On August 1 of the first year of Chongzhen, the people of the capital flocked to the avenue between Chongwenmen and Zuo'anmen, and they all went out to see the excitement. Today is the official operation day of the horse-drawn railway in Beijing, and everyone wants to see what the horse-drawn carriage running on the two iron rods looks like.

Although the drought in the region was severe this year, the people of felt much better than in previous years because of the construction work in and around the capital by the imperial court and the imperial court. Unlike previous years, most of these projects were based on an employment system rather than a compulsory conscription system.

This also allowed most of the people to have another way to support themselves, especially the people living in the capital, and it has become a new pursuit to work in the various workshops opened in the palace.

However, most of the new workshops in the palace are in the area of Zuo'anmen, which was originally a field and forest in the outer city, and there are basically no people except for a few small villages and barracks.

Although some dormitories were built at the same time, most of these workshops were female workers, who were responsible for household chores in addition to earning money. It is against common sense to keep them away from home and only go home once every 10 days.

As a result, temporary workshops such as Liuli factories are overcrowded, while there are very few workers in new workshops. In the beginning, the palace could also provide subsidies and threaten to dismiss female workers who did not obey the allocation, forcing some female workers to be diverted to a new workshop in Zuo'anmen.

However, with the promotion of new cotton textile machinery and technology, the noble and wealthy families living in the capital found that opening a cotton textile factory was really a profitable business. Especially when the emperor was staring at the land in the hands of the nobles, they had to shift the family's investment from buying land to another long-term business.

The cotton mill that adopts new machinery and technology does not have a huge capital investment, but it is very profitable. In particular, Hebei and Shandong were originally places where the cotton planting industry was relatively developed, and in the past, because the textile technology in the north was not good, the harvested cotton could only be transferred to the south for sale.

But now that the problem of cotton textile technology has been solved, and the new machinery used has greatly improved the production efficiency of the cotton textile industry, although the quality of the woven cloth is not as good as that of the southern Soviet and Song regions.

However, these cloths, known as Jingbu, also have two advantages: first, the price is lower than that of southern cloth; Second, the width is nearly one-third larger than that of southern cloth. Therefore, Jingbu is very popular with civilians and overseas merchants.

In addition to ordinary fabrics, there are also newly developed new items such as pillows, towels, handkerchiefs, masks, and socks. The wealthy families in the capital may not appreciate the cloth produced in the capital, but they are quite fond of these new objects.

The news that the cotton textile factory opened in the palace took only more than 3 months to recover its cost soon spread among the wealthy families in the capital.

When this news was confirmed, investing in the establishment of a cotton textile factory became a trend among wealthy families in Beijing. In just a few months, the number of textile mills in Beijing has increased by three, and the total number of spindles has grown to nearly 150,000.

The opening of these mills greatly promoted the development of the textile machinery factories under the Wensi Academy, but they encountered another problem, that is, it was difficult to recruit female textile workers, and the price of cotton continued to rise.

Before the invention of the ginning machine, separating cotton from cottonseed was a very labor-intensive task, which also made the scale of cotton cultivation in the north maintain a slow increase.

However, after the development of the ginning machine, the most labor-intensive link has been broken through, and the lint raw materials that can be provided to the textile industry are no longer a limitation, restricting the output of the cotton textile industry, but has become the scale of cotton planting and the yield per mu.

The continuous rise in cotton prices this year has made many landowners plan to replant their fields with cotton. But for wealthy families who are interested in investing in cotton textile mills, this is not an urgent need.

After all, they already had a large amount of land in their hands, and even if there was a grain field maintenance order issued by the imperial court, they could still find a way to avoid the past.

However, workers who were familiar with the new textile machinery and technology had to be trained by the textile factories opened in the palace until now.

The eunuch in charge of the cotton mill in charge of the palace soon discovered a problem: when the recruited female workers had been trained in their factories and were ready to be assigned to the new workshops, they often quit their jobs.

He sent personnel to investigate, and immediately knew the reason, and several newly opened cotton mills were digging into the corners of the cotton mills in the palace with high salaries.

The female workers who spent time and effort training in the cotton mills in the palace were only managed by these private cotton mills for a small amount of money.

This fact made the director very angry, it has always been the palace that takes advantage of others, when is it the turn of the palace to take advantage of the palace industry.

As soon as he heard the news, he wanted to trouble the three newly opened cotton mills, and wanted the government to force these cotton mills to close their doors and return their female workers.

However, he informed the two counties of Daxing and Wanping, and soon reported to him that there was no law in this dynasty to prohibit this kind of poaching, and the government could not do anything.

When the eunuch in charge heard the report from the two counties, he was stunned for a moment. Doing things for the palace, when is it time to talk about the law, these cotton mills are all the industries in the palace, that is, the private property of the Son of Heaven.

The owners behind these textile factories can't get along with the Son of Heaven's industry, and the local county officials actually say that they are not illegal, which is really a bit strange.

He then investigated the background of the three textile factories again, only to find that these three textile factories were really not something that he, the eunuch in charge of the small palace workshop, could shake.

Of these three textile factories, one was opened by Zhou Kui, the father of Empress Zhou, and the other was the industry of Tian Hongyu, the father of the Tian family, who had just been canonized as a concubine, and the last one was heard to have the background of the British government.

After inquiring about the background of these three textile factories, the anger of the steward eunuch suddenly disappeared. But he also found that even if he turned a blind eye to it, it was not a good thing.

These three are only used by the wealthy families in the capital to explore the way, and there are a group of noble and wealthy families behind them who are ready to follow suit, and it is said that they will open a workshop of 250,000 spindles within a year, and the textile machinery factory under the Wensi Institute has received orders in September next year.

The steward eunuch of the cotton textile workshop could only hand over this matter and let it be arranged by the officials. However, no one in the palace dared to anger the queen and the concubine, and they also felt that it was inappropriate to deal with the British princess alone, so in the end, this question was put in front of the emperor.

Chongzhen didn't mind much that these nobles and nobles went to open factories, but he couldn't laugh at them for digging their corners so blatantly.

In the end, after he discussed with Xu Xingsheng and other leaders and eunuchs, the palace issued several orders. First, all the workshops under the name of the palace adopt the contract system, and all workers who have received training must sign a 3-5 year employment contract.

The second is to carry out land construction and development in the area of the new workshop in Zuo'anmen, in addition to the previous industrial area, the construction of the family area attached to the factory has also begun, prompting some workers with families to move to live near the new workshop.

The third is to strengthen the transportation roads between the new workshop area and other areas in the inner city and the outer city, and expand the transportation mode of public carriages.

However, these new policies only alleviated the problem of the loss of workers in the palace's workshops, and did not solve the problem of recruiting workers for the newly opened cotton textile factories.

For those workers, the number of workshops belonging to the palace has surpassed those private workshops, and now that they have solved the most troublesome housing and travel problems, they have begun to return to the palace workshops.

The owners behind these private workshops obviously do not have this capital, and they are not willing to spend a lot of money like the palace to build a new town to build a workshop gathering area.

So through Empress Zhou and Concubine Tian Li, they made a tactful request to the emperor and directly allocated some workers to them.

Such a request was naturally rejected by Chongzhen, but he didn't want these relatives to launch the industry after these setbacks, and he didn't want the two concubines to complain about themselves.

So after thinking about it for a few days, Zhu Youzhen drew up a charter and asked people to convene the owners of the cotton textile factory in Beijing on behalf of the palace to discuss.

In fact, the charter proposed by Zhu Youzhen is very simple, that is, it is proposed to set up a special textile school, recruit qualified students from the primary schools now opened in the capital, conduct further study, and reserve cadre candidates for each textile workshop.

In addition, the Cotton Textile Association was established to prohibit unfair competition among the same trades, and to jointly determine the prices of raw materials and products, as well as the upper and lower limits of workers' basic wages.

In addition, Chongzhen also summoned some gentry representatives of the Beizhili Democratic Progressive Association, as well as Sun Zhiqi and other Hanlin scholars for discussions. Soon after, the Beizhili Democratic Progressive Association and some northern Shilin officials began to advocate the New Life Movement.

The so-called New Life Movement: It is a social education movement aimed at all the people by promoting the four practical basic living standards of food, clothing, housing, and transportation for the whole country, abandoning some pedantic social customs, and establishing a new social atmosphere of civilization, progress, and development.

The focus of this campaign is to break the superstitious concepts of the people at the bottom, change the custom of middle- and upper-class housewives who bind their feet and are not allowed to contact society, and advocate late marriage. And in ambiguous rhetoric, the ethical order of women as appendages of men is denied.

In addition, it encourages the separation of family life, depreciates the old tradition of living in a group, and all actions should be based on the laws of the imperial court, rather than the rules of the clan and the family.

The closer you get to the area, the more receptive the people are to the New Life Movement. The essence of this movement was to provide enough labor for the newly built workshops in the capital.

Whether it is the old family life or the family's bondage to women, it has begun to seriously hinder the process of recruiting workers in the new factories.

Even if the Beijing Workshop is the germ of the industrial revolution that appeared in advance under the care of Chongzhen, at this moment, the demand for independence has already begun to appear. The thirst for industrial raw materials, markets, workers, and capital, as well as the aggression against all the old relations of production that hindered its development, led to this new life movement under the impetus of Chongzhen.