Building an imperial palace is not too big a project for the current productivity of the Ming Dynasty. And after all, the imperial court is rich, so it always has to take care of the lower face problem. The Imperial Palace has been burned for so many years and has not been rebuilt, how ugly it is to put it there!

The ministers naturally want to vigorously support, especially the emperor's conduct over the years, everyone also sees it, not the kind of monarch who squanders wantonly, and he also has enough self-control in terms of personal enjoyment. It's really a strong taste, leaving three points with everyone.

With such qualities, the ministers were not afraid that the emperor would become overjoyed and extravagant. It's just that the specifications of the emperor always have to be guaranteed, and this palace must be repaired.

Half a month later, the Ministry of Industry came up with a reconstruction plan. The palace is mainly made of wood, and the wood will be selected from the Northeast and Nanyang, and the quality will be of high quality.

The construction budget is 950,000 yuan, and the material cost accounts for most of it.

In fact, although the material cost of timber is high, most of it is provided by state-owned enterprises. The large timbers in the primeval forests of the Northeast and South Seas are now owned by the state. Nowadays, the finances of state-owned enterprises are all independently accounted for, so the behavior of money from the left hand to the right hand is not all superfluous.

The construction of the Imperial Palace is expected to be completed within a year and a half, mainly because it takes a certain amount of time to prepare those high-quality materials, and it will be completely complete within a year.

If it was before, it wouldn't have cost so much money to repair the Emperor's Palace, but now the main thing is that the cost of labor has risen, and the cost of materials has increased compared to when Zhu Youxiao first ascended the throne.

Capital is constantly evolving, and the scale is constantly becoming larger. The wealth used by the common people. It is also increasing with development.

And the allocation of the budget has also been completed. Infrastructure construction still accounts for the largest part of the budget, reaching 350 million yuan, mainly water conservancy facilities and urban infrastructure. These construction funds are mainly allocated to Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu, which have just begun to reform, while other provinces show a decreasing trend, among which Beizhili is the least, followed by Northeast China.

In terms of the construction of water conservancy projects, the first thing that the imperial court should ensure now is the flooding and water storage problems in various river basins. The basins of the great rivers are built first, and then the individual tributaries are built.

It is still the same goal, to improve the ability of agriculture to resist disasters and strive to ensure harvest in drought and flood.

Once the water conservancy facilities in the northern provinces are completed, there will be a huge increase in agricultural output. One of the main reasons for the low yield of land in the north is the lack of irrigation.

The investment in education has increased to 80 million yuan, and the education funding has been increasing year by year. Within four years, public primary schools will be universalized in all northern provinces, and six years of compulsory primary education will be implemented in all northern provinces.

The problem of teachers is also simple, and the teaching in the primary school is not too difficult, and there are so many literati in the Ming Dynasty. You can get a job after studying at a teacher training college. The quality may be uneven, but the quality of the faculty can be improved gradually. Let's popularize it first. The school will be an important platform for the imperial court to guide its people, such as instilling in students some common common sense.

Spending on medical and health care is also increasing, and a medical system of out-of-pocket expenses for minor illnesses and reimbursement for major illnesses will be gradually implemented. In the development of medicine, a large amount of money has also been invested.

The funds invested in the military have not been improved at the level of the past, and now the Ming Dynasty has swallowed a lot of territory, and these territories have not been digested! Therefore, for the time being, there is no idea of continuing to expand externally, but focusing on internal development.

As for the scale of investment by state-owned enterprises in the ninth year of the Apocalypse, it has reached a scale of 800 million yuan, mainly in shipbuilding, highways, metallurgy, machinery manufacturing, textiles, agriculture, grain processing, and so on.

After a year of development, the production capacity of steam engines can be manufactured more than 500 units per month, and after a year of use last year, various factories using steam engines have made huge profits, and the only fly in the ointment is that there have been several boiler explosion accidents.

The expansion of steam engine production capacity has led to more state-owned capital factories starting to use steam engines for production, and because of the improvement of production efficiency, these goods are extremely competitive in the market and very profitable.

Driven by profits, the steam engine manufacturing industry began to flourish, and the steam engine manufacturing plant, which was separated from the machine factory, is now making every effort to increase production capacity as quickly as possible. As soon as these steam engines left the factory, they were immediately looted out by state-owned capital factories.

The textile industry and the grain processing industry took the lead in using a large number of steam engines, and the profit margins of textiles and grain came out at once, and once the scale of production went up, the profits would be very terrifying.

There has also been a breakthrough in the application of steam engines in machining, and researchers are applying steam engines to the manufacture of munitions, thereby reducing the manufacturing cost of military equipment.

The effect of the large-scale application of the steam engine is to continue to monopolize the various commodity markets.

First of all, the commodity markets in the northern provinces began to be highly monopolized by state-owned capital, such as the monopoly of textiles, and the sales markets of cotton and wool products in the northern provinces were basically produced by state-owned enterprises. The textile market in the south continued to slump in the ninth year of the Apocalypse, and the market for silk and individual varieties of textiles was constantly encroached upon by state-owned textiles.

In the ninth year of the Apocalypse, the number of spindles in state-owned textile factories increased by 3 million again, the number of spindles driven by steam engines reached 4.5 million spindles, and the number of spindles driven by hydraulic machinery reached nearly 2 million. The scale of textile production in the north has increased exponentially.

It is not only textiles that are growing, but also raw materials. In the ninth year of the Apocalypse, the cotton sowing area in the cotton producing areas of the Western Regions quickly exceeded tens of millions of mu, and it is still increasing. At the same time, the scale of wool produced by Mongolian herdsmen in the Ming region is also growing, and under the integration of the commodity economy of Mobei and Southern Mongolia, sheep have become their main livestock.

And the number of sheep they raised is further increasing, which is an agreement between the Ming and the Mongols, and the Mongols want to buy weapons and equipment from the Ming Dynasty. Then show sincerity. Economic bundling with the Ming Dynasty.

The Mongols raised so many sheep. The market dependence on Daming is getting stronger and stronger.

In addition, in Australia and New Zealand, the livestock industry should really flourish, and the output of wool will continue to increase, which may be good news for the people in the south. This means that the South has more land to produce other cash crops and food, which can feed a larger population.

Of course, it has an incomparably huge impact on the textile industry in the south.

For the external textile market, the usual mode of plunder is to import cotton and then export textiles. Take advantage of ultra-high productivity. Earn more labor to produce raw materials.

There are some things that can be quickly manufactured through the improvement of production technology, that is, various industrial goods. However, for some raw materials, the production efficiency has been improved very slowly.

Therefore, those industries that are inefficient are left to the population of other countries through the mode of plunder. For example, cotton planting is an industry that requires a lot of labor. Historically, the United States used a large number of black slaves, mainly because of the development of plantation in the southern United States, and the United States was an important cotton producing area for Britain in the era when Britain dominated the world.

The Ming Dynasty is not British, and it is impossible to subcontract all cotton cultivation overseas. Because the Ming Dynasty is a big country. The demand for cotton is so great that it is impossible to obtain enough cotton in the short term by plundering external patterns. Therefore, Daming needs to develop its own cotton planting industry.

The place with the highest production efficiency of cotton planting in the Ming Dynasty is nothing more than the Yellow River Delta and the Western Regions, and the south also planted a large amount of cotton in this era, but the production efficiency is not so high, of course, in the case of aging water conservancy and irrigation facilities in the north, it is higher than the cotton yield in the Yellow River Delta, but soon this situation will change.

At the beginning of the ninth year of the Apocalypse, Zhu Youxiao introduced the cotton planting subsidy policy in the Yellow River Delta and the Western Regions and Australia, because the labor required for cotton production is relatively large and the production efficiency is relatively low, so in order to make the income of cotton farmers keep up with the development of the times, it is imperative to adopt a cotton production subsidy policy.

Of course, the subsidy was not much at the beginning, and only 1 corner per load of cotton was subsidized in the ninth year of the Apocalypse, but the system was determined, and with the development of the economy in the future, this subsidy will continue to rise.

At the same time, a research project was established to develop machinery for sowing and harvesting cotton.

Zhu Youxiao adopted the method of subsidy and development of production efficiency to ensure that Daming's cotton production could be self-sufficient and not subject to external constraints.

In the southern provinces, as well as in the South Seas, there is no subsidy for cotton farming. The southern region is not so suitable for the development of the cotton industry, although the gap in output is not too large, but the difference in cotton quality is relatively large. The cotton planting industry in the South Seas uses indigenous labor, and the labor cost of the indigenous people is relatively low, so naturally there is no need for subsidies.

In the case of satisfying its own needs, in terms of developing the external textile market, it is through the mode of importing cotton and exporting cotton cloth.

For example, North Korea, Japan, now North Korea's textile industry has been completely finished, low-cost textiles continue to pour into North Korea, North Korea's cotton is exported to Daming, in the Ming textile factory into cotton cloth and other commodities and then sold back to North Korea, these cotton after processing, immediately produced added value.

Don't look at the textile industry is a relatively low-level industry, but in this era of underdeveloped productive forces, the textile industry is a high-tech industry for some backward nations.

Japan is now also stepping into the footsteps of Korea, after the compromise of the Tokugawa shogunate, the trade between the Ming Dynasty and Japan has been unimpeded, and Japan's cotton will continue to be purchased by the Ming capital.

The situation is different in Indochina, where cotton production is shrinking rapidly, because grain production is more efficient than cotton production in Indochina. When the textile industry was occupied by foreign textiles, fewer and fewer people were engaged in cotton planting, and they all began to engage in the production of commercial grain, so as to exchange for textiles and other commodities through the export of commercial grain.

Because the population of the Indochina Peninsula is not so large, and the agricultural resources are very large, the situation of the people of the Indochina Peninsula countries is still not so bad.

However, the price of rice produced in Indochina is indeed very low.

Because the pricing power of grain is in the hands of Daming capital, only state-owned capital can do grain import and export business in the Indochina Peninsula, and this field is monopolized by state-owned capital. If a civilian-funded merchant ship transports commercial grain from the Indochina Peninsula back to Daming, it will be charged a higher import and export tax, and it will not be cost-effective when calculated.

The countries of the Indochina Peninsula have produced a large amount of grain, and the ships that transport it are owned by the Ming state-owned capital, and the state-owned capital of the Ming Dynasty wants to buy grain at whatever price it wants. So the grain, the population of the Indochina Peninsula can't be consumed, when the price is barely acceptable, who can it be sold to if it is not sold to the Ming state-owned capital?

In addition, the industry and commerce of the Ming Dynasty have been developed, and the monetary value is relatively large. Nowadays, in the northern market, a stone of rice costs 2 yuan, while in the Indochina Peninsula, the price of a stone of rice is less than 1 yuan. Daming state-owned capital does not even need to reduce prices, there are huge profits.

This was the era of the frenzied ocean trade.

Of course, there's also a huge piece of fat, and that's India. India had a population of about 150 million and more than 2 billion acres of arable land in this era, many of which have already been developed. This means that in order to meet the needs of its own textile industry and other fields, the scale of production of raw materials such as cotton is very huge.

This is also the reason why Britain was able to obtain a large amount of raw materials in India when they colonized the world.

However, Daming's own textile market, as well as the textile market in the Indochina Peninsula, has not been fully digested, and the overcapacity is not enough to expand to the Indian market, so it will have no idea about India for a while.

The problem of unemployment of workers in Jiangnan was also well solved in the ninth year of the Apocalypse, that is, a larger scale of recruitment and immigration activities was being carried out.

The development model in Nanyang and Australia is already on track, and the population in need is increasing. If you can't survive and immigrate to Nanyang and Australia, food and clothing are not a problem at all.

At the same time, with the development of northern industry, the demand for workers has further increased, and although the enclosure movement is unfolding, the speed of effect is continuous, and it is not directly possible to liberate all the people in the land. Moreover, continuous large-scale investment and construction have created a large number of jobs.

As long as you are willing to work, you will not starve to death.

Moreover, with the development of industry in the north, the income of workers has exceeded that of workers in the southern provinces, and now the young and strong labor force working on the construction sites in the north earns at least 5 yuan a month, while the income of workers in the south is less than 2 yuan a month.

The gap is so big, even though prices in the north have also begun to be higher than in the south, and paper money is still used. However, the Apocalypse Treasure Banknote is pegged to the silver dollar, which means that the money earned by the southern workers working in the north can be exchanged for silver dollars at the bank when they return to the south and brought to the south.

The number of people from the south who went to the north to work and emigrated overseas also increased greatly in the ninth year of the Apocalypse. As for those who were unemployed and unwilling to go to other places to earn a living, the imperial court could only ensure that these people would not starve to death through the Civil Affairs Bureau. The Civil Affairs Bureau has now begun to be deployed to the southern provinces, prefectures and counties, but anyone who does not have enough to eat can go to the Civil Affairs Bureau for help. (To be continued.) )