Flowers in full bloom

Chapter 756 The Third Investment Attraction Owner

The total production cost of these dozen sugar-pressing machines was only seventy or eighty taels. She had the nerve to ask me for three hundred taels for the fee. She was really too cruel.

After a lot of noise, Liang Xiangyi finally accepted a hundred taels of silver, but made an agreement with Hua Lei that when Changtong Prefecture produced sugar in the future, he would give her a portion so that she could sell it.

That was no problem, Hua Lei readily agreed to her request. However, in order to increase the tax revenue of Xichang Prefecture, Hua Lei started to use her own tricks to attract investment.

At first, Liang Xiangyi shook her head like a rattle. Her parents and husband's families all made fabrics. However, they were basically thin silk fabrics.

Although it is very suitable for the weather in Xichang, the silk fabric is really too expensive. It may cost more than ten taels to make a vest.

If a set of clothes is made, and embroidery is added, it will cost several dozen taels of silver. Therefore, even the wealthy gentry in many places who have enough money are reluctant to buy it.

Therefore, the main sales places for silk fabrics are Shangjing City and several wealthy prefectures in Jiangnan. Because the weather in Mobei is too cold, Liang Xiangyi once brought a batch there, but sold very little.

The coarse cloth fabric suggested by Hualei sold well in Mobei. In the past two years, the sales volume has been increasing, and Liang Xiangyi has also expanded the textile village in Mobei by half.

Xichang Prefecture was the poorest prefecture in the Great Sheng Dynasty, and Liang Xiangyi didn't even dare to hope to sell her silk fabrics here.

This time, he only brought a dozen rolls of newly produced silk fabrics to give to Hualei and the two children. When Liang Xiangyi found out.

When Jinnian and Jinshi returned to the capital a few months ago, they joked that they wanted to take back the fabrics they had given to the children.

After all, if a piece of newly produced silk fabric is sold in the capital city, it would cost thirty or forty taels of silver. It would be a pity to leave the fabric lying around since the child is not around.

Unfortunately, before she could finish her words, the fabric was snatched away by Hua Lei, who asked Qing Qi to send it to her own warehouse, leaving Liang Xiangyi at a loss whether to laugh or cry.

However, a few days later, Hua Lei brought Liang Xiangyi and the few pieces of fabric she gave her to the border market.

He randomly found a shady place, spread a piece of coarse cloth on the ground, put a dozen pieces of silk fabrics on it, and sat back waiting.

Within a quarter of an hour, several people came to ask about the price of these fabrics. After Hualei bargained for a while, each piece of cloth was finally bought by a passing caravan for 80 taels.

Looking at the banknote in Hua Lei's hand, Liang Xiangyi was stunned. He once again beat his chest and stamped his feet for his short-sightedness. He also felt embarrassed for his misunderstanding that Hua Lei was deceiving him and defrauding commercial taxes.

So, she immediately prepared to return to Shangjing City to deliver the fabrics. However, Hua Lei stopped her again and only asked her to write a letter back to ask Liang Xiangyi's men to deliver the fabrics, but left Liang Xiangyi in Xichang.

After living in the house behind the Xichang government office for five or six days, Liang Xiangyi was feeling restless when Hua Lei gave her a tent and a horse and asked her to follow her to Changhe Prefecture under Xichang Prefecture.

Changhe Prefecture is located in the north of Xichang Prefecture. It is full of undulating hills, but the slopes are generally not steep and a lot of the soil is sandy.

Last time, when Hualei came to Changhezhou to inspect the academy, he found a lot of Luobu Ma on the hillside here.

In the Great Sheng Dynasty, Loplum Hemp was called Zeqi. Hualei didn’t know if this name was correct, but it was exactly the same as the Loplum Hemp in her previous life.

So the flower buds are directly called Luobu Ma. Luobu Ma can not only be used for medicinal purposes, but can also be used to weave cloth and make clothes.

In the past, Luobu Ma was generally used for medicinal purposes. Its leaves could be used to make tea, which had the medicinal value of softening blood vessels, lowering blood pressure and clearing fat.

It is relatively rare to use it as fabric. However, in the Great Sheng Dynasty, this Luobu Ma was one of the raw materials used by local people to weave cloth and make clothes.

The fabric woven with ramie fiber has good air permeability, strong moisture absorption, softness, and antibacterial properties. In Xichang, it is very suitable to wear clothes made of this fabric, and it is inexpensive and of good quality.

Local people would collect the stems of Lop Nur in the autumn when Lop Nur is ripe and use them to weave cloth and make clothes, because the Lop Nur fiber is the most mature at this time.

Cut the ramie, remove the leaves, peel off the tendons and skin, and wash it clean, you can get the light green ramie fiber.

Next, the hemp needs to be degummed. Degumming can make the hemp fibers softer and thinner, making them easier to weave.

There are many ways to degumming. You can use running water, beat and wash continuously, or soak it in lime water of a certain concentration.

However, local people usually soak and boil hemp fibers in wood ash water, because this method produces the softest hemp fibers.

After the hemp fibers are degummed, they are combed and spun into yarn. The bundles of hemp fibers are untied and the pieces are split into threads using fingernails or special tools.

Then take a few strands of hemp, twist them into twine, and roll them into a cocoon-like ball, which can be stored. When there are enough, you can weave cloth.

However, before weaving, the linen thread needs to be starched. After brushing the linen thread with glutinous rice starch several times, it will become smoother.

After the starched hemp thread is dried in the sun, it can be used to weave cloth. However, few local people have decent looms in their homes.

In the whole village, only three or four households have looms, and they are all very simple, usually made of a few pieces of wood and bamboo.

If any villager wanted to weave cloth, he would go to the house of someone who had a loom, borrow it, and then give the other person half a pound of brown rice.

The linen woven by this loom is only about five inches wide. Moreover, because the loom is simple, the quality of the linen spun is also very poor, and the warp threads often break, resulting in holes in the linen from time to time.

It is extremely difficult to make a set of clothes. It may take half a year to complete. The efficiency is very low. Therefore, the local people can't spin much cloth in a year, and the utilization rate of Lop Neck Hemp is also very low.

When Hualei saw the apocynum, she thought of Liang Xiangyi. However, Liang Xiangyi's family used silk threads spit out by silkworms to weave cloth, so the loom should be different.

However, as a fabric merchant, Hualei felt that Liang Xiangyi should be able to get a loom for weaving linen. Originally, she wanted to write a letter to Liang Xiangyi.

However, Hualei was very angry because Li Chengliang used inferior products and violated regulations to build the academy. So she forgot to write to Liang Xiangyi.