Chapter 162: Trial Production

The boiler worker arrived that night, and the next morning, black smoke rose from the chimney by the river. Zhao Yigong didn’t understand the technology, but he watched the trial run of the boiler from the sidelines.

This was not the first trial run. The people from the mechanical department had already come to debug it to a runnable state, but a month had passed since then. Whether it could start up successfully this time remained to be seen.

Fortunately, apart from the boiler, the rest of the equipment was not complicated, just pipes and pumps. Except for some trouble when starting the boiler, which took half a day to sort out, the entire system ran without any problems.

“Let’s start the trial production,” Zhao Yigong said.

The first batch of trained female workers timidly walked into the workshop and sat at their workstations. The workshop began to operate. During the entire trial run, only fifty machines were running. This was also the maximum number of people Li Yo’er could personally supervise.

These female workers were all refugees selected from the Cihui Hall, unmarried and childless women between the ages of sixteen and twenty. Silk reeling was a very labor-intensive job that required a high degree of concentration, making it most suitable for young girls. During the Industrial Revolution in the old timeline, most silk reelers were child laborers between the ages of ten and their teens, and their labor productivity was not inferior to that of adults. The Planning Commission, with the intention of protecting the health of children and adolescents and preventing them from aging prematurely and wasting manpower, had set the working age for the silk factory at sixteen.

She planned to focus on this batch of workers first, and after their skills matured, she would use them as a core workforce to train new workers.

No one in the Fanhaijin knew how to reel silk. Fortunately, the equipment of Jichanglong was not some high-tech marvel. In terms of reeling technique, it was no different from the traditional method of basin reeling, so no special training was needed in this aspect. Li Yo’er mainly trained them to use the foot-pedal machines and the hot and cold water taps.

The basin work was not complicated. It still involved boiling the cocoons in hot water. After the female worker found the silk end from the cocoon, she would attach it to the wooden reeling machine. By pedaling a small iron rod with her feet, she would turn the axis of the machine, making it rotate and winding the silk onto it to form the finished product.

In traditional silk reeling, it was entirely a manual sideline for farmers. They would boil the cocoons over a charcoal fire and then reel the silk. After the raw silk was produced, it would be sold to the silk firms, which would then process it into dry skeins.

The production equipment and process of the Cihui Hall Silk Reeling Factory were not only much better than those of ordinary farmers, but their processing methods were also more advanced than those of the silk firms. The multiple processing steps that originally had to be outsourced to many artisans by the silk firms were now completed in a one-stop process within the silk reeling factory.

Although there were some minor glitches on the first day of operation, the overall operation was still barely satisfactory. The workers had been trained in advance and were not unfamiliar with using the machines, but their overall coordination was still lacking. Some supporting and auxiliary work could not keep up in time. The quality of the silk produced was also not as good as Li Yo’er had imagined.

However, these were all due to the initial lack of skill. Li Yo’er felt that it was not a big problem; they would naturally become proficient after more practice. The top priority now was to establish a management system, which was her weak point.

She shared this concern with Zhao Yigong.

“We have the Great Library, and a whole bunch of people who are good at management…”

The management system was compiled by the Great Library at the request of the Planning Commission, covering all aspects of the enterprise’s production and operation.

The workers in the Cihui Hall, except for a few naturalized workers transferred from Lingao to maintain the equipment, were all indentured slaves selected from the refugees in the Cihui Hall.

This was not because Zhao Yigong felt that slave labor was more useful, but under the conditions of the time, it was completely unrealistic to hire urban poor or rural female workers. It was rare for women to leave home to work. Unless it was very close to home and they could commute daily, they would not be at ease staying overnight outside. It was much easier to use indentured slaves who had no personal freedom at all.

The main types of work in the Cihui Hall Silk Reeling Factory were: silk reeling, cocoon peeling, water drawing and knotting, cocoon sorting, and thread picking. These were all paid on a piece-rate basis, except for cocoon sorting, which was paid a monthly salary. Since cocoon sorting required no skill, only physical strength, all the workers in this category were clumsy but strong women. Their job was to deliver cocoons to the reeling workstations of each female worker as needed throughout the day.

At the end of each day, the female silk reelers would take off the finished products they had reeled that day, place them on the steam pipe’s pot, and cover them with a large oilcloth before returning to the refugee camp to rest. The factory’s miscellaneous workers would then collect the silk, put it in the silk baking room to be baked again, and then pick the threads and tie them. After that, the silk would be twisted and then packaged. The packaging was very exquisite. Zhao Yigong decided to sell his raw silk as a high-end product.

In addition to these workers who had direct contact with the raw silk, there were also cocoon bakers, foremen, silk twisters, patrols, miscellaneous workers, and machine maintenance workers, totaling more than a dozen people. All of these people were paid a monthly salary. Regardless of the type of worker, all wages were paid in scrip. Since the vast majority of the workers were indentured slaves from the refugee camp, their wages were extremely low, and in Zhao Yigong’s view, only symbolic. However, they were provided with three meals a day, and the quality and quantity were better than in the refugee camp. The key was that receiving a salary, even if it was so low as to be purely symbolic, was enough to stimulate the workers’ enthusiasm. Zhao Yigong planned to also set up sales points in the refugee camp to sell some extra food, so that the indentured slave workers could use their wages to buy more food for themselves or their families to improve their lives. And by artificially dividing the workers into different levels, setting different wages, and distributing extra bonuses, it could serve as an effective stimulus, which was much better than simple slave labor.

The working hours of the silk reeling factory were temporarily on a two-shift system, but Zhao Yigong and Li Yo’er planned to switch to a three-shift system after the number of workers increased. The human resources here were much more abundant than in Lingao, and the wages and benefits were lower, so there was no need to use a two-shift system. Moreover, the silk reeling workstations faced hot water and steam for a long time, and the labor intensity was high, so people were easily fatigued. The production process involved hot water and steam, and fatigue in production could easily lead to industrial accidents. Furthermore, the Hangzhou station had originally planned to use this place as a training base for silk industry workers, and increasing the number of shifts would be conducive to training more workers and reserving workers for future industrial expansion.

After a week of continuous operation, Li Yo’er evaluated the work efficiency of the female workers: skilled operators could reel about one hundred grams of silk per day, while unskilled ones could reel eighty or ninety grams. This speed was not yet satisfactory. According to the information provided by the Great Library, a skilled female worker could produce more than one hundred and fifty grams of raw silk per day on this type of production equipment, and even an unskilled one could produce one hundred grams.

However, even so, the production efficiency was still amazing. So much so that Zhao Yigong soon discovered that if he could not quickly put an end to the sericulturists’ habit of reeling their own silk and selling traditional silk, his factory would face the predicament of having no cocoons to reel in the future and would only be able to operate intermittently each year.

How did they change from selling raw silk to selling cocoons in the late Qing and early Republic of China? It was nothing more than the natural choice after silk reeling factories sprang up everywhere and traditional silk had no market. Unfortunately, the scale of his own silk reeling factory was limited, and the current situation did not allow him to go all out. He was surrounded by tigers and wolves, and everyone was an enemy.

“When will we have the Opium… no, the Raw Silk War?” Zhao Yigong lit a cigar on his concubine couch.

After the silkworm season ended, a gloomy cloud hung over Jixian Village. This gloom not only enveloped this place but also extended to all the local sericulturists, and its influence even reached the sericulture areas outside Hangzhou, such as Jiaxing, Huzhou, and Suzhou. After hearing the news of the sharp drop in cocoon and silk prices in Hangzhou, the various silk firms also colluded to lower their purchase prices. The prices of silk and cocoons throughout Jiangnan plummeted.

This allowed the silk firms to make a fortune. In contrast, a large number of sericulturists went bankrupt because they could not repay their high-interest loans.

The villagers of Jixian Village had not yet gone bankrupt. Thanks to Master Zhao’s kindness, although every household owed him a debt with a monthly interest of one percent, they had not yet been pressed for repayment. They were much better off than the people in other villages who were forced to repay their debts after the silkworm season. Every household was also able to temporarily not consider how to repay their debts or flee from them and could focus on spring farming.

But temporarily not considering it did not mean the debt was gone. The fact that Wang Siniang’s family never mentioned it made every household feel uneasy.

In the early years, as long as the weather was favorable, they had their own land, and their families were healthy and free from disasters, they could always save some money after all the expenses of a year, and there was hope for repaying their debts. But in recent years, the farming has not been favorable, and the government’s taxes have been heavy. It was a great fortune to be able to get through a year peacefully, so how could they talk about saving money to repay debts!

Shen Kaibao had said several times during idle chats at the village entrance that although Master Zhao was not asking for repayment now, when he did, he would definitely be more ruthless than anyone else. The villagers were still going to Wang Siniang’s house every few days to borrow rice and money, which was simply courting death.

“When the time comes, the land will be gone, the house will be gone, and the whole family will have to become slaves to this Master Zhao!” Every time Old Father Shen said this, he would spit fiercely on the ground to add emphasis to his tone.

But seeing clearly did not mean he could avoid it. His whole family had to farm and eat. If they didn’t borrow, where would the money come from? Now, even if he wanted to sell the mulberry grove to get some money, he couldn’t. It had already been mortgaged to Master Cao. He knew that the debt from Master Zhao was a bait, but was the debt from other masters not? In the end, they were all after his family’s land. Who cared about the life and death of a farmer!

He knew that his family had already borrowed money and rice from Wang Siniang’s house several times, but he just pretended not to know. His heart seemed to have hardened. It was already like this. If they really couldn’t get by, they might as well sell the house and land and the whole family would go to Songjiang to find a way out. He had heard that they were building houses and repairing docks there recently and needed a lot of laborers. Daqing and Sanqing were both young men, and although he was old, he could still work. Maybe they could make a living by selling their labor.