Chapter 244: The Birth of the Glass Mirror
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“Your Highness, it seems agriculture really is the foundation of the nation. Cotton, rapeseed, hemp—these are all things we should encourage the people to start planting.”
As Xiao Ming was fretting over cotton supply, Pang Yukun seized the moment to bring up his concerns. He felt that lately, Xiao Ming had been placing too much emphasis on handicrafts and was beginning to neglect agriculture.
“You’re not wrong. But right now, we’re still facing grain shortages. It’ll be hard to convince the common folk to grow these other crops when they risk not being able to sell them later. Let’s have the Production Corps begin planting on a limited scale. Once our grain production stabilizes, we’ll expand from there,” Xiao Ming said.
Pang Yukun nodded. For weeks now, he and Xiao Ming had been planning the agricultural and industrial layout of the six prefectures. These topics were already part of their agenda.
“Also, Your Highness—what’s this new product you mentioned?”
At the last banquet, Xiao Ming had casually tossed out the hint of a new product. But with the spy crisis dominating everyone’s attention, the topic had been forgotten—until now.
“Mirrors,” Xiao Ming said with a smile, thinking of his latest innovation.
In the Great Yu Empire, the standard was still bronze mirrors, which gave a blurry, distorted reflection that barely revealed any facial detail.
Modern mirrors, by contrast, were glass mirrors, made by coating the back of glass with a reflective layer—typically aluminum in the present day, which created a clear image.
But extracting aluminum wasn’t an option. It required electrolysis, something impossible without electricity. And producing a silver-backed mirror through chemical plating also needed nitric acid, ammonia, and glucose, which were similarly unavailable in the current technological environment.
In the end, Xiao Ming determined the only viable method under current conditions was to use glass, tin foil, and mercury—a method historically used in pre-industrial Europe and China.