The next day, Han Qian accompanied Zhao Ting’er with gifts back to her family home. In the afternoon, he brought his core followers aboard ship to travel upstream, arriving at Linjiang County by nightfall.
With Han Qian relinquishing the Provincial Governor position, naturally he no longer concurrently served as Linjiang County Magistrate. He ultimately recommended Xi Xunqiao to succeed him as Linjiang County Magistrate.
On one hand, Xi Xunqiao was far more open-minded than the other chieftains and leaders of the four major clans, having also established great merit in the process of persuading Xi Ying to surrender and recruiting tribal braves. On the other hand, using Xi Xunqiao helped ease local conflicts and antagonistic sentiments, allowing native-immigrant household registration integration and other matters to advance more deeply.
The most crucial point of native-immigrant household registration integration was reforming customs. Regardless of immigrant registration or native households, all were required to observe the various rites established by the Great Chu Code.
Therefore, Xiang Jianlong and Yang Zaili had not attended the banquet when Han Qian took Zhao Ting’er as a concubine. But when Han Qian stayed overnight in Linjiang County and Xi Xunqiao held a welcoming banquet, they came bearing generous gifts to meet him.
Who deserved primary credit for vassal reduction might still be debated in the imperial court, but for Xiang Jianlong and Yang Zaili, the last trace of restlessness in their hearts had long since vanished into smoke and dissipated completely. Now they were more worried that Han Qian’s original promises to their three families might change.
If that truly happened, they really wouldn’t dare voice any complaints. Who would have thought that the powerful Ma family could so easily vanish into smoke?
Compared to the Ma family, what did they amount to?
And the so-called divine power of invincible brave tribal soldiers had already shattered at battles like Laoya Hollow and Yuanling City.
Looking at it now, even if they couldn’t become土皇帝 (local emperors ruling over mountains and waters), becoming wealthy rural gentry wasn’t a bad choice either.
The Linjiang County town with over seven hundred bu of depth had been completed. Though it couldn’t be called particularly magnificent and couldn’t compare to great cities in the Jianghuai region, situated on the north bank of the Yuan River and east bank of the Sha River, it added a touch of worldly prosperity to this formerly desolate place.
Who could have imagined that two years ago, this was still a wasteland marsh where water birds roosted?
The nearly forty-li-long embankment on the Yuan River’s north bank had now been completed. It was deliberately built three to four li back as a distant levee, leaving such an expansive river beach outside the embankment. This was intended to accommodate more upstream water during spring and summer flooding seasons, reducing impact on the river embankment.
To prevent wind-blown trees from shaking and disturbing the embankment, tall trees were forbidden on top. Only low shrubs were planted.
Together with the Wuliu Stream comprehensive water conservancy project, this could basically ensure the bay area with thirty to forty li of depth south of Longya Mountain would no longer suffer flood disasters.
Besides over twelve to thirteen thousand slaves and displaced people from the Feng family, over these two years, over two thousand households—thirteen to fourteen thousand people—of stronghold slaves, stronghold soldiers, and their families from the four major clans had also been successively relocated and resettled in this area.
After the reforms of native-immigrant household registration integration and family division property distribution, Linjiang County ultimately registered over six thousand households with over twenty-seven thousand people, barely meeting middle-tier county standards. By comparison, the newly established Zhongfang County was still much worse.
Linjiang County’s current main problems, besides insufficient farmland per capita, included not enough irrigation channels built yet, with irrigated fields not reaching the proportion Han Qian expected. They needed to continue strengthening intensive cultivation of riverside land to increase grain, mulberry, and hemp yields.
In the mountain ranges, besides surveying mineral veins and mining iron and coal, they also widely promoted planting tea, medicinal herbs, mulberry, and hemp.
Beyond this, regarding the Xi, Xiang, and Yang families who still controlled substantial resources, Han Qian no longer continued suppressing them. Besides agreeing to let them lead trade with prefectures and counties upstream on the Yuan River, he also agreed to let them contribute money and grain, allowing them and other major households to participate in wharf and warehouse construction, and in the development of industries like weaving and dyeing, leather processing, clothing manufacture, brewing, oil pressing, papermaking, shipbuilding, ship repair, lacquer production, tea processing, medicine production, bag making, and flour milling.
Besides commercial trade in agricultural products and specialty products from various regions, Han Qian also hoped Linjiang County could ultimately produce substantial primary industrial goods to participate in commercial trade with counties upstream and downstream on the Yuan River.
Only this way could Linjiang County accommodate more outside population and create and retain more wealth on limited land.
Compared to Qianyang, which had served as the prefectural capital for centuries with a relatively good handicraft industry foundation that had been catalyzed over these years to develop more substantial artisan industries, the reason Linjiang County could develop various crafts was mainly because among the four to five thousand slaves who migrated west with the Feng family were large numbers of manor, warehouse, and various shop managers and stewards, plus a large group of handicraft artisans.
After the Feng family’s enormous wealth accumulated over a century was completely confiscated, these people truly represented another form of wealth the Feng family had accumulated over a hundred years.
Unfortunately, besides Feng Liao having realized this point, the rest of the Feng family, including Feng Yi, remained somewhat confused.
These people couldn’t endure too much hardship, couldn’t be considered qualified recruitment sources, and had difficulty adapting to arduous and tedious agricultural production. But Han Qian wouldn’t forcibly require them to be attached to farmland, nor did he forcibly require them to be incorporated into the artisan camps at Longya City or Wufeng Mountain.
After all, besides mining coal and iron, large-scale refined iron smelting, and large iron castings, Longya City mainly focused on casting excellent weapons and armor. Wufeng Mountain primarily had the shipyard, weaving workshop, and plantations.
At the end of last year, seeing that Xuzhou’s grain production showed no shortage, and having restored trade with upstream Yuan River prefectures and counties through the three families, Han Qian established money shops to loan them money and grain, encouraging and supporting Feng family slaves to set up various handicraft workshops in Linjiang City and several villages at transportation hubs, even opening warehouses and shops, giving them opportunities to resume their old trades.
When the Wuling Army downsized, the provincial garrison retained only three thousand troops. Longya City and Wufeng Mountain’s workshops retained fewer than fifteen hundred workers. Some of the downsized and discharged soldiers returned home to farm, while a considerable portion remained in Qianyang, Linjiang, and other places to work.
Meeting with Xi Xunqiao, Xiang Jianlong, and Yang Zaili, Han Qian hoped each family’s fleets could continuously transport more outside population to Qianyang, Linjiang, Zhongfang, and other cities. He also hoped the Xiang and Yang families would participate in operating the Longya money shop to expand the money shop’s capital.
Although the Longya money shop’s loan interest was very low, barely profitable, besides Han Qian’s personal requests, Yang Zaili and Xiang Jianlong also saw that the various industries the Longya money shop supported in Qianyang, Zhongfang, and Linjiang counties provided increasingly abundant products at increasingly excellent quality and low prices. This would directly promote their trade scale with upstream and downstream Yuan River prefectures and counties growing larger, so they were quite willing to participate.
This time Han Qian also wanted to raise funds to formally establish primary schools in Linjiang, Zhongfang, and Qianyang to teach basic literacy and mathematics. Besides teaching elementary education to children within the three counties, male and female workers in workshops and factories, even provincial garrison soldiers, could all enroll to achieve literacy.
Considering that the three locations’ supplementary student enrollment might exceed one thousand people, besides the six thousand strings of cash needed to establish schools, subsequently hiring teachers and running night schools would require three to four thousand strings annually. The three locations temporarily couldn’t provide this money and grain. Han Qian would contribute part, but also needed donations from each family.
Additionally, this time finding Xi Xunqiao, Han Qian also hoped Linjiang County could continue expanding cotton planting area after next spring.
Cotton cultivation existed in the Western Regions and Lingnan areas during the Qin and Han periods, but processes like cotton ginning and cotton spinning never developed. Processing cotton was extremely labor and resource intensive, making woven cotton cloth extremely expensive.
In this era, cotton cloth was even more precious and rare than silk, with very few wearers. This also meant that over nearly a thousand years, cotton planting area in the Central Plains region was extremely limited, with people’s clothing primarily silk and hemp.
After winter arrived, besides fur coats, the padded jackets worn by wealthy families used silk floss as filling.
Initially for weaving ship awnings and canvas, Han Qian had the weaving workshop collect existing fiber materials for comparison.
Medium-to-long staple cotton, besides being expensive with sparse planting area, was far superior to hemp fiber in every aspect.
However, at that time the Xuzhou region’s cotton seed processing still remained at the backward stage of manually removing seeds to obtain cotton. One person removing seeds all day couldn’t obtain even one jin of cotton, not to mention the extremely backward subsequent processes of fluffing, spinning thread, weaving and dyeing.
No wonder cotton cultivation couldn’t be promoted, and no wonder cotton cloth was more expensive and rare than silk.
When Han Qian first entered Xuzhou with his father, cotton planting area around Qianyang City was only about one thousand-plus acres.
Also after establishing the weaving workshop, through over two years of continuous experimental improvements, manual cotton removal was changed to roller cotton ginning seed removal. The fluffing process changed from small bamboo bow hand-plucked vibration to large sandalwood bow and wooden frame cotton beating. Spinning changed from traditional single-spindle hand-cranked spinning wheels processing hemp to five-spindle foot-pedal spinning wheels, step by step greatly reducing cotton thread spinning costs to comparable with hemp thread.
However, comparing cotton cloth’s texture and comfort level to hemp cloth was truly like heaven and earth, clouds and soil.
Previously for wealthy families, cotton cloth’s texture was only slightly better than gauze, damask, and silk, but the price was double that of gauze, damask, and silk. Not to mention ordinary families—even the powerful and noble wouldn’t accept it.
However, Qianyang cloth produced by Xuzhou’s shipping guild had fine texture. Over these two years, prices had gradually dropped nearly sixty percent. Naturally, sales to various regions were in short supply.
On one hand, cotton cloth was in short supply. On the other hand, cotton ginning and thread spinning efficiency greatly increased. The thousand-plus acres of cotton initially planted in Qianyang, with one year’s production requiring only ten to twenty female workers, could turn seventy to eighty thousand jin of cotton seeds into thirty to forty thousand jin of cotton thread and three to four thousand bolts of cotton cloth.
Local raw materials weren’t enough. Early on, Han Qian mainly directly purchased cotton seeds from other areas at high prices for concentrated processing. The problem was that prefectures and counties along both Yuan River banks combined only had twenty to thirty thousand acres of cotton planting area.
Although after Han Qian thoroughly controlled the Xuzhou situation, the Wufeng Mountain plantation alone currently had over ten thousand acres of cotton fields, and Linjiang County and Zhongfang County last year expanded Xuzhou’s total cotton planting area over a hundredfold compared to three years ago, it still might not satisfy the weaving workshop’s demands. Moreover, Zhongfang and Linjiang counties still needed to build dedicated weaving workshops.
Subsequently, weaving, spinning, dyeing, and printing technology would inevitably spread step by step to the common people. Then demand for cotton seeds and raw cotton would become even higher.
In an agricultural society, to develop a substantial primary industrial system, only three types of commodities were most suitable: besides salt and iron, there was cloth.
Currently, Wufeng Mountain weaving workshop expected to produce fifty thousand bolts of cotton cloth this year worth ninety thousand strings, with net profit reaching forty thousand strings after deducting cotton seed purchases and labor costs—this was still on the basis of cotton cloth prices plummeting sixty percent.
By comparison, over the past year Longya City’s iron smelting works produced one million jin of crude iron and one hundred thousand jin of refined iron worth less than forty thousand strings.
More importantly, as cotton cloth prices further declined, the market with no other competitors entering yet was far more expansive than imagined.
Xuzhou this year could probably produce fifty thousand bolts of cotton cloth. With cotton seed harvest greatly increasing after this autumn, next year cotton cloth production could probably increase to one hundred fifty to sixty thousand bolts. Even annual production of four to five hundred thousand bolts might not completely cover Hunan’s eight prefectures’ market.
Han Qian’s current priority was continuing to expand Xuzhou’s cotton planting area, successively converting mulberry and hemp fields in various counties to cotton cultivation, and continuously guiding nearby prefectures and counties to expand cotton planting area.
Besides discussing Linjiang County’s development with Xi Xunqiao and others, with Zhao Qi, Zhou Chu, and Kong Xirong as leaders, three hundred family troops had also assembled in Linjiang County these days, completing initial training.
However, from selecting over two hundred people at Huaxi Stronghold, ultimately only over one hundred forty were retained. After all, not everyone had sufficiently strong will and physique to endure extremely arduous training to become elite troops.
About seventy-plus people were eliminated and would be mercilessly sent back to Huaxi Stronghold.
For these people, this was losing their only upward channel to escape their fate. They might be branded with the slave mark for life. Disappointed, dejected, even tearfully crying—this also secretly motivated those who remained, determined to persevere through the subsequent arduous training no matter what.
However, the very next day, just as Han Qian was preparing to bring three hundred newly organized retainers to Longya City, a letter sent by fast horse from Tanzhou through Shaozhou disrupted his plans:
Marquis Changxiang, on behalf of Shu ruler Wang Jian, had submitted a memorial requesting that Princess Qingyang be married to the Third Prince Yang Yuanpu to maintain friendly relations between the two states. Emperor Tianyou specifically ordered Han Qian and Guo Rong as principal and deputy wedding envoys to go to Shu territory to escort Princess Qingyang to Tanzhou to marry the Third Prince!