Chapter 1366 - Incubation
However, the villagers didn't understand this point. In their view, keeping one's own seeds was a matter of natural law. Very few farming households purchased silkworm eggs from outside.
At this time, another boat delivered "egg cloths" to Shen Da's house. As they were unloaded, everyone noticed the quantity was large. An ordinary household raised two or three sheets, five or ten at most. If the harvest was good, the silkworms from one sheet of eggs would require nearly ten dan of mulberry leaves to support until they "went up the mountain." For silkworm farmers with no or little mulberry land, this meant risking a great deal.
Although the size and shape of the "egg cloths" unloaded at Shen Da's house were completely different from what everyone used, just looking at the quantity, one knew it far exceeded what an average farmer would have—at least several dozen sheets.
This Master of Shen Da was truly lavish! How many mulberry leaves would it take to feed all these "babies"? While everyone was clicking their tongues, they heard Duoduo's mother say these cloths were shipped thousands of li from Guangdong, reportedly "Guangdong seeds," superior to both local Yuhang seeds and Huzhou seeds. This, everyone found hard to believe. Better than local Yuhang seeds, perhaps; but better than Huzhou seeds, known as number one under heaven? That was fantasy—who didn't know Huzhou raw silk was the finest in the world? The satins used in the palace were all woven from Huzhou silk.
Although Wang Siniang said that if anyone wanted to raise Guangdong seeds, they could take a few sheets on credit, repayable after the cocoon harvest just like the rice, most households kept their own seeds and naturally didn't accept this newfangled thing. Wang Siniang's Guangdong seeds found not a single taker. Hearing this, Shen Kaibao felt he had vented some spleen.
Because Duoduo's mother had many women in her family and didn't lack labor, she simply became a formal "busy-month" worker at Wang Siniang's house. She didn't dare haggle over wages; just the treatment of eating her fill every day and bringing cold rice home made many families envious. Daqing's wife was even more resentful, frequently picking quarrels with her father-in-law.
Duoduo's mother seemed very proud of this job. Every day after returning home, she habitually acted as Wang Siniang's mouthpiece, bragging about sericulture preparations in that household. Thus everyone knew the various tricks Shen Da's family was using. Like recently, not only whitewashing the silkworm rooms with lime but also sealing the doors and windows to burn sulfur for fumigation—supposedly called "disinfection."
This wasn't even the newest trick. The latest was that as soon as Wang Siniang's silkworm eggs arrived, they started incubation immediately, and incubation didn't use human body heat but entirely fire power.
In the process of raising silkworms, incubation work was particularly important. "Incubation" (Tsaiching) meant using artificial heating to hatch the eggs. In a natural environment, silkworm eggs could hatch by themselves after winter, but under natural conditions, temperature and humidity varied, and the eggs' sensitivity to temperature varied, leading to uneven hatching, weak constitutions, many sick silkworms, and low yield and poor quality cocoons. Therefore, China recognized very early the need for artificial heating to hatch silkworms uniformly.
Traditional sericulture relied entirely on manual incubation. Once the "Grain Rain" solar term passed, the "cloths" with saved seeds began to show a faint green—the sign that embryos were developing and about to hatch. At this time, incubation work had to begin.
Local manual incubation relied entirely on "warming." In the countryside, this was women's work: pasting the cloths against their flesh to warm them, relying on constant human body temperature for hatching.
Using fire power for incubation—that was truly unheard of. Shen Kaibao told Daqing and Sanqing privately: "Fire-forced silkworms—they aren't chickens or ducks. I've lived more than fifty years and never heard of it. Silkworm babies are such delicate things; baking them with fire—won't it roast the eggs dry alive?"
Even if not roasted dry, if hatchlings came out, in his years of experience, whenever the weather around Grain Rain was particularly dry with little rain, far fewer ants would hatch, and there would be massive amounts of "dry bud seeds." Of course, too damp wouldn't do either; the hatched silkworms would be bloated and weak, and cocoon quality would be poor.
Shen Kaibao once again passed judgment—he had said similar things when Shen Da's family borrowed to buy forward leaves—"Shen Da and his wife love to fuss; this time they'll fuss themselves into trouble again."
"Whatever he does is his business," Daqing didn't care about Shen Da's family. "But raising five sheets of seeds this time, the mulberry leaves from the family's eight fen of land probably won't be enough."
The piece of mulberry land mortgaged by Shen Da's family could produce less than ten dan of leaves. One sheet of seeds required about eleven or twelve dan; five sheets would need at least fifty or sixty dan. The shortage was too great, which meant buying from the leaf market when the time came.
Mulberry leaf consumption peaked after the third molt. At that time, leaf prices would skyrocket; a dan could sell for four or five qian of silver, averaging around three qian. At those prices, Shen Kaibao's family would have to spend twelve taels on mulberry leaves.
Twelve taels was a year's expenses for a middle-class urban family; for a family like Shen Kaibao's, it was an astronomical figure. But if the silkworm harvest was decent, one sheet could yield a dan of cocoons, reeling out over ten jin of silk. Five sheets meant fifty jin, earning thirty or forty taels in an average year. After taxes, loan principal and interest, and various expenses, they could net a dozen taels. That was several times the return of simply farming grain.
"Leaves must be bought..." Shen Kaibao said.
This was as good as saying nothing, because Daqing was asking where the money would come from. The few qian remaining in the house couldn't buy many leaves.
"If push comes to shove, we can only borrow from Master Cao." Shen Kaibao helplessly spoke the words he didn't want to say.
"Master Cao might not be willing—"
"Why speak such discouraging words?" Shen Kaibao finally lost his temper. "When the time comes we'll go beg; we're fellow villagers, surely he'll have some pity for us farmers..." Actually, he had little confidence Master Cao would lend this money. His land was already mortgaged. Though there would be proceeds after harvest, whether Master Cao was willing was hard to say—raising silkworms was short, but like farming, a natural disaster could mean total loss, which wasn't rare.
Daqing said nothing more, but his face showed disapproval.
Shen Kaibao's family passed day after day in such doubt about the future. Fortunately, spring was the busy agricultural season; everyone was rushed off their feet and had no time to think much. As Grain Rain passed, the silkworm eggs in every household began turning green, and the women of every family began incubation.
Every year at this time, household closed doors to guests. Neighbors, relatives, and friends were all barred; even the fiendish bailiffs from the county yamen disappeared. At night, married women absolutely did not share beds with their husbands; not only that, but throughout the silkworm-rearing period, husbands and wives slept in separate rooms—it was said silkworms loved purity most, and conjugal acts would cause offense.
Duoduo's mother was still working the busy month at Wang Siniang's. Wang Siniang also wanted to secure her loyalty, so she let her move into the house to help, promising one tael of silver for the month, with the condition that she couldn't go home before the silkworms mounted the spinning frames. Duoduo's mother agreed readily: she had two unmarried sisters-in-law at home, and her eldest daughter was ten and could help out. The household had many hands. They wouldn't miss her.
Wang Siniang's silkworm rearing truly opened her eyes: she had helped her family raise silkworms since childhood, nearly thirty years now, and had never seen incubation done like this!
The incubation room was large and bright, with walls and ceiling whitewashed. During incubation, light requirements were high; light and dark had to be orderly—neither constant light nor constant darkness, otherwise hatching would be uneven. So the windows were large to allow sufficient light. At night, grass curtains were used to prevent disturbance from natural moonlight or starlight. Against the wall was an "earth dragon" (flue heating system)—she only learned what this was after asking Wang Siniang. During incubation, someone burned a fire outside at fixed times every day to gradually increase room temperature.
Though there was an earth dragon, the room wasn't dry at all: shallow copper water basins sat on the dragon, and wet cloths hung along the walls. One of Duoduo's mother's main odd jobs was refilling the copper basins and re-soaking the dried cloths.
Hanging on the wall was a glass gadget thicker and longer than a chopstick, marked with many horizontal lines and symbols every few lines. Strange red thread inside the glass tube would lengthen and shorten. Besides this, another glass instrument embedded in a wooden board hung on the wall, containing a ball of cotton-like stuff, also with a self-moving thread pointing up and down at symbols she didn't understand.
In Wang Siniang's house, a maid came to look at these things every one or two shichen, writing something in a booklet, then instructing Duoduo's mother to add water, soak cloths, or add firewood. Sometimes the reverse: remove water basins, withdraw fire. Endlessly tiresome.
Every morning, this maid would also come to the incubation room, carefully take a few eggs, place them on paper, and carry them to a small room in the backyard. An hour later, Duoduo's mother would have to busy herself with the routine again according to her instructions. In the afternoon, she had to open windows for ventilation as ordered.
Such incubation practices were very mysterious. Duoduo's mother never knew what path they were following. In fact, the Jixian Village Sericulture Cooperative used the "progressive temperature method" for incubation.
This maid was actually Lizheng, a student of Hangzhou Station whom Li Yao'er had personally trained. Every morning at eight she took egg samples, removed the shells, and used a microscope from Lingao to observe embryonic development, adjusting daily temperature and humidity accordingly.
Compared to farmers letting eggs turn green naturally and then using body heat, this incubation method was not only faster but resulted in uniform hatching, high hatching rates, and hatchlings with strong constitutions. Thus, while the whole village's eggs had not yet turned green, Wang Siniang's eggs had already been moved from the incubation room to the rearing room, awaiting final hatching.
(End of Chapter)