Fang Yun nodded and said, "Tell me about the paper-making workshops. When I climbed Yueyang Tower, I don't recall seeing any outside the city."
Dong Wencong sighed. "As you know, making paper consumes enormous amounts of water. Lime is used for bleaching, the black liquor from the straw pulp has to be discharged, and then there is all the other wastewater. That makes paper-making workshops notorious producers of wastewater. Making a thousand jin of paper produces a hundred thousand jin of wastewater-a hundred times as much! The Craftsmen School has been trying every possible way to reduce it, but there has never been a major breakthrough. As a result, papermaking wastewater has become one of the human race's greatest headaches."
Fang Yun nodded. Never mind the present-day Saint Origin Continent-even the countries of the Ancient Hua Kingdom era had fretted over papermaking pollution, with no way to solve it.
Dong Wencong continued, "Back then, the Qing Kingdom never treated the people of Xiang Prefecture as human beings, so it built large numbers of paper-making workshops wherever there was water in the prefecture. As excessive wastewater was discharged, rivers and waterways in some areas developed problems, prompting the people of Xiang Prefecture to take to the streets against the workshops. The affair grew so serious that righteous men even went to the gates of the Sacred Academy and burned themselves, alarming the academy into sending people to investigate. Left with no choice, the Qing Kingdom had to reduce the number of workshops in Xiang Prefecture and close the smaller ones, because the smaller the workshop, the more wastewater it discharged to produce the same amount of paper."
"However, there was originally still one paper-making workshop outside Baling City. After the Jing Kingdom reclaimed Xiang Prefecture, the Qing River Trading Company closed