Chapter 2204: Renzong Arc 13: The Empire's Cotton

About sixty years ago, during the reign of Emperor Taizong, a prolonged north-south merchant war erupted in the markets of the Han Empire, with the already substantial cotton industry as its battlefield.

It was truly the first organized, large-scale commercial war in the empire's markets, with wide reach and far-reaching impact. Although it was initially started by some major cotton cloth merchants, as time went on, the many stakeholders in the cotton industry were gradually drawn into the conflict.

In the prolonged struggle, the entire cotton market fell into chaos, from cotton merchants to cotton workers to cotton farmers—the entire industry was affected, and it threatened to impact people's livelihoods, with signs of further spread.

At the same time, commercial struggles in the Great Han Empire had always been bloody and brutal, for the open and covert conflicts between the northern and southern merchant factions resulted in numerous casualties, and large-scale armed brawls were endless.

Eventually, the local authorities could no longer contain it, and the imperial court took over. Under Emperor Taizong's stern reprimands and supervision, the court struck with heavy force, even going so far as to deploy garrison troops, before order was restored and the situation was brought back onto the right track.

On the surface, that great north-south cotton cloth war was caused by northern cotton merchants who, feeling threatened by the rise of the southern cotton industry, resorted to unscrupulous means to suppress the development of the southern cotton market—especially to stop some southern cotton merchants from their "reckless" actions, daring to openly sell southern cloth in the north, snatching food from their rice bowls.

Instigated by some major northern cotton merchants, a great purge was carried out against the "southern cotton" forces that had come north, and from the very start it was total destruction, with extremely ruthless methods.

Whether they were open employees, secretly backed proxies, or numerous partners, all came under attack—some killed openly, some assassinated in secret. Warehouses and cargo ships were attacked, cotton cloth products were plundered and burned.

But the southern cotton merchants were no saints either. When the northerners drew their knives, they fought back fiercely. If the north was rotten, then they would go east and southeast to make trouble for the northern merchants there. And so, a truly cruel war began.

To the ordinary observer, it was like looking at flowers through fog—even those nearby could only see where fires had broken out, where shipping accidents had occurred, and where armed brawls had taken place. Indeed, no matter how big the incidents grew or how many people died, in the handling of many local governments, it was merely treated as ordinary "civilian brawls." Once the corpses were disposed of, all was peaceful again.

Clearly, merchants alone could not possibly stir up a commercial war of this scale. They lacked both the power and the audacity. Behind it all, there were clearly higher-ranking nobles and magnates locking horns.

At the same time, one cannot rule out the "north-south struggle" that had run through several generations of the empire's history. Behind the northern cotton merchants' strikes against their southern counterparts was none other than the northern nobility who held the empire's levers of power suppressing the southern nobles and bureaucrats.

It was precisely for this reason that in the final settlement, not only were the cotton merchants from both north and south who had directly participated severely punished—their families broken and fortunes confiscated under the court's heavy hand of law—but in the imperial bureaucracy, every official found to have been involved in inaction or misconduct was demoted.

Of course, those who willingly served as dogs and horses and directly participated faced far more than mere demotion or dismissal. Even among the upper nobility, quite a few received warnings and punishment—salary forfeiture, dismissal from office, execution, and even stripping of noble titles.

Although Taizong was known for benevolence and virtue, it was only because he valued rules; once those lines were crossed, his methods were anything but gentle. This was one of the few instances of "harsh laws and severe punishments" during the entire Yongxi reign, and precisely because such an example was set, other restless nobles and erratic merchants were awakened and dared not act with reckless abandon.

The north-south cotton cloth war of over sixty years ago was of great significance—it was a major reshuffling concerning the development of the cotton industry. Many once-famous great merchants fell, though of course they were not irreplaceable; new figures quickly rose in their place. Interest has no feelings and recognizes no faces.

In that great war, whether in process or outcome, the north in fact held every advantage. After all, the Central Plains and Hebei were where the empire's cotton industry had truly risen and grown—with deeper foundations, larger scale, and more resources. At the same time, they enjoyed the support of a large number of power-holders in the imperial court, giving them an even greater political advantage.

Therefore, in the end, the southern cotton merchants' hard-won industries and channels in the north came to nothing. After that, "southerners dared not go north," and could only diligently cultivate the southern market, consolidate their foundations, and in passing, expand overseas.

They lay dormant for over a decade before daring to raise the matter of going north again. Over the past thirty to forty years, fierce struggles had always existed, but nothing as intense as that Yongxi-era war ever occurred again.

Now, over sixty years later, three generations have grown up, and the cotton industry has undergone entirely new changes.

First, political discrimination has basically been eliminated. The complete rise of commoner bureaucrats, the unfolding of civil official politics, the convergence of the noble class, the rise of the southeastern economy, and the elevation of its political status have all made imperial politics increasingly balanced and conservative—no longer a situation where one wind completely overwhelms another.

This has been a continuously favorable process for the development and growth of the southern cotton industry.

As for the cotton industry itself, the scale of the cotton industry in the twenty-first year of Zhengtong is more than ten times larger than in the Yongxi era. The number of people engaged in cotton spinning and weaving alone exceeds one million, not to mention those involved in planting, transportation, sales, and other links of the chain.

In Shanghai alone, there are over a hundred thousand cotton textile workers, including large official factories (government-run textile mills), government-supervised merchant-run enterprises, large private factories, folk workshops of various sizes, and even more part-time small household operations—all together giving birth to the prosperity of Shanghai's cotton textile industry.

And from its very founding as a city, Shanghai had always been the empire's southern cotton textile and trade center. Seventy years later, this position has not only not wavered, but has grown even more solid.

Not just the neighboring Su and Xiu prefectures, but the entire Jiangnan Circuit—even the cotton of Jiangxi, Huguang, Min, and Yue—has become the raw material base for Shanghai's cotton textile industry. It is unrealistic to rely on Shanghai cotton cloth alone to clothe all the people under heaven, but it does indeed occupy half of the empire's cotton industry.

Such great development naturally cannot be separated from technological progress, whether in cotton cultivation or cotton textile processing. Especially the latter—in the past thirty years, the empire's cotton textile technology has undergone another round of innovation, mainly reflected in cotton textile tools.

On the basis of the Zhou family's machinery (Zhou Renjun, who led the great leap forward in the empire's cotton textile technology), the cotton gin and the flying shuttle loom were both built, and Shanghai was also the birthplace of this round of technological innovation.

Twenty years ago, a Huaixi cotton merchant named Bi Sheng invented a three-spindle spinning machine, and later improved it into five-spindle and seven-spindle machines, greatly increasing spinning efficiency. It was this that gave birth to the true prosperity of the empire's cotton industry.

To this day, although cotton clothing has still not been fully popularized throughout the empire, in overall scale it has already replaced traditional silk and hemp, becoming the primary source of clothing for the empire's scholars, commoners, and ordinary people alike.

Of course, the hemp cloth market is declining, but silk—that aristocratic fabric—remains very prosperous. It is an entirely different track from cotton cloth.

As southern cotton textile technology innovated, the north gradually fell behind the pace, and the balance of strength between north and south underwent a fundamental reversal.