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Volume 1: The Arms Dealer¡¯s Feast Chapter 276: Business

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    Faced with the troops who dared to fire on the Lushan, everyone still admired their courage.  But it¡¯s just admiration. A crossfire shot destroyed its turret. If you can¡¯t see clearly the difference in strength with your eyes open, you are not brave but stupid. You don¡¯t mind using force to educate such a Lushan. Modern  Everyone knows that peace is achieved through fighting.

    Sure enough, after the battle, those at the shore guard saw that the Lushan did not make any further moves, but shouted about the treatment of servants to recruit troops. They could no longer calm down and sent someone to discuss it - peace was impossible.  The entire imperial court could not survive. Since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, there was no record of seeking peace in the war against foreign nations.

    For example, the commander of the Tianjin Guard Yang Yi, who was spinning a little on the big iron ship, thought that if he could get rid of him with some benefits, this trick was generally called banknotes, and it was often used in the local area.  Tactics used to deal with bandit rebels.

    The people on the Lushan Ship are also very happy that an official figure has finally come out. Most of what the Lushan Ship can sell now is military supplies and luxury glass mirrors, so just have an open chat with him.  Because this person had a military position, the person who received him was Zhang Tiejun, the military officer on board. No one on board the Lushan felt that the emperor was nobler than themselves. This was also a characteristic of the republican background.

    Zhang Tiejun said to the envoy: "Okay, okay, it'll be nice when people come. Hahahaha."

    Yang Yi, the commander of the Tianjin Guard, said boldly: "This is the land of the imperial court, and the whole world is the land of the royal family. What do you want to recruit troops and horses here? Why don't you disperse early before the imperial army comes."

    "Is the whole world the land of kings? Hahahaha, that's not the case at all." As a modern man, Zhang Tiejun waved his hand and said: "This sea belongs to everyone, just like the fish and birds come, so do we.  Yes. But you should be glad that we came with friendly and peaceful purposes, otherwise we would have sunk all your small sampans when we came."

    "You, you, you" Yang Yi was so angry that he couldn't speak.

    "What am I? In this world, people with big fists speak loudly. You have also tried firing cannons. You can't do anything with our big iron ship, right? So what else is there to say?" Zhang Tiejun said and asked people to take it over Lushan.  He asked about the newly manufactured rifle: "You are also a soldier, do you want to see what features this gun has?"

    "It's just more sophisticated." Yang Yi still knows something about firearms. It's not just Yang Yi. At this time, due to the invasion of the Jin Dynasty and the Mongols, the court needed new and powerful firearms. In recent years, the whole country has started to develop firearms.  Sports - everyone from the pavilion boss to the traffickers and foot soldiers are studying firearms in the hope of being favored by the court and becoming famous in one fell swoop. In terms of the Milu gun, the highest technology mastered by the court now, it is equivalent to the front-loading rifled rifle of the seventeenth century.  It still has the ability to penetrate armor at 150 meters - a rifle of this level was not built in the Qing Dynasty before the Westernization Movement.

    "Fire a shot and show this gentleman." After Zhang Tiejun finished speaking, the member of the Firearms Enthusiasts Association took out the paper shell fixed ammunition and bit it, opened the gun and reloaded it, locked it and aimed and shot the "bang"  With a sound, a tree trunk two hundred meters away from the shore was exploded by a bullet.  After the first shot was fired, this man immediately opened the gun body, cleaned the gun barrel a little, and then loaded it again. He fired four shots in a minute, all of which hit the same big tree. This was because of this gun maker.  It's not because of the skilled musketeers, otherwise it would be possible to fire five or six shots a minute.

    After finishing the fight, Zhang Tiejun looked at the commander again and said, "Well, even Milu's gun can't compare with it."

    The commander with a bad look on his face shook his head: "Indeed, the rate of fire, range and power of Milu Gun can't be matched."

    "If you want to buy a rifle like this, it costs fifty taels of silver. It's not expensive. So, we come here with good intentions." Zhang Tiejun said, patting the official rifle on his body: "The gun I have is from my country's technology It shows the highest level of performance. It can fire nine shots in a row, with a longer range and greater power. We sell it at a cheap price for five hundred taels of silver each. The Japanese sell them for one thousand taels of silver. But this gun is You can't make bullets, so we sell them for one tael of silver per bullet, so don't think it's too expensive for you. We sell them to the Japanese for half a tael of gold per bullet."

    Yang Yi said angrily before he had any idea about the gun: "You actually have an affair with Japanese pirates"

    Zhang Tiejun laughed and said: "I said, this world belongs to everyone. Since we are here in Tianjin, we can't go to Japan no matter what. As long as they are willing to open the door and do business, they are our customers."

    At this point, Zhang Tiejun pointed to the fort that was swept by the machine gun and said: "Of course, if you don't want to do business but want war, we will also give him war."

    The commander Yang Yi lost his temper: "I would like to watch the details."

    Zhang Tiejun performed some target shooting with the Chinese official rifle he was wearing, and there was more on the shore.A tree trunk here was damaged.

    The shocking effect this time has not disappeared. Another person came with a glass mirror. Zhang Tiejun said: "This is my glass mirror made in Australia. It is extremely precious. It costs five thousand taels of silver."

    Commander Yang Yi thought to himself that this time a large iron ship came into the harbor to harass and plunder countless soldiers and civilians. At least he would be caught and impeached by the Yushi Yanguan - these grandsons are the only ones in his mother's nest who have the ability and Australians.  Go theorize.  Hey, who allowed himself to be the commander of the Tianjin Guard?  However, these Australian guns and mirrors are really good things, but the price is a bit expensive, that¡¯s all. Money can¡¯t be taken with you until you die. As long as this position is still there, how much money can¡¯t be paid for it.

    The commander discussed the price for a while, and after discovering that they would not lower the price at all, he had no choice but to hold his nose and admit it.  Commander Yang Yi spent all his money to buy four glass mirrors, ten official rifles with one thousand rounds of ammunition, and two hundred and twenty Type 1628 rifles - two hundred of which the Commander used to equip his servants.  .

    After spending more than 30,000 taels of silver to buy so many things, Commander Yang Yi also had one request: Lushan No. should stop recruiting troops, otherwise all the military households in the Tianjin Guards Station would be wiped out.

    The Lushan naturally agreed to the request of this big customer. However, only more than a hundred of the Type 1628 rifles have been made so far, and they still have to stay in Tianjin waters for two days to produce the number needed by Commander Yang Yi. The Lushan  Of course, the ship would not tell Yang Yi that the Lushan's Type 1628 rifle was made now, but would stay for a few more days in the name of replenishing food and water. At the same time, Yang Yi had to have someone transport silver - thirty-seven thousand taels.  The combined metric amount of silver is over a ton.

    During the past few days, the Lushan stepped up the production of Type 1628 rifles, and at the same time sent the Tianjin Guard soldiers and civilians who had had two full meals to quietly go ashore to recruit people - the Lushan just said that it would no longer use the loudspeaker to recruit people, and sent people  It's okay to go, but Yang Yi turned a blind eye to it when he found out about it. It didn't matter if he pulled some people away to rebel. Anyway, he just didn't make a big fuss in his own jurisdiction.

    If all the newly arrived immigrants understand Chinese, there is no need for Jin Sanduo to go to each house to tell them how to use the bathroom, how to use the flush toilet, how to use the shower, and repeatedly emphasize the health regulations for living on the ship - because the remaining toilets on the Lushan  The hair water and soap were not enough to last for several years, so the immigrants were given laundry detergent to wash their bodies and hair.

    Because of the timely interruption by the commander, this Tianjin persuasion activity only attracted more than a thousand people, but it doesn¡¯t matter, there is still a long coastline from here to Guangzhou.

    In May of the first year of Chongzhen, Yang Yi, the commander of the Tianjin Guards, presented the four sides of the treasure mirror sold by Australian maritime merchants, eight Australian nine-shot fast guns with eight hundred bullets, twenty Australian single-shot fast guns, and fixed gunpowder technology (paper  shell bullet).  Of course, Yang Yi was not so stupid as to say that he paid the bill - didn't this clearly indicate corruption? Instead, he pushed out his brother-in-law who was a grain merchant in Tianjin Wei. Yang Yi only appeared as an introducer.

    Chongzhen had just ascended the throne and had only removed the 9,000-year-old Wei Zhongxian - he had not yet realized that once Wei Zhongxian was removed, the Donglin Party members in the court began to tremble again.  When Emperor Apocalypse first ascended the throne, the Donglin Party was the dominant family in the court. They vigorously attacked and persecuted political opponents and manipulated government affairs. Speaking of which, Wei Zhongxian was just a dog thrown out by Emperor Apocalypse to fight against the Donglin Party.  It's just that at that time, the imperial court was full of Donglin Party members. If Wei Zhongxian wanted to seize power, he would naturally suppress the Donglin Party members - in this way, the position of Emperor Tianqi became delicate.

    It can even be said that although Chongzhen had good habits of diligence and frugality, his grasp of the political situation and people's hearts, that is, in terms of imperial skills, was far inferior to that of the carpenter Emperor Tianqi - in this regard, Emperor Wanli was more open-minded. As an emperor, I  It¡¯s not that words don¡¯t count. I might as well not go to court and you can go and have fun by yourselves.  It can even be said that if it were not for the mining and commercial taxes collected by the emperors of the Wanli and Tianqi dynasties, the internal funds of the Chongzhen dynasty, which had to raise taxes on farmers due to internal and external troubles, would not have been able to last for seventeen years.

    "As everyone knows, the more taxes are raised, the more rebels will become after the farmers go bankrupt. By the middle and late Chongzhen Dynasty, there was really no rebellion everywhere in the world.  The theme of Zhang Juzheng's reform at that time was that "the officials and the gentry all receive food from one body." After Zhang Juzheng's death, the dross and essence of the whip method were removed, and it became a new method for the officials and gentry to exploit the people.

    The Lushan Ship's opinion regarding the Chongzhen Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty is to take a look first and then talk about it. If the firearms sold by the Lushan Ship fail to bring about changes, it will not be too late to wait until the Australian Republican Army becomes stronger - those local gentry will eventually be eliminated.  The peasant army cleaned it up, otherwise the Lushan No. 1 would be powerless in the face of this solidified social form, no matter how powerful it was.

    At this time, after Emperor Chongzhen obtained the precious mirror and quick gun, he ordered the precious mirror to be framed into screens and distributed to Queen Zhou and Yuan Concubine Tian Fei. As for the quick gun, it was naturally handed over to the Shenji Battalion to test the gun and then the Beijing Camp to imitate it.  ¡ª¡ªThe number of the Ming Dynasty at this time?As a big country, everything is available and refined, but a group of skilled craftsmen can eventually imitate any industrial product.

    It's just that it was defeated by the Australian nine-gun fast gun. The craftsmen are still very capable of imitating this gun. For example, the 1628-style rifle itself does not have epoch-making high-tech in it - the flint and the fire sickle are both from the Ming Dynasty.  The problem with the breech-loading rifle was just the locking mechanism. It took the Jingying craftsmen half a month to master the manufacturing method of the Type 1628 rifle - but the quality could not be compared with the modern machine-processed ones on the Lushan.

    By groping and copying parts, this group of craftsmen actually made an Australian fast gun that could fire successfully - this is something that later gunsmiths and level 4 and 6 fitters who repaired guns could easily do it as long as they had drawings or objects for reference.  Yes, but the same bullet is not so easy to make - the chemical industry needs to reach a certain level to create a bullet primer.

    Craftsmen in the Ming Dynasty did not have warheads with steel cores and lead bodies covered with copper, but they could imitate lead warheads. The shells could also be made in small quantities by hand. The propellant could be changed to black powder, but the primer was beyond the scope.  The scope of understanding of the craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty has changed - not only the craftsmen of Kyushu, who are separated by a sea from the Ming Dynasty craftsmen, are also worried about this matter.

    No matter how good the thing is, it will be useless if it fires one round and one less round, and because the firearms of the Ming Dynasty have a high explosion rate, although the Australian fast rifle has a door-to-door sight and a mountain view, none of the soldiers have the habit of aiming at the front line - they do.  Those who are used to this are either killed by bombs or blinded by bombs.

    These medium and formal rifles were later shelved, but the Ming Dynasty was not without gains. This Australian gun was not afraid of wind, frost, rain and snow. After several failures in imitating modern bullets, the craftsmen in Beijing camp were asked to go all out to make Australian guns to replace the current ones.  A blunderbuss used by the Shenji camp.

    After the Lushan left Tianjin, it recruited a number of immigrants in Shandong and Zhejiang and then headed south into the Guangzhou waters.  Here the Lushan went directly to Macau. Hong Kong doesn¡¯t even have a decent pier now, so it¡¯s impossible for the Lushan to dock.  However, a ship as big as the Lushan could not enter Baietan in Guangzhou. Even if it wanted to threaten the local Ming Dynasty government with force, it was powerless.

    When we arrived in Macau, the Lushan was still unable to dock. In this era, there was no dock that could dock a 50,000-ton ironclad.  Once here, the Lushan took out the 1628-type fast gun, the Chinese nine-shooter rifle and the Australian mirror to fool the Portuguese businessmen.  At the same time, the Lushan Hao also had some needs, which were to buy ironware and farm cattle and sheep. The largest iron factory in the Ming Dynasty was in Guangdong.

    Although the law of the Ming Dynasty clearly stipulates that ironware and cattle cannot be exported, as long as there is profit, the goods will flow. As long as the profit is big enough, who cares about that.  After the Lushan number sold more than a dozen Australian treasure mirrors in Macau, it temporarily satisfied the purchasing requirements of Portuguese merchants and Ming Dynasty merchants here.

    The iron tools for farming cattle had to wait for many days before they gradually arrived. During this period, the people on board the Lushan studied the cargo list given by the Portuguese merchants. As for spices, most of them were useless, but some did have some medicinal value.  Some of them were purchased in categories, including twenty boxes of opium. Although the Lushan knew the harm of opium, no one in the Ming Dynasty smoked opium at this time. These opiums were all used for medicinal purposes.

    In addition, Portuguese merchants bought thousands of pieces of Indian cotton cloth shipped from India. Seeing that the Lushan ship liked the cloth, Ming Dynasty merchants brought thousands of pieces of cotton cloth, linen, silk, etc. from Guangzhou, and the Lushan ship ate them all - although now the Lushan ship  Everyone on the boat has clothes to wear, but in the future, they will have to buy fabrics from the 17th century to make clothes, and the more than 8,000 immigrants on the ship will also need to wear clothes. The southern part of Australia where we are going has four distinct seasons, because winter along the coast is not special.  The cold climate is equivalent to that of Zhejiang.

    I also bought a lot of porcelain plates and bowls, Guangzhou¡¯s specialty export porcelain. Obviously, the stainless steel tableware on the Lushan number cannot be taken with immigrants, otherwise they will not be used by future immigrants.  Similarly, we also bought a lot of export goods such as sugar and tea.  Today's Australia is very poor. According to the Lushan computer data, the local indigenous tribes are still living in the Stone Age. Within a year or two, many things have to be imported.

    Of course, there are inevitably curious people who ask about the location of Australia and how this big iron ship that moves without sails was built. All Jin Sanduo can do about such secrets is nonsense. For example, the location of Australia is accused of being in  In Antarctica, this large iron ship was excavated by Australians from ancient ruins.  Today's Australians can only use this big iron ship to sail, but they don't know how to make it, and they can't make it. Jin Sanduo and others know that the development of electrification will end in their lifetime. This nuclear-powered battleship-level ship  It cannot be made anyway, including most electronic products. A nanochip technology is useless even if it knows how to make it but does not have a relevant industrial chain - this is the same reason why people in the Ming Dynasty cannot crack modern bullets.

    The dilapidation of Macau does not bring anything strange to everyone. When everyone comes,Macau in the 1960s was no better than here, except that there were more people, more houses, and cleaner streets.  Because the Portuguese knew that sooner or later this land would be returned to the Republic of China government, they were too lazy to make great efforts to develop and build Macao. Compared with the people on the Lushan cruise ship, Macao was not as well constructed as Kinmen, Xiamen and other places. The Pearl River  The most prosperous place at the entrance to the sea is Zhuhai City, and Macau relies on it to barely survive. As for opening casinos, the Republic of China couldn't help it. Instead, it launched a national lottery, opened a racecourse and other plans to hit private casinos in Macau economically.  Small casinos simply have no competitive advantage.

    After leaving Macau, the Lushan headed directly west to Vietnam - the food on the ship was getting less and less, and to provide food for immigrants to Australia for several months, it was necessary to go to Vietnam to buy rice.  The Japanese grain on Lushan is calculated according to the metric system. It costs four taels of silver to buy one hundred kilograms of white rice. The price of grain in the Ming Dynasty is not cheap. The situation varies in different places. Generally speaking, it takes two to three taels of silver to buy one hundred kilograms.  There is not much white rice or flour available, so you can only buy it in small quantities.

    Because Vietnam can produce three crops of rice a year, the price of rice has been very cheap since ancient times. Just because transportation is difficult and there are many pirates nearby, not many people come here to buy rice.  After arriving here, Lushan Hao realized what the low price of rice meant. A hundred kilograms of rice of the same weight cost more than two taels of silver (a little more than one stone) in Macau, but here it only cost half a tael of silver.

    And there is a very strong demand for industrial products, iron tools, and weapons - Vietnam is now the two dynasties of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and they are at war. How many weapons are there?

    When the Lushan cruise ship showed off its Type 1628 fast rifle to the officials and merchants of the Northern Dynasty, the officials and merchants of the Northern Dynasty decided to exchange grain for the Lushan's Type 1628 rifle.  Of course, the price is still fifty taels of silver set by the Lushan. Thinking that this quick gun can be exchanged for ten tons of rice, it is really crazy to make money.  (To be continued. Please search Piaotian Literature, the novels will be better and updated faster!)
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