"Qin Mo! The Four Garrisons of Anxi are not mine. I am only in charge of the city of Suyab. After much discussion, we have come to the conclusion that only by exclusively selling your Dayuan goods throughout the entire Western Regions can we support the huge expenditure on food and supplies in the future. That's why... they asked me to shamelessly come to them for help."
“Auntie, you’re being too polite. Business is all about mutual benefit! My merchants from Dayuan have also made money, haven’t they? However, my fleet from Dayuan can only go as far as Tongguan. From Tongguan to the Western Regions, it’s thousands of miles away. You’ll have to take care of things along the way yourself.”
“Of course I understand that. Merchants are all about taking a cut at every level. Qin Mo, you don’t know... that Protector Su secretly hinted to those merchants that if they wanted to trade in his territory, they would have to give him a share of the profits. That bastard, he even takes a cut when raising funds for his army, he’s truly heartless!”
Qin Mo had also traveled all the way from Tongguan, so he naturally knew that the various forces at each checkpoint along the way were complex and complicated. Long-distance trading was really not easy, and he truly admired those merchants who traveled all year round.
"Aunt, have you ever thought about building workshops in your Suyab city to make the Hu people under your rule rich?"
"...Let alone making them rich, it would be wonderful if they could have enough to eat and wear. The barbarians who have no food or clothing are the most difficult to manage. How could I not want them to be rich?"
"Auntie, did you ever grow cotton in your Suyab city? You know, the 'white cotton'?"
"Of course there is. I even thought about planting cotton in Suyab and then inviting the weavers from Songjiang to teach me how to weave! Hehe, at the time I only knew that Songjiang cotton cloth was the best in the world, but I didn't know how many difficulties there were."
Qin Mo was immediately filled with respect. This kind of approach, where the government takes the lead in actively introducing technology, is extremely rare in this world. At least Qin Mo had never seen it before, but she never expected to see it in a woman.
“Auntie, actually weaving cloth... isn’t difficult. As long as you’re willing to work hard, not to mention making a living, it’s very easy to even become moderately wealthy.”
The location of the four towns in Anxi is very conducive to cotton growth. In Qin Mo's memory, large cotton farms in southern and northern Xinjiang employed hundreds of thousands of people every year to pick cotton.
Meanwhile, the improved version of the spinning jenny had become widespread in Dayuan, and this hand-cranked spinning machine could greatly speed up the weaving process. There were no competitors in the textile industry in the Western Regions, so if a textile workshop were to be established, it would be a monopoly.
Xu immediately became interested and sat down with Qin Mo to start a long talk. They talked for most of the night and eventually became very interested in Qin Mo's suggestion to jointly establish a large-scale textile workshop.
"My dear nephew! What do you think of my second daughter, Yuyan? How about I give her to you as a concubine?"
"Auntie, this... really won't do!"
Seeing the disappointed look on Madam Xu's face, Qin Mo really wanted to tell her about her relationship with Wang Yushi, but she was afraid that Madam Xu, who was even more fierce than Wang Yushi, would go berserk.
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