Only nine months have passed since 1871, but the economic data has already surpassed that of the whole of last year. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

In those years, there were no precise statistics, and the most objective data used to prove the economy were often only the scale of imports and exports and fiscal revenues of the customs. As of September, imports and exports have reached 80 million taels, which is the data for the whole of last year. Among them, the export value is as high as 50 million, and the import value has also reached 30 million. The fiscal revenue reached 50 million taels, which is very close to the 50 million last year.

The surge in imports and exports is mainly due to the promotion of tea and raw silk, especially raw silk, which has sprung up, and has grown rapidly in recent years, doubling compared with three years ago to 40 million taels. Compared with raw silk, the growth of tea has been somewhat overshadowed, only from 20 million taels three years ago to more than 30 million taels.

The development of tea trade has been very stable in recent years, but it is not yet high-speed, with tens of millions of acres of new tea plantations, tea prices have even fallen, although the Russian and American markets are expanding rapidly, but the speed of tea production exceeds the market growth, at present, we are under great competitive pressure, the price of tea has not risen for two years, and even the price of high-grade tea with the fastest increase in production has fallen a lot.

Obviously, tea production has reached a bottleneck period, the international market is basically saturated, and the area of tea plantations in India has even shrunk by one-third under the competition, which is already less than one million acres, and Assam has long given up its expansion in India and is fully engaged in the operation of Chinese tea plantations.

Therefore, although the tea industry has entered a bottleneck period, the monopoly advantage of the Ming Dynasty has been basically formed, and this industry can be regarded as successfully cultivated.

The Ministry of Industry's survey believes that in the next ten years, Indian tea is unlikely to have a future for development, so the industry will be harvested, the government first announced the cancellation of the tea tax rebate policy, which can save 3 million taels of expenditure for the Ming Dynasty every year. Moreover, the government plans to decide whether to introduce a tea export tax depending on the tea situation next year. If the tea market is stable next year and the tea export tax is increased, fiscal revenue will increase again.

After the development of the tea industry has entered the bottleneck, the changes in tea production are accelerating, because everyone feels more pressure, when the market is good, fools can make money, machine tea factories and handicraft workshops can live in peace, now the tea market begins to become crowded, handicraft workshops bear the brunt of the impact, plus the modern factories that have long been all over the production areas, it is nothing new, it has long been accepted, so more and more handicraft workshops are introducing machines for production, The industrialization of the tea industry has been accelerated.

In the past, the old tea producing areas are also rapidly changing the mode of production, more and more tea farmers have given up their own manual processing of tea, but will pick down the tea, sent to the nearby emerging tea factory processing, although there are some Chinese characteristics, such as some local tea farmers are not to sell tea to the factory, but to small factories to pay processing fees, the processed tea they take to sell the phenomenon, but in general, in the field of tea processing, mechanization has begun to form a trend, at the current rate, Within three to five years, there will be basically no one producing tea by hand, which means that within a few years the industry will be industrialized.

Compared with tea production entering a new stage, raw silk production is still out of the expansion period, and the silk industry suddenly broke out at this time.

On the basis of the development of the silk reeling industry, the silk industry began to grow three years ago.

Three years ago, after the Nylon Hall incident, Chen Qiyuan and his two cousins rebuilt their own silk reeling factory, and introduced plain silk and printed silk machines to open a machine silk factory.

At the same time, the Chen brothers began to unite, Chen Qiyuan was the secretary of the Ministry of Industry, and the Chen family became a local nobleman, but his official status made him unable to fully devote himself to business, so he handed over his own industry to his cousins to operate, and the two sides merged, and the factory was collectively known as Jichanglong, with a total of three silk reeling branches, divided into 123 factories, two silk branches, divided into 12 factories, employing more than 10,000 workers, and is currently the largest private silk weaving enterprise in Guangdong.

Chen Qiyuan's purpose of developing his own industry is to promote the development of the industry.

However, unlike the silk reeling industry, the silk reeling industry must be close to the cocoon production area in order to save transportation and storage costs to the greatest extent, while the weaving industry is different, raw silk is a raw material that can be transported over long distances, and no special equipment is required for storage and transportation, and the cost is very low.

Chen Qiyuan's weaving factory was also built in Jiancun, but it was soon found that the raw silk produced by the nearby silk reeling factory was difficult to meet the raw material requirements of the weaving factory, so he built a second branch factory in Foshan Town, the center of the weaving industry in the past, and at the same time attracted Foshan workshop owners to start using machine weaving.

Chen Qiyuan's promotion was of course effective, and a group of squires and merchants began to use machine weaving and set up silk factories, and with the help of technical experts from the Ministry of Industry, they were able to produce normally in the first year.

But at the beginning was relatively stable, only a dozen new factories started in the first year, but from the second half of last year, the number of squires and businessmen who invested in silk factories suddenly skyrocketed, which is of course not their concept changed, the change is slowly changing, the conservative is still conservative, the reason why the squires suddenly burst out to invest in the silk industry, the main reason is that the price of silk suddenly doubled.

All this was due to the Franco-Prussian War.

This is also a matter of luck, when Chen Qiyuan promoted machine weaving in Foshan, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, France is not the world's largest silk producer in this era disputed, but they are the largest silk exporter in this era There is no dispute, French silk, not only exported to Britain, Germany, but also large-scale exports to North and South America, it can be said that they produce more than half of the world's commodity silk.

France is almost the dominant player in the international silk market, and French silk production is as world-class as Britain's cotton textiles.

Therefore, after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, especially when the Prussian army appeared on the outskirts of Lyon, the center of French silk weaving, the international silk price doubled in an instant.

Historically, Shanghai's silk exports have increased by 8% for two consecutive years since 1870, but the quality of handmade silk in Jiangnan has been criticized by Westerners, because the French silk production area was damaged by the war, resulting in silk instantly becoming a seller's market.

In the case of abundant raw materials for raw silk and falling prices, this has made the weaving industry extremely profitable, and even handmade silk has begun to become sought-after, not to mention the prospect of machine weaving.

Taking advantage of this shareholder trend and the vigorous promotion of the government, not only interest-free loans were given, but also technical personnel were sent to teach production techniques, which immediately ignited a wave of enthusiasm for building a weaving factory.

Chinese already have the habit of getting together, and when they found that weaving, a relatively familiar industry, was unusually profitable, a large amount of capital poured in, and the largest silk center, Foshan's silk industry, was particularly obvious.

Foshan was originally the silk weaving center of Guangdong, with a large number of silk workshops, is the largest silk production center in Guangdong, these workshops are not family workshops, many are large-scale handicraft workshops, employing more than 100 people.

These workshop owners have a lot of money, have long completed the accumulation of capital, and have the experience of managing the production of hundreds of people, have been operating the silk weaving industry in Foshan for a long time, and also have shipping channels, there is no shortage of market, no shortage of labor, no lack of experience and knowledge, and then see that the price of silk is so good, they are the most eager to expand the production of a group of people.

But manual production is obviously impossible to expand the scale in the short term, but the government to promote the machine weaving, a person can at least top several people, so the machine weaving has become their best choice, their weavers only need simple training, soon can master the machine production technology, although the machine weaving is not as good as the reeling of silk one person top ten people, not to mention the cotton spinning one person top forty people's efficiency, but one person produces the output of eight people, for these workshop owners, it is also attractive enough, so they have put into it.

As a result, in this silk east wind, Foshan not only strengthened the original position of the silk weaving center, but also became the largest production area of the machine weaving industry, and the machine weaving thick factory was set up in more than a year.

These hundred silk factories took advantage of the dividends of the Franco-Prussian War, and the cheap plain silk they produced was exported to the British market in large quantities, and they made a lot of profits, for the capitalists, high profits are accumulation, and accumulation is not to save money, that is, the rich people are not capitalists, and the capitalists' understanding of accumulation is to put into production as soon as possible, expand production capacity, and what they accumulate is productivity.

Therefore, after the silk reeling industry, the silk industry has become another hot spot for growth.

The Franco-Prussian War was a once-in-a-century dividend for silk production, but it was not so friendly to the silk reeling industry.

France is a big silk country, although France is also the first country in Europe to grow mulberry and silkworms, but their silk weaving industry is huge, and the raw silk produced in France is completely unable to meet the raw material needs of silk factories, so France is also the world's largest importer of raw silk.

Therefore, the outbreak of war not only caused the price of silk to skyrocket, but also caused the price of raw silk to plummet.

In the first half of the Franco-Prussian War, there was even a large backlog of raw silk that had been exported well in recent years, and a large amount of raw silk was piled up in the warehouse of the Kowloon Exchange.

A large number of raw silk piled up in the port, but the production of raw silk in the silk reeling factory did not stop, a large number of products could not be sold, and the payment was backlogged, which made the market good in recent years, quite a few blind expansion, and a large number of silk reeling factories with very chaotic financial situation suddenly fell into trouble.

For the first time since the boom in machine reeling, there has been a large-scale general loss.