December is the coldest time in winter.

But when yin and yang embrace each other, the bitterness will come after the sweetness, and the coldest season will inevitably indicate that spring is coming.

After two consecutive heavy snowfalls, the sky cleared, and the entire Guanzhong Plain was full of silver snakes, and the wax figures were scattered in silver.

Since the Yanmen Pass was exposed in the court, the atmosphere in Xianyang has been a bit dull recently. From princes, princes, generals, and ordinary people, they basically do not discuss this topic easily. Even if it is discussed, they just secretly talk and guess the final result of this matter with three or five friends at home.

Chen Xu has not been concerned about this matter recently. His purpose is not to do anything to Wang Li, and it is probably not going to happen in the end. As long as the Wang family does not rebel, the emperor will not touch a single finger. Therefore, what Chen Xu is looking forward to Wang Ben's return and taking the opportunity to deal with the Yanmen Pass incident, he will raise the matter of reforming the army to promote his last stable reform to Qin.

As long as the military reform is completed and the country of Daqin is now safe, we can consider starting a large-scale contact with Central and Western Asian countries, and strive to explore the situation in Europe and Africa such as Egypt, Rome, etc. in two or three years. In this way, the Qin Dynasty's tentacles will extend to the prosperous area of ​​the earth's civilization, and the Eastern and Western civilizations will begin to truly exchange and exchange. In this way, China will have the greatest initiative in the future development of the earth's civilization. Tens of thousands of elite troops and tens of thousands of servants of the vassal states, and iron hooves will rush all the way, grabbing money, land, and women, and trampling on everything... Well, there are muskets and artillery grenades that are really unwilling to accept. In short, the Qin Dynasty is the most awesome empire on the earth, no one... unless the West also travels through several takeaway guys at the same time.

However, this idea only flashed through Chen Xu's mind. If such a thing really happened, it would happen that a few people would come together to get the computer out as soon as possible and sit in the pharaoh's magnificent palace and have a good handful of chicken.

Although the atmosphere in Xianyang has been a little dull recently, for Chen Xu, there are two things that make him happy.

The first is that the loom has made a major breakthrough in the project three years, and has been successfully overcome by a group of craftsmen who are proficient in machinery and carpenters.

At present, Daqin weaving cloth is based on family units. From the staining of hemp to spinning to weaving cloth, it is done by women from all households by hand. Not to mention the staining of hemp, it is planted in spring and harvested in autumn, and there is no need to be deliberately managed. Sprinkle seeds on the open space in front of and behind the houses, and ramie can be harvested in autumn, and then soaked in water, scraped in the skin, washed and dried to make it into soft hemp silk. You can spin the thread in the slack season, and you can start weaving after the twine is enough.

Although the history of human weaving has been for thousands of years, the technology has developed very slowly. In the current Qin Dynasty, spindle spinning and waist-woven fabrics are still common. The gold cloth law stipulates that a piece of cloth is eight feet long and two feet five inches wide. To weave such a piece of cloth, it takes at least ten days for a skilled woman to weave textile all day. The rural women also have to participate in heavy farmland labor, as well as housework such as growing vegetables, cooking, washing and other housework. A housewife can only take time to stay up late and get up early and go to bed late. It takes one or two months to complete a piece of cloth intermittently.

Moreover, when most families don’t have enough food, cloth is basically used as a circulation material equivalent to grain, because farmers can make money too few ways, and except for grain, only cloth is a relatively stable income. Therefore, it is common for a family to not make new clothes for several years in rural and even in cities. A set of clothes patches can be worn for seven or eight or even ten years, and children’s clothes are even more cost-effective. After the eldest wears the second, the second wears the third wears it, and even parents don’t wear it as a family heirloom. When a set of clothes is worn in a strip, it is really hard to put them away. They are ragged and look like beggars. This is what Chen Xu saw at the beginning after traveling through time, which really makes him unable to believe his eyes.

After waking up in a broken thatched hut with a big hole with a panoramic skylight, he grabbed the torn cloth strip on his body and his mind was blank for a long time. At first, he thought it was a movie prop. It was not until Xing'er, who was so thin that he was almost unsteady, ran in and called his brother that he slowly realized that he might have traveled through time, because it was impossible for him to find a malnourished girl like Xing'er in the future. If the crew could find it, they would inevitably be invited by the police to have tea. By the way, they would talk about how the crew abused children's extras.

It is not easy for poor families to weave cloth, and it is also not easy for noble families to weave cloth. In order to meet the huge supply of clothes in the harem, Qin Shihuang had thousands of people in the garment office of Shaofu, and he used a simple loom. However, this loom was just an improved version of the waist machine. In addition to using a wooden frame to free the fixing method from a person's waist, the warp threads, weft threads, lifting, shuttles, and weft knives have not been greatly improved. He still relies on the weft knives to lift the weft shuttle one by one. It takes about ten days for a professional weft knives to complete a whole piece of cloth.

A piece of cloth is eight feet long and two feet wide, and needs to be made of densely woven threads with a diameter of less than half a millimeter. To weave a piece of cloth that meets the regulations, it is necessary to repeat the same action thousands of times. This fixed and heavy labor day after day will cause serious strain on the body, but all women have to persist for many years. Under this heavy labor volume, the weaver girl in the palace lives more hard and tiring than ordinary women in the folk.

If it is silk, the yield will be lower. A woman specializes in raising silkworms and weaving silk, three or five pieces a year are the biggest result. In order to increase the output, she has to relax the warp and weft. In this way, the quality of the woven silk has decreased a lot, and the price of the woven silk will naturally decrease a lot.

It is precisely because of the difficulty of weaving and low yield that cloth has become a hard currency for human communication since its birth. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the cloth is the most sincere item. If it is silk, it is not just sincerity, but bloody friendship. Generally, only kings and top nobles are willing to take it out.

For example, the emperor rewarded Chen Xu, but he never gave a linen. It was all silk. Large carts were sent to the Qinghe Marquis' Mansion. There were dozens of pieces of silk, worth tens of thousands of yuan, which was definitely a heavy reward. All the civil and military officials in the court had only envy and jealousy. Because the tax on mulberry silk silk was under the jurisdiction of the Shaofu, almost most of the silk flowed into the palace in the end. The palaces of kings, lords and ministers also had their own channels for obtaining it, but the people did not allow civilians to wear it. The wealthy merchants could not do it, so they could only wear linen.

With the continuous development of the Daqin economy, grain revenues have continued to increase year after year. After the implementation of monetary reform, although cloth has lost its identity as currency, the value of hard currency has not yet decreased. Moreover, with the increasing life of civilians, the demand for cloth is getting bigger and bigger. The people of Daqin not only have their complexion and their clothes are being replaced in large quantities, but the production of cloth is a serious bottleneck and cannot provide more quantities. Moreover, with the increase in grain production and the firing of cement, the demand for sacks is also increasing. Therefore, the emergence of looms will greatly alleviate the demand for cloth among the people.

With looms, hemp planting will soon become a bulk agricultural project second only to grain production, which will bring another means of increasing income for farmers.

In a wooden workshop outside the south gate of Xianyang City, a complex woodworking machine that is two meters long and ten meters tall is placed in the closed factory shed.

Several layers of spools are inserted densely on top. Each of these spools has a yarn through several wire ports and then bypasses through two reverse rollers to enter the warp area. There are several dense holes in the warp area that can move up and down. Behind the coil is a shuttle board...

Looking at this complex machine, Chen Xu's scalp was numb.

At this time, dozens of people had gathered in the factory shed, all of whom were craftsmen and folk craftsmen involved in the development of this loom. Everyone was excited and their faces turned red. The machine could be placed here today. These people have been working hard for three years and are waiting for the acceptance of Qinghehou. Once they are recognized by Qinghehou, this will be an extremely important milestone in improving human life.

"Mr. Marquis, this is our tenth edition of the loom. After repeated verification, this machine has completely met your previous requirements for us!" A gray-bearded craftsman from the Academy of Sciences followed Chen Xu and said carefully.

"The tenth edition?!" Chen Xu was stunned.

"Yes, this is the tenth improved model. Because what was made before always fails to meet your requirements, especially the sluice and jacquard boards you mentioned, it is too difficult to implement, so we can only continue to study and improve them one by one. We consulted many colleagues from the Academy of Sciences and folk craftsmen, and finally superimposed these verification techniques. Finally, we assembled the machine three days ago. This loom can enter 800 warp threads at most at one time, and the width of the weaving cloth reaches three feet. Through two consecutive days of verification, three to five feet can be weaved in one hour, and a weaving girl can weave at least two pieces of cloth a day. If you are skilled in operating, you can also weave three or four pieces of cloth a day..."

"Mr. Marquis, the most difficult thing is to cooperate with this pedal and pedal. In the past, ordinary looms had only one pedal, and it was not such a dense hole pedal. It required other people to cooperate. However, after using the pedal that the pedal said, the weaving lady only needed to step on the pedal, and the pedal would move the staggered warp threads up and down, which made the work of the loom much more convenient and saved a labor. We set up a total of four pedals to weave weaving patterns with different intervals. If we continue to improve, we can add more pedals and pedals, which can achieve the effect of the jacquard machine mentioned by Marquis. When weaving cloth, weaving more patterns and fabrics with different thicknesses..."

"The most amazing thing is this, Marquis, the flying shuttle... the flying shuttle is simply a miracle. The flying shuttle is the biggest reason to improve the efficiency of weaving..."
Chapter completed!