Chapter 2936: Tianjin Wei (15)

They walked deeper into the works. Once taken off the carding machines, the cotton laps were fed into another row of machines.

Seeing how intently Li Luoyou watched, Han Zhaoxian took it upon himself to explain.

"Sir, observe: what comes down off the carding machine is still only a thin veil of cotton. The fibers, though combed apart, are not yet aligned, and their thickness is uneven — it cannot be spun as it is. It must pass through several more stages, being drawn straight and even little by little, before it can go to the fine spinning frames."

Li Luoyou nodded and followed his pointing hand.

The first stage was doubling. Several laps were fed side by side into a single machine, deep in which turned several pairs of rollers, each at a different speed — slow at the back, quick at the front, ever faster the farther forward. Between these pairs of rollers the layers of cotton were gradually drawn out and drawn thin, the fibers brought into line until they lay parallel, one beside another, like hair passed again and again through a fine-toothed comb. What came out the far end of the machine was no longer a fluffy web but lengths of white silk-ribbon sliver, dropping neatly into large round earthenware crocks and coiling round upon itself.

"This is called drawing," said Han Zhaoxian. "Several slivers are joined into one, then drawn out long — pass after pass, and the sliver grows ever more even, the fibers ever straighter. The books call it 'drafting' — that is, using several pairs of rollers turning at different speeds to pull the fibers straight and true. The principle is simple to state and no easy thing to do. The ratios between the rollers' speeds will not tolerate a hair's deviation: a fraction fast and the sliver snaps, a fraction slow and it will not straighten. In the old days this pulling was done by hand, and no pair of hands could ever match the evenness of these machines."

Li Luoyou noticed that several more machines of the same kind stood in ranks down the workshop. Workers came and went bearing heavy sliver crocks, ferrying sliver from one machine to the next and back again, several times over. With each pass the sliver came back finer, more even, more compact.

"How many passes must the drawing make?" Li Luoyou asked.

"For ordinarily carded cotton, three," Han Zhaoxian replied. "Fewer, and the sliver stays uneven and the yarn spins up lumpy in the bargain; more, and you squander labor and time to no profit. Three is exactly right — they say the southerners tried several hundred times before they settled on that number."

Even after drawing, the sliver could not yet be spun. The next stage turned sliver into roving.

Li Luoyou watched the sliver fed into yet another machine, where it passed through finer roller drafting than before and came out a good deal thinner; then, through a revolving flyer, it was given the least twirl of twist — just enough for the fibers to hold together and not fall apart. What emerged was no longer loose, soft sliver but faintly twisted roving, winding coil upon coil onto long wooden tubes, like so many stout white cords ranked in neat order on racks.

"This is called roving," said Han Zhaoxian, lifting a tube of it from the rack and handing it over. "Feel it, sir — it already has the look of yarn, but it is not yet fine enough, nor twisted enough. It must go on to the fine spinning frame, there to be drafted, twisted, and wound all in one pass; what comes off that is true yarn, fine enough for the loom."

Li Luoyou took the tube of roving and weighed it in his palm. It was a good deal thicker than finished thread, soft to the pinch and somewhat springy, the grain of the fibers just visible beneath the surface. He tugged at it experimentally; it did not break, but showed a certain toughness.

"The roving stage sounds simple, but it is in truth the hardest," Han Zhaoxian held forth. "The degree of the draft and the measure of the twist bear directly on the fineness and the strength of the finished yarn. As things stand it rests wholly on experience — the eye must be sharp, the hand quick, the heart careful. One small slip and the whole batch is ruined, and a good many jin of cotton go down the drain. The masters the Grand Secretary engaged from the south say that in time there will be process manuals, and testing instruments beside; the workers will simply follow the readings and work by the book. Such a method is not only easy to teach — it sets you free of the craftsmen's stranglehold. Ingenious in the extreme."

At the deepest end of the workshop stood row upon row of machines larger and more precise still, their frames taller than any before them, their iron castings more numerous. Along their tops flew ranks of swiftly spinning flyers, keening with a shrill hum; at their middles sat three pairs of precision rollers, their surfaces bright as mirrors; below were the bobbins, yarn flying onto them, coil over coil, building up plump little cylinders.

From the flank of each machine a thick iron shaft reached out through the wall to the gearbox at its base, where gears meshed and turned with a muffled, rhythmic clatter, driving rollers and flyers along the entire row. This was the power delivered by iron shafting from the waterwheel — and here it finished its work.

Beside every machine stood a woman worker, her eyes fixed on the whirling spindles. As spun yarn built ever thicker on a spindle, the worker would deftly bring the machine to a stop, lift off the bobbin, set a fresh empty one in its place, and set it going again.

Their movements were quick and exact, without a dram of surplus. Eyes on the machine, hands flying among the spindles, they joined a broken end in the space of a breath and untangled a snarled thread in the blink of an eye. Such concentration and skill belonged not to village women who but lately had stood teetering in beggar lines, but to hands grown old in the factory.

"All women?" Li Luoyou was mildly taken aback — women workers were plentiful enough among the Australians, but he had not expected Grand Secretary Xu's mill to employ them too. "How many months have they been learning?"

"Three months and they can do the work. This batch have been at it half a year and more. When they first came, every one of them was sallow and starved, skin over bone, too weak to walk without swaying. A few months in the mill — full bellies, wages in hand — and the life came back into them," Han Zhaoxian answered at his side. "The Grand Secretary brought masters up from the south to teach them, and the instructors say it is no great art: all it asks is power of concentration. A woman's hand is nimble and her temper quiet; for this work she is actually better than a man."

Han Zhaoxian went on: "Of the hands the mill uses today, apart from the Nameless Whites, most are women. A woman's hands are clever; at work like this they are nimbler than a man's. Besides, a woman's wages come cheaper, and she is easier to keep in order. The Grand Secretary calls it 'each performing to their strength' — the men go off to farm, fire bricks, and cut ditches, the women come to spin and weave, and nobody sits idle."

At the word "women," Li Luoyou's gaze swept once around the workshop. So it was: apart from the Nameless Whites doing the coarse work of breaking bales and hauling, at the finer trades — carding, drawing, roving, spinning — the machines were mostly run by young women, with a few older matrons among them, every one dressed in the same blue cotton jacket, hair bound up in cloth kerchiefs, hands quick, eyes intent.

"These are the water-powered fine spinning frames — down south they call them 'mule spinners,'" Han Zhaoxian said, indicating the machines. "The roving is fed in above, passes through three pairs of rollers turning at different speeds, ever faster, and is drawn down from roving to the fineness of yarn; then the flyer twists it — and the twist must land exactly right, for too much makes the yarn hard and too little leaves it slack — and at the last it is wound onto the bobbin."

So saying, he bent and took from a machine a bobbin of freshly spun yarn and presented it to Li Luoyou. "Look, venerable sir — this is yarn that can be woven."

Li Luoyou took the bobbin and examined it close up. The yarn was exceedingly fine — several times finer than the roving — snow-white and perfectly even in grain, wound on its wooden bobbin neat and tight. He drew a fingernail across its surface: smooth to the touch, with scarcely a burr to be felt.

"Good yarn," he praised, and meant it.

"Better than homespun — by no telling how many times," Han Zhaoxian nodded. "Homespun is all spun on the hand wheel, uneven in thickness and never without splices and lumps. What these machines spin is even throughout and far stronger withal. The Nanyang broadcloth on the market is woven from yarn just like this — cloth flat and dense, better than the best twill that comes out of Songjiang."

Li Luoyou returned the bobbin, and his gaze rested a good long while on that rank of spinning frames.

From the coarse labor of bale-breaking and ginning at the start, through the fine work of carding and drawing, to this last delicate spinning — having watched the whole sequence through, the layman sees the spectacle, but the insider sees the method. No weaver himself, he yet understood the ingenuity and craft embodied in it all. This subversive productive power was, in some measure, a thing to make a man's scalp prickle — and it set his heart churning with restlessness all the same.

He only brought the cotton yarn up to the tip of his nose and sniffed at it: a faint scent of vegetable oil mingled with the rust of the machines — nothing you would call fragrant, yet somehow it comforted him.

"How much yarn does the mill turn out in a day, as things stand?" he asked.

"The mill has set up twelve water-powered fine spinning frames, a hundred spindles to a frame — twelve hundred spindles in all. If the wheel turns full and the hands are all present, two shifts, day and night, can bring off four or five hundred jin of yarn a day. As it is, the mill has been running but a short while and the hands are not yet practiced, so it comes to three hundred jin or so. The Grand Secretary says that in the latter half of the year, with a few more machines installed and the hands well drilled, five or six hundred jin a day will pose no difficulty," Han Zhaoxian said. "And if the mill could run the year round at full turning, it would want some four hundred thousand jin of seed cotton a year — which by reckoning is about the yield of two thousand mu of cotton fields."

Li Luoyou nodded. Judging by the land here, the mill could not in a year consume even half of what these fields produced. He thought of the finest Songjiang twill he had seen in the capital not long before — a bolt of it would fetch a full tael of silver. And this Gegu yarn was far, far better than what went into Songjiang cloth; if it could be woven into cloth like that, the profit would be no small sum indeed.

"And the weaving?" he asked again. "Spinning only, and no weaving?"

Han Zhaoxian raised a hand toward the stretch of open ground east of the mill buildings. "Sir, look — our weaving mill is going up there. The foundations are already laid, brick and timber stacked in good order, and the building work has begun; by reckon it should be finished in the latter half of the year, and then the looms can go in, one after another, and be put to use. From that day we shall run the whole flow ourselves — cotton into the mill, spinning, weaving, cloth out the gate — with no need to borrow another's hands at any point. And once it is built, the plant can take on another thousand or two thousand hands besides, providing livelihood for the colonist farm households and hastening the output of cloth in one stroke."

Here his tone turned, and something helpless crept into Han Zhaoxian's voice. "Only, there are difficulties just now: the looms — the weaving machinery itself — have not yet arrived. The waterwheels we use at present, convenient as they are, are a true bother to manage: one must dig dedicated channels and set up sluices, and these past few years Heaven has withheld its cooperation — drought and flood come and go without pattern, the water supply is ever uncertain, and the wheels often cannot give their full strength, which sets back the works."

Then he remembered the rumors and added, "Not long ago I heard that in the south they have that kind of coal-burning 'fire engine' — it leans upon no river and will run any time, any place, most convenient indeed. Only, such an engine devours coal at a fearful rate; year in, year out, that too becomes no small expense."

(End of chapter)