Chapter 1373 - Trial Production
The boiler workers arrived that evening. By early the next morning, the chimney by the river was already billowing black smoke. Zhao Yingong didn't understand the technology, but he remained on site throughout the trial operation of the boiler.
This wasn't the first trial run. The Mechanical Division's people had already debugged the system to an operational state during their previous visit, but a month had passed since then. Whether it could start up successfully on the first try remained to be tested.
Fortunately, apart from the boiler itself, nothing in the system was particularly complicated—just pipelines and water pumps. Though firing up the boiler proved troublesome and required half a day of fiddling, the entire system eventually ran without problems.
"Let's begin trial production," Zhao Yingong said.
The first batch of trained female workers walked into the workshop timidly and took their seats at workstations. The machinery began to operate. During the entire trial run, only fifty machines were in use—the maximum number Li Yao'er could personally supervise.
These female workers were all refugees selected from Cihui Hall: unmarried, childless women between sixteen and twenty years old. Silk reeling was labor-intensive and demanded high concentration, making young women most suitable. During the Industrial Revolution in the old time and space, most silk reeling workers had been child laborers aged ten to their early teens, and their productivity was no worse than adults'. Based on considerations of protecting young children's health and preventing them from aging prematurely—a waste of human resources—the Planning Commission had set the minimum working age at sixteen.
Li Yao'er planned to concentrate her efforts on this initial batch. Once their skills matured, they would serve as core workers to train newcomers.
No one in the Council of Elders actually knew how to reel silk. Fortunately, the Jichang Long equipment was not high technology. The silk-reeling technique was no different from the traditional "pot-beating" method, so no special training was required in that regard. Li Yao'er mainly trained the workers in using the foot-pedal machine and the hot and cold water taps.
The pot-beating work was straightforward: cooking cocoons in boiling water, then locating the silk end within the cocoon body. The worker would hook the silk onto a wooden reel, press a small iron lever with her foot, and drive the axle of the reel to rotate, winding the silk into finished thread.
Traditional silk reeling was entirely a sideline handicraft of farming households: cooking cocoons over charcoal fire and reeling out the silk. After the raw silk was made, it was sold to silk guilds, which then twisted it into dry warp.
The production equipment and technology of Cihui Hall Filature far surpassed ordinary farmers', and the processing methods were more advanced than those of the silk guilds. Multiple steps that would normally require guilds to subcontract to various craftsmen were completed in a single facility.
On the first day of operation, some minor malfunctions occurred, but overall performance was acceptable. The workers had been trained beforehand and weren't unfamiliar with the machines. The problem was that overall coordination still fell short. Some support and auxiliary tasks weren't keeping up in time. The quality of the silk produced also fell below Li Yao'er's expectations.
But these were all consequences of initial unfamiliarity. Li Yao'er felt the problems weren't serious—more practice would naturally lead to proficiency. The urgent matter was establishing the management system, which was her weak point.
She shared this concern with Zhao Yingong.
"We have the Great Library, and a whole team of people working on management..." he reminded her.
The management system had been compiled by the Great Library on commission from the Planning Commission, covering all aspects of the entire enterprise's production and operations.
Except for a few naturalized citizen workers transferred from Lingao to maintain equipment, the workers at Cihui Hall were all indentured servants selected from refugees.
This wasn't because Zhao Yingong believed slave labor was more efficient. But under contemporary conditions, hiring urban poor or rural women for factory work was completely unrealistic. Few women left home to work to begin with, and unless they lived close enough to commute daily, families were even less willing to let them stay overnight elsewhere. Only indentured servants—individuals with absolutely no personal freedom—were manageable.
The main types of work at Cihui Hall Filature were: silk reeling, peeling cocoon skins, entering the bushel and tying water knots, distributing cocoons, and picking flowers and tightening threads. All positions except distributing cocoons were compensated by piece rate. Distributing cocoons involved no skill—only physical strength—so all women assigned to it were on the clumsy but sturdy side. They spent the day delivering cocoons to each silk-reeling position as needed.
At the end of each day, silk-reeling workers would remove their finished products and place them on the pot of the steam pipe, covering them carefully with large oilcloth. Then they could return to the refugee camp to rest. The factory's odd-job workers would collect the silk, place it in the baking room for another round of drying, then pick flowers and tighten threads. After twisting, the silk was packaged—very exquisitely. Zhao Yingong intended to position his raw silk as a premium product.
Besides the workers directly handling raw silk, over thirty additional personnel served as cocoon baking workers, foremen, silk twisting workers, patrol workers, odd-job workers, and machine maintenance workers. All these positions were paid monthly salaries. Regardless of type, all wages were paid in circulation notes. Since the vast majority of workers were indentured servants from the refugee camp, wages were extremely low—purely symbolic, in Zhao Yingong's view. The real compensation was three meals a day, with quality and quantity superior to what the refugee camp provided.
The key insight was that receiving payment—even at purely symbolic levels—was enough to stimulate work enthusiasm. Zhao Yingong planned to establish sales points within the refugee camp as well, selling food items so indentured workers could use their wages to buy extra provisions for themselves or their families. Moreover, by artificially differentiating worker grades, setting wage levels, and distributing bonuses, effective incentives could be created. This worked far better than simple slave labor.
The filature's working hours temporarily adopted a two-shift rotation system. However, Zhao Yingong and Li Yao'er planned to switch to three shifts once the workforce expanded. Human resources here were more abundant than in Lingao, and wage and welfare expenses were lower. There was no need to cling to a two-shift system. Furthermore, silk-reeling workstations exposed workers to boiling water and steam for long periods, and the labor intensity was high, causing rapid fatigue. In production involving boiling water and steam, fatigued workers were prone to accidents. Additionally, Hangzhou Station had originally planned to use this location as a training base for silk industry workers. Increasing shifts would facilitate training more workers and stockpiling personnel for future industrial expansion.
After a week of continuous operation, Li Yao'er evaluated the female workers' efficiency: skilled operators could reel about one hundred grams of silk per day, while those still learning produced eighty to ninety grams. This speed remained unsatisfactory. According to materials from the Great Library, skilled workers on this type of equipment should produce over one hundred fifty grams of raw silk daily, while even unskilled workers should manage one hundred grams.
Even so, the production efficiency was already astonishing. So much so that Zhao Yingong quickly realized a problem: if he couldn't rapidly revolutionize the habit of sericulture households reeling their own silk to sell as raw silk, his factory would eventually face a situation with no cocoons to process—able to operate only intermittently each year.
How had farmers transitioned from selling raw silk to selling cocoons in the late Qing and early Republic era? It was simply natural selection after filatures sprang up everywhere and handmade raw silk lost its market. Unfortunately, his filature remained limited in scale, and current circumstances didn't permit aggressive expansion. He was virtually surrounded by wolves, with everyone as his enemy.
"When will there ever be an Opium... no, a Raw Silk War?" Zhao Yingong reclined on the xiangfei couch and lit a cigar.
After the silkworm season ended, Jixian Village sank into a pall of gloom. This sorrow didn't merely shroud this one place—it extended to sericulture households throughout the region, reaching even the silk-producing areas of Jiaxing, Huzhou, and Suzhou beyond Hangzhou Prefecture. Upon hearing the news of collapsing cocoon and silk prices in Hangzhou, silk guilds everywhere simultaneously drove down purchase prices. Silk and cocoon prices plummeted throughout Jiangnan, letting the guilds profit handsomely. In contrast, countless sericulture households went bankrupt, unable to repay their usurious loans.
The villagers of Jixian Village had not yet reached bankruptcy—because Master Zhao was benevolent. Though every household in the village owed him debts at one percent monthly interest, they were temporarily not being pressed for repayment. This was far better than the fate of farmers in other villages, who were hounded for debt repayment the moment the silkworm season ended. Here, at least, families could set aside for now the question of how to repay or flee from debts and devote their energy to spring planting.
But the temporary reprieve didn't mean the debts had disappeared. The fact that the Wang Siniang household never mentioned the matter only made every family more uneasy.
In earlier years, as long as the weather cooperated, you had your own land, and no one in the family fell ill or got into trouble, by year's end—after all the various expenses—you could usually save a few coins, and paying off debts seemed possible. But recent years had brought nothing but unfavorable weather, and the taxes demanded by the yamen were heavy. Getting through the year safely was already extremely fortunate—where could one still talk about saving money to repay debts?
Shen Kaibao remarked several times while chatting at the village entrance: "Don't be fooled because Master Zhao isn't collecting debts right now. When he does collect, he'll be harsher than anyone. The villagers still keep going to the Wang Siniang household to borrow rice and money every two or three days. They're simply courting their own destruction."
"When the time comes, the land will be gone, the house will be gone, and the whole family will have to become servants for this Master Zhao!" Every time Old Man Shen made such pronouncements, he would spit viciously on the ground for emphasis.
But seeing clearly didn't mean one could escape because of it. His family needed to farm. They needed to eat. If they didn't borrow, where would money come from? Now even wanting to sell the mulberry orchard was impossible—it was already mortgaged to Master Cao. He knew the loans Master Zhao extended were sweet bait, but weren't the loans extended by other masters also bait? In the end, weren't they all eyeing his land? Who truly cared about the life or death of farming people?
He knew his family had already borrowed money and rice from the Wang Siniang household several times. He simply pretended not to know. His heart seemed to have hardened. Things had already come to this. If they really couldn't manage, they might as well sell the house and land and take the whole family to seek a livelihood near Songjiang. He'd heard they were building houses and repairing docks there recently, needing quite a few laborers. Daqing and Sanqing were both strong young men. Though he himself was old, he could still work. Perhaps selling labor could still earn a living.
(End of this chapter)