Chapter 83: Silk

However, the Shen family’s bankruptcy was not due to a bad silk market, but to silkworm disease.

“Last year, when we were raising silkworms, they unfortunately caught a disease, and we had a total crop failure,” the man said with a sorrowful face. “That’s why we lost all our capital. We ask for the master to take us in.”

Most silkworm diseases are caused by viruses. The environment for raising silkworms is enclosed, and the density of the silkworms is very high. If cleaning and disinfection are not done properly, various silkworm diseases can easily break out. Traditional sericulture had its own methods for dealing with silkworm diseases, but there were still deficiencies in the concept of disinfection at that time, so it was common for outbreaks of silkworm diseases to cause reduced harvests or even total failures.

Once a large-scale disease broke out, the silkworm farmers faced the risk of losing everything.

It seemed that raising silkworms was also a “high-risk, high-return” venture for farmers, not as simple as he had thought. Zhao Yigong’s interest was piqued. Since he was going to get into this business, it was of course better to find out as much as possible beforehand.

He then asked the man to describe the specific process of raising silkworms, but in the countryside, raising silkworms was a woman’s specialty. Girls began to learn how to raise silkworms from the age of twelve or thirteen. From “protecting the eggs” in the twelfth lunar month, to hatching the eggs in the spring (“spreading the birds”), all the way through the silkworms’ “three molts,” “leaving the fire,” “mounting the hills,” and finally baking the cocoons and reeling the silk, it was all handled by women. Although he knew the general process, he was afraid he wouldn’t explain it clearly or might even say something wrong, so he asked his wife to speak.

“Your servant greets the master,” the woman said. She was pretty and spoke the Hangzhou dialect with a mix of northern and southern accents—not very different from modern Hangzhou dialect. Zhao Yigong found it pleasant to listen to and immediately smiled. “Rise. What is your name?”

“Country women don’t have names. My maiden name is Wang, and I’m the fourth child. Everyone used to call me Wang Siniang. The master can call your servant whatever you wish.” The woman was very articulate. In Jiangnan, peasant women not only had to work in the fields and raise silkworms but also occasionally went to the market to sell goods, so they were quite worldly-wise.

Wang Siniang first described the process of raising silkworms. From hatching to forming cocoons, it took about twenty-eight to forty days. The silkworms had to be fed at regular times, and mulberry leaves had to be added promptly. Even in the middle of the night, one had to get up to feed them, without a moment’s delay. The silkworm droppings and leftover mulberry leaf fragments had to be cleaned constantly, otherwise, it was easy for diseases to spread. Raising silkworms was also very demanding in terms of temperature. It had to be kept warm, but not too hot, and there could be no drafts. Therefore, the places where silkworms were raised always had their doors and windows tightly shut. If the temperature dropped slightly, a fire had to be lit to keep it warm. And when the silkworms were “mounting the hills,” a brazier had to be placed under the silkworm trays. This would speed up the silkworms’ spinning and ensure the spun silk was as dry as possible, which was beneficial for improving the quality of the cocoons. But with frequent fires, one had to be very careful with candles, as fires caused by raising silkworms were a common occurrence at that time.

Zhao Yigong was very familiar with the allusion to the “silkworm room”—it seemed this method of raising silkworms had already matured by the Qin and Han dynasties.

Throughout March and April, families raising silkworms were basically inactive. There were very few pedestrians in the villages, and neighbors and relatives stopped visiting each other. Red paper was pasted on the doors of every household. Even the government would not come to the countryside during this period.

Most of the harvested cocoons were reeled into silk by the silkworm farmers’ families and sold, but some sold the dry cocoons directly to “cocoon hongs.” However, these were usually families with insufficient manpower or for some other special reason.

“Why do you make the raw silk yourselves?” Zhao Yigong asked.

“There are too many ‘tricks’ when selling cocoons to the cocoon hongs. The country folk always lose out,” Wang Siniang said. The cocoon hongs had to have official licenses, so they were highly monopolistic. Moreover, the trade had a special “guild.” When the new cocoons came onto the market, the guild members would discuss and decide on which day to start weighing and which day to stop. The purchase price was also agreed upon, and no one was allowed to raise the price themselves. The negotiated price was always very low each year.

Low prices aside, there were also various “tricks” when buying the cocoons, either complaining that the cocoons were “wet” or deliberately under-weighing them. The worst was that to further suppress the price, the cocoon hongs would suddenly close their warehouses for a few days at the peak of the cocoon season, stopping the purchase of cocoons.

“Why stop buying?”

Wang Siniang said, “Once the cocoons are harvested, they can’t wait. If you don’t reel the silk or sell them, they just sit there. After a few days, the pupae inside will bite through the cocoon, and they’ll be worthless. The country folk have no choice but to sell them at a low price.”

So that’s how it is! Zhao Yigong thought. This was essentially artificially creating a “difficulty in selling cocoons” to make the purchase price plummet. Such tricks were also common in the old world.

Zhao Yigong asked again, “After the cocoon hongs buy the cocoons, how do they sell them?”

“They reel the silk themselves and sell it to the silk hongs. In and around Hangzhou, there are many families who don’t raise silkworms themselves but reel silk for others.” After the cocoon hongs got the cocoons, they would outsource the reeling to them, paying a processing fee per liang.

As long as conditions allowed, silkworm-raising families would try their best to reel their own silk and sell the raw silk. This was more profitable. The reeling work was done by the women of the family—it was an important sideline industry in the countryside. The Shen family was one where Wang Siniang and her daughter reeled silk by hand.

Shen’s wife gestured to roughly explain how to reel silk. When reeling silk, a large pot of water was boiled. Ten to twenty cocoons were put in at a time, and a bamboo stick was used to stir the scalding cocoons. When the water boiled, a bamboo stick was used to skim the surface of the water, and the silk ends would naturally float up. The silk ends were picked up by hand, passed through the eye of a bamboo needle, wound around a guide pulley, and then hooked onto a moving silk rod, which fed it onto a foot-powered reeling machine called a “daguangche.” By operating the machine and pedaling the silk wheel at the same time, one could continuously draw out the raw silk.

Reeling silk was very hard work. Once the silkworms started spinning their cocoons, it was a race against time. If the silk was not reeled quickly, the pupae inside would metamorphose and bite through the cocoon, rendering it useless. Therefore, when reeling silk, the whole family had to pitch in, with the men also helping out, working day and night. A skilled laborer could reel about thirty liang of silk a day. If it was the particularly fine “baotou silk,” the daily output was only about twenty liang.

Zhao Yigong had not read any professional books on sericulture, but he knew from common sense that this kind of handmade product had low efficiency and poor quality. In the late Qing Dynasty of the old world, native silk was completely defeated in the international market by Japanese raw silk, which was produced using modern methods of sericulture and reeling.

“Where does the best local silk come from?” Zhao Yigong asked.

“Replying to the master, locally, of course, the silk from Renhe County is good,” Wang Siniang said cautiously. “But in terms of Zhejiang, the best is Huzhou silk. The ‘Seven-li silk’ from Nanxun in Huzhou Prefecture is famously good. Guian, Deqing, Chongde, and Tongxiang counties all produce good silk. After that comes the local raw silk from Renhe.”

“The silk produced here in Renhe County is mostly ‘fat silk,’ while Huzhou and Jiaxing produce ‘fine silk,’” Wang Siniang explained. “For weaving brocades with patterns, the warp threads must be ‘fine silk.’ This is because the jacquard looms used for weaving brocades have certain requirements for the strength of the warp threads, and the raw silk from those two places is strong and not easy to break. Other raw silks are basically unusable on jacquard looms.”

“Even the Imperial Weaving Manufactory and the Weaving and Dyeing Bureaus here in Hangzhou have to specially purchase raw silk from Huzhou and Jiaxing to weave the brocades for imperial use. The local raw silk from Renhe and Qiantang is not used much.”

Zhao Yigong listened very carefully. It was clear that the sericulture industry, like the sugar industry in Leizhou, was currently in a state of small-scale production. Manual production and small-scale, high-interest loans were indeed common forms of industry and commerce in this era. There were too many places to intervene and make a profit. Seven or eight ideas were swirling in his mind at the same time, and it seemed he could get a foothold in every stage… He shook his head to clear his thoughts, sorted them out a bit, and then returned to the interrupted topic.

“Where do you sell the silk you reel?”

“There are special silk hongs that buy silk. As soon as the raw silk is produced, the ‘silk guests’ who buy it come to the market towns,” Wang Siniang said. The price of raw silk fluctuated with the market, but the price of ordinary raw silk was always above thirty or forty taels of silver per dan throughout the year. Since the Wanli era, with the large-scale export of raw silk and silk fabrics, the price of raw silk had been constantly rising. Although there were some sluggish years, operating a silk business was still a profitable industry in most years.

“Oh,” Zhao Yigong nodded. “Tell me more about the silk hongs. Do they also need official licenses and have guilds?”

“I’ve heard it’s the same. But I usually only deal with the ‘silk guests’ who come to the countryside, so I don’t know the specific details.”

Wang Siniang said that some of the “silk guests” from the silk hongs also engaged in moneylending. Silkworm farmers could borrow from them and then repay the debt with raw silk after the new silk was produced. This seemed simple, but in reality, the raw silk was valued very low when repaying the debt, and the farmers suffered a great loss.

In terms of exploiting the silkworm farmers, the “silk guests” were no more merciful or trustworthy than the cocoon hongs. However, once the cocoons were reeled into new silk, there was also a time limit. If the raw silk was stored for too long, it would easily turn yellow. If the silk guests deliberately delayed, they could certainly drive down the price for the farmers, but the sales time for the raw silk they received would also be shortened. Therefore, deliberately delaying to drive down the price was rare. The farmers could get some benefit.

“Where do the silk hongs sell the raw silk in the end?”

“Most of it is sold to various weaving workshops, and some is sold to merchants from other places.”

“Are there many brocades woven locally?”

“Replying to the master, how could there not be?” Wang Siniang said with a smile. “Putting aside everything else, just the East and West Mansions in this city, plus the two weaving and dyeing bureaus, have an annual quota of several thousand bolts of robe fabric. And that’s not counting other items. Altogether, the tribute of silk fabrics alone amounts to tens of thousands of bolts a year.”

The names “East and West Mansions” caught his attention. Cai Shi, seeing his confusion, quickly explained, “That’s the Imperial Weaving Manufactory set up by the court in Hangzhou. It’s just east of Puji Bridge. The brocades woven there are all for imperial use.” The two dyeing and weaving bureaus were also large, government-run workshops with a large scale.

Zhao Yigong asked, “Do you know how to weave silk?”

“I don’t, your servant. Weaving brocades is a specialized craft, passed down from father to son or from master to apprentice. It’s not something a country person like me can do.”

“You may all leave now. In a few days, I will have a use for you,” Zhao Yigong said, and then turned to Sun Wangcai. “Enroll all these children in the charity school.”