wealthy and the new class followed suit, and Lyon's silk weaving industry was revived.

The silk weaving industry in France also produced technological innovations, and the Jacquard loom, invented before the Revolution, became popular, a high-efficiency jacquard machine, the prototype of which of course came from China, but China has been used for hundreds or even thousands of years, and the construction and principle of the machine is no different from that of the Song Dynasty.

The Yunjin and Song brocade produced by large and complex jacquard machines are indeed of excellent quality and are the luxury goods that the world desires. But the innovation of the French has greatly improved the efficiency, a large jacquard machine, it takes 6 people to operate to weave complex patterns, but through a set of punch cards, only 1 person can mass-produce large and complex patterns of fabrics, this efficiency is not only 6 times the difference, but dozens of times, because the French machine is easier to combine with power machinery, they introduced the steam engine.

In fact, Zhou Lang was not worried about the introduction of these machines, and even the technological innovation of the French in the silk weaving industry in the last few hundred years, because he saw that these technologies were quickly imitated by their Chinese counterparts. But these Chinese silk weaving factories, which have learned the techniques of the French, have never been able to compete with the French.

At this time, Zhou Lang began to pay attention, and he found that China's silk weaving industry is indeed backward, and backwardness is not technology or product quality, but a set of management ideas and management methods. Chinese, and even Zhou Lang's understanding of silk is a product, and the silk industry is a craft.

Is there something wrong with that? Everyone thinks so!

But it is really wrong, since the time of Louis XIV, France has created a whole system of silk industry, which is not a simple craft and product. Rather, it is a complete set of cultural products from design to manufacturing.

The issuance of decrees, the granting of special status, the establishment of product quality standards, the establishment of a protection system, and the making of large quantities of orders at the same time are the policy management given by the French government. But more management was carried out through the silk weaving guilds in Lyon and other places. They established a silk design school to train specialized designers. These designers are of a very high level, keeping up with the trend of the times, constantly innovating, Rococo, Baroque, whatever is popular in the mainstream art field, they follow what is designed.

Not only design patterns, but also design new varieties of silk. The most important thing in Lyon is the woven fabric, the main types of woven fabrics are plain fabrics, satin fabrics, heavy brocade fabrics, velvet fabrics, leno fabrics and landscape fabrics, the design of which has its own system and theory, which must be consistent with the opening and transmission principle of the loom. Designers don't care about innovation, and then promote their technology by publishing professional books.

In order to ensure the healthy growth of this industrial chain, as early as 1744, Lyon promulgated a law to clearly protect the design copyright of designers, encourage the creation of designers, and in 1756 established an art school to improve the artistic level of designers, where students first learn the basics of painting, then flower design, and then fabric design, to understand the trend of fashion. By around 1790, there were 80 independent designers in Lyon, providing design solutions for the Lyon silk weaving industry.

After learning about these situations, Zhou Lang was a little silent, what is a gap, this is called a gap. China's silk industry has always been a craft, the domain of craftsmen, and no high-level intellectual elite has paid attention to this field. All the products are either the ancestral products that have not changed for thousands of years, or the very limited new varieties that the old craftsmen have explored, which is too bad in terms of ideology and concept compared with the conscious innovation and conscious pursuit of the artistic trend directly through the designer.

Due to the fall of Napoleon, the French economy was in mourning, and the French silk weaving industry came to a standstill again. The silk weaving industry was also an industry that Napoleon once focused on protecting, and many elites of the silk industry came to China to join Napoleon, and they opened new silk factories.

Zhou Lang is not worried about the advanced technology they introduced, and the management methods they introduce do not pose a threat, but the ideas they bring are really beyond the ability of Chinese craftsmen. As a result, in a short period of time, they not only produced a large number of silk fabrics that sold well in Europe from China's high-quality raw silk, but also stole a lot of foreign trade business, and only two years later, they began to squeeze the local market.

They had a small number of factories, only three in Nanjing, one each in Hangzhou and Suzhou, but they were very large, and they did not expand in the agrarian style of the Chinese handicraft workshops, but borrowed money to expand as soon as they were profitable. For this reason, some French businessmen even introduced the French banking industry into China, and set up a number of small and medium-sized banks to provide funds for the silk weaving industry.

Several silk factories, in just three years, have generally employed tens of thousands of workers. The raw materials are the high-quality lake silk cultivated by Chinese silkworm farmers for hundreds of thousands of years, and the workers are ingenious Chinese Jiangnan girls, who use China's high-quality raw materials to make China's cheap labor, while the French are seeking huge profits.

The most unacceptable thing for Zhou Lang is that they also carried out a cultural invasion of China, because they introduced a large number of European cultural patterns, most of which are ancient Roman and ancient Greek art styles.

In the early 18th century, the Chinese style was popular in Europe, and a large number of Chinese cultural products poured into Europe, the most concentrated embodiment of which was Chinese porcelain, the kind of porcelain with ink patterns, which was extremely popular in Europe, and even a large number of clumsy imitations appeared. It is estimated that in the early 18th century, the British shipped between 25 million and 30 million pieces of Chinese porcelain to Europe.

However, after the first three decades of the 18th century, the number of porcelain shipped from China to Europe decreased dramatically, not because Europeans mastered the art of firing porcelain, but because of the change in fashion, Europeans began to lose their fascination with Chinese customs, but developed a sense of collective cultural pride, and began to popularize ancient Greek and Roman art styles.

Chinese porcelain artisans have not been able to keep up with the change in fashion and have lost a large market for millions or tens of millions of pieces of porcelain every year.