The Ming government's attention to the cotton textile industry is the same as the importance of tea and raw silk production in previous years, but the cotton textile industry is not like the tea and raw silk industry, rapid development, and has always been in a tepid state. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

In 1868, when Zhu Jinglun returned from the French Exposition, the incident of the destruction of the Jichanglong silk reeling factory by the Nylon Hall broke out, and the final result was the exile of hundreds of ruffians and hooligans, and at the same time, the head of the Nylon Hall committed suicide after pleading guilty.

But then Nylon Hall, a huge chamber of commerce made up of silk weaving workshops, silkworm cocoon merchants, raw silk and silk fabric merchants, began a transformation with a kind of personal anger, and of course, they hated the industries of Jichanglong silk reeling and weaving of the Chen Qiyuan family, the secretary of the Ministry of Industry.

Due to the disagreement with the Ministry of Industry, Nylon Hall does not need the support of government capital, and they themselves are not short of capital, they themselves are an organization composed of businessmen who have accumulated for many years, and they have adopted the method of fund-raising, and in a short period of time, they have established a large-scale silk weaving factory.

In the raw silk industry, businessmen who used to go down to the countryside to buy silkworm cocoons and raw silk began to build factories directly in the fields to produce raw silk raw materials. In the weaving industry, they have built two large-scale weaving factories in Foshan and Guangzhou, respectively, to produce various types of silk products, with printed silk and plain weave being the largest products.

In just seven years, with the help of the commercial network mastered by the old guilds, their efficiency improved through industrial production was perfectly released, and these efficiency improvements were finally turned into lucrative profit reporting.

Zhu Jinglun was quite touched by the fact that Nylon Hall was able to surpass Chen Qiyuan's family business, and after analyzing the advantages of this old guild, he felt that this was a matter of course, they had been engaged in the silk industry in the past, they knew where there were silkworm cocoons, where there was a market, and Chen Qiyuan, an industrialist, was completely transformed from the squire, obviously between the squire and the merchant, the merchant engaged in industry, and had more advantages than the squire.

Zhu Jinglun was greatly inspired by the example of Nylon Hall, so the Ming government has been promoting a policy in the past five years, that is, to promote the transformation of the guild to modernization. Foshan's iron and artillery stores respectively set up new machine manufacturing plants.

Similarly, the establishment of machine-spinning and weaving factories by the Cotton Textile Guilds was promoted.

In the process of promoting the transformation of these guilds, the Chen family continued to play a leading role, following the expansion of the Cheong Loong Enterprise, in addition to the silk reeling and silk weaving industries, to set up the Cheong Loong Cotton Mill and Weaving Mill, which was located in Kowloon Port, where the source of imported cotton was convenient.

However, the production of cotton yarn can be maintained, and the woven fabric is basically a loss-making business, and even the capital may not be recovered.

This is something that no one has ever thought of.

The Ministry of Industry has conducted a special investigation on this, and they believe that the spinning industry has formed an open market for machine cotton yarn under the promotion of foreign cotton yarn for hundreds of years, and the people of Daming have long learned to use machine-made cotton yarn as warp and handmade soil yarn as weft to produce homespun cloth, and the annual import of British and Indian cotton yarn has reached the scale of 10 million taels of silver.

Therefore, it is easy for Daming cotton yarn industry to enter this industry that has formed a market.

However, the woven fabric encountered the same problem as the British in the past hundred years, that is, it has never been able to make the Chinese people accept the woven cloth.

The British Ministry of Commerce has done a survey, the reason why the Chinese people don't like foreign cloth, the problem is because although the foreign cloth looks exquisite, the texture is fine, but it is not durable, the Chinese people can wear a homespun cloth clothes for three or four years, this is still in the case of farm work, and if it is replaced by foreign cloth, those farmers who do gravity work can only wear it for a year at most.

So in the end, English muslin found business among the middle class in a few port cities, because these people did not need to do hard work, they were more comfortable in dressing, and the fine printed and dyed English muslin could be used by the middle class in the city as a substitute for expensive silk fabrics to a certain extent.

The British believe that no matter how the price of foreign cloth is reduced, it is impossible to compete with the more durable homespun cloth, because it is impossible for foreign cloth to be reduced to one-third of the price of homespun cloth in any case, and the durability of homespun cloth is three or four times that of foreign cloth, so the British believe that their product market is in the city, and they are very optimistic about the consumption demand of the urban middle class that is growing rapidly with the economic development of the Ming Dynasty.

But the British do not have a Chinese market, they can also dump in India, the Indians will also produce homespun cloth, the British can greatly increase the tax on hand-woven fabrics, so that the Indian workers who spin on small wooden looms cannot compete with the British workers who use machine weaving, but Daming can not use this method, he must face the competition of a large number of Chinese homespun cloth, and without opening this market, it will not be possible to complete the industrialization of the cotton spinning industry.

After careful investigation and research, the Ministry of Industry found that in the Chinese market, the best foreign cloth sold is the coarse cloth of the United States, this kind of coarse cloth is very popular with the miners in the west, because it is very thick and durable, and the same reason is also liked by the Chinese people, becoming the only cloth that can compete with the native cloth.

The Ministry of Industry of the Ming Dynasty intended to encourage merchants to imitate this coarse cloth to compete with the huge rural market of homespun cloth, but they did not know that the British had copied American coarse cloth in 1887, and as a result, British cloth exports to China had tripled in that year.

The Ministry of Industry successfully imitated the American coarse cloth last year, and immediately promoted it in the Jichanglong Textile Factory, producing a large number of coarse cloth, which sold quite well in Shanghai and Tianjin, but because it was the promotion stage, it was not yet possible to form a large market.

As a result, with the exception of the Tan Kai Yuen family business, which did not have economic interests as its first goal, other businessmen were not very interested in it, and even the cotton cloth merchants preferred to sell homespun cloth and imported foreign cloth to satisfy different types of consumers, respectively, and had little interest in the machine production encouraged by the Ministry of Industry.

Therefore, after five years of promotion, the cotton spinning industry in Daming is still only an industry that is only interested in the government and political and business closely related to the government, and private capital is not interested in it, and there is no investment boom.

In the absence of a capital giant, there is no condition for Daming Capital to go to Jiangnan to compete for the cotton resources produced in Songjiang Prefecture around Shanghai.

Only a businessman like Chen Qiyuan, whose main purpose was political achievements and meritorious deeds, was willing to blindly establish a cotton textile factory in Shanghai in accordance with Zhu Jinglun's instructions and without seeing any prospects, and set up a large-scale spinning mill and a textile mill with a capital of 200,000 taels respectively.

Surprisingly, these two factories have achieved extraordinary success, not because of Shanghai's strong local consumption power, but because these two factories quickly entered the Northeast market from Shanghai, which is a huge market in Northeast China, saving Jichanglong's cotton textile business.

Just after Chen Qiyuan's industry succeeded in the Northeast, his eyes soon entered this area, because the Ming Dynasty was about to build a railway in the Northeast, and if the Ming Dynasty did not build a railway in the Northeast, the Russians would build a railway here.