Siheyuan: If I marry Qin Huairu, I will become stronger by showing off.

Chapter 427: The sorrow of a great country, the storm is coming!
"Mr. Wu, are you going to Kowloon in the future?"

As soon as Niu Longtai said this, the clan members, Suo Qian, and Tong Fu who had already agreed, all looked at Wu Youde.

This question is critical.

If Wu Youde goes to Kowloon in the future, the business there must be very important, otherwise he would not go there.

vice versa.

Besides, what about business or future?

The most important thing is to be able to stay with Mr. Wu all the time.

As long as I can stay with Mr. Wu, why would I worry about not making money?

Several people understand this principle.

Being looked at like this by several people, Wu Youde understood what they meant and knew what they were thinking. He smiled and nodded frankly.

"Yes, I will go to Kowloon and live there for a long time..."

That's it!

Niu Longtai was immediately delighted. Was this asking him to go ahead and take the lead?
He said with a smile: "Mr. Wu, since you need me, Lao Niu, then I have no choice but to help you. I want to go over there first and take a look. When things are stable there, I will bring my family over."

Wu Youde nodded and said yes, then looked at Zongren and Suo Qian.

Zongren scratched his head and said with a smile: "Mr. Wu, let me think about it..."

"Hehe, Mr. Wu, let me think about it too." Suo Qian followed.

"Of course, there's no rush."

Wu Youde smiled and said, "Please ask the others for me as well. If anyone wants to go, they can come find me. However, this matter must be kept secret and not publicized. The fewer people who know about it, the better."

Niu Longtai and others nodded in agreement.

……

The second-hand goods recycling shop has been open for almost two years.
During the past two years, Niu Longtai and his companions have been roaming around the capital, often setting up stalls in various markets and temple fairs, and sometimes several of them would ride a human-powered tricycle to the countryside.

Day by day, month by month, two years have passed.

The number of old items collected by Wu Youde has reached a considerable level. How many are they?
As many as 50,000 pieces!
There are many varieties and everything you need.

In addition to porcelain, antiques, calligraphy and paintings, there are also various precious and rare woods, jade, enamel, etc., as well as some niche items.

For example, ivory-carved jewelry, mats, chopsticks, various bronze wares, pottery figurines, gold and silver ornaments such as brocade clothes, gold-inlaid jade waists, gold crowns, phoenix crowns, and so on.

There is even a relic.

By the way, this relic was once enshrined in the Jianfu Palace in the Forbidden City.

The Jianfu Palace once housed thousands of golden Buddhas.

Most of the collections that Emperor Qianlong left to Emperor Jiaqing were packed and sealed here.

Unfortunately, the theft of the palace artifacts angered Puyi, who ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to conduct a thorough investigation. However, this led to even greater disasters. On June 1923, 6, in order to destroy the evidence of the theft, the eunuchs set fire to the Jianfu Palace.

Afterwards, when processing the ashes, a gold shop alone picked out 17,000 taels of gold bars and gold flakes! !

As for how Wu Youde got the relics of Jianfu Palace, we have to talk about Niu Longtai and others. They are old people with many old networks of relationships.

Knowing that Wu Youde is fond of various old objects,
Niu Longtai and others found many eunuchs and palace maids who had escaped from the palace before. The great change that year made the entire Forbidden City panic-stricken.

Every moment of every day, someone would sneak out with a bag on his back.

The bags of these people were all filled with treasures from the Forbidden City. When disaster strikes, they grab some valuables and run away. This is human nature.

How many treasures did these tens of thousands of palace maids and eunuchs bring out of the Forbidden City?

Some say tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands, and some say millions...

The specific circumstances are unknown.

But Niu Longtai and others found a total of more than 50 palace maids and eunuchs who had worked in the Forbidden City. Most of them had died, and they bought some old items from their descendants.

Eunuchs have no descendants?
it's not true.

Most eunuchs would adopt one or two sons to take care of them when they die.

From these people,

A total of about 6,000 old items were collected. Some families kept more, and some kept less.

That's how the relic was brought out from Jianfu Palace.

……

In two years, more than 50,000 precious old items were collected.

Wu Youde was quite complacent at the beginning. Looking at the dazzling collection in his backpack that covered thousands of square meters, he felt proud and happy, and felt that his two years of work were not in vain!
Just with these collections, even if you do nothing else and just eat, drink and play every day, it will be enough for you to live a carefree life for ten lifetimes, and this also includes your descendants!

However, he quickly calmed down and secretly cursed himself for being so narrow-minded.

These 50,000 pieces of collection,

It seems like a lot, but compared with the collections in the Forbidden City, or the royal collections, it is completely insignificant.

It is no exaggeration to say that it is a drop in the bucket!
The Qing Dynasty was the last feudal dynasty in China. After the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, the royal collection reached an unprecedented scale.

These cultural relics were stored in the Forbidden City and the emperor's various palaces. In a sense, the imperial palace became a huge warehouse of the world's artistic wealth.

So, how many treasures are there in the Forbidden City and the emperor's palace? ? ?

do not know!
No one in the world knows!

Even the emperors of the Qing Dynasty were not clear about this!
But we can get a glimpse of the whole picture from the several major losses of collections from the Qing Palace...

The first major loss of Qing Palace collections occurred on October 1860, 10.

After the British and French allied forces captured Beijing, they entered the Old Summer Palace. The next day, crazy looting began...

The Times reporter at the time,
In a communication sent to this country it said:

“No one knew what to take after entering the emperor’s palace.

Silver was lost for gold, and gold was lost for jeweled clocks and precious stones.

Priceless porcelain and enamel bottles were too big to be transported and were smashed. Priceless paintings and calligraphy were seen by the soldiers as nothing more than waste paper, and were even used to light cigarettes.

After three days of looting, the British and French forces burned down the Old Summer Palace.

The great French writer Victor Hugo denounced this atrocity, saying: "After the two robbers robbed and burned the Old Summer Palace, they divided the loot equally, held hands, and returned to Europe laughing loudly."

So what treasures are there in the Old Summer Palace?
The Old Summer Palace is a large royal palace that was built by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty over a period of 150 years. It is also an important collection of royal cultural relics.

According to incomplete records,

There are more than 200 paintings and calligraphy by famous people from the Tang and Song dynasties in the Old Summer Palace alone.

The Wenyuan Pavilion in the garden was the largest library in China at that time, housing more than 30,000 volumes of the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature.

In Savatthi,
There are also 100,000 precious Buddha statues collected since Emperor Kangxi!!

And these treasures that have been collected for hundreds of years disappeared in just a few days!!!

The British Museum in London, England, is the overseas museum with the largest collection of Chinese cultural relics in the world, no doubt about it!!!

In its Oriental Pavilion, a painting called "The Admonitions of Court Ladies" is prominently displayed. This is the earliest scroll painting in China. Although it is a copy from the Sui and Tang dynasties, it is a rare work handed down from the great Eastern Jin painter Gu Kaizhi.

This is also why Margaret told Wu Youde that she had seen many oriental ink paintings and landscape paintings in London.

This was the first major loss of Qing Palace collections.

The second major outflow occurred on the fourth day of the eighth lunar month in 1900 AD.

The Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing, and the Forbidden City was invaded by foreign forces for the first time since its construction. At that time, the troops of various countries took turns to stay in the Forbidden City for more than a year, and the cultural relics of the Forbidden City were looted...

They stole and looted countless treasures from the Forbidden City, Zhongbeihai, Yuanmingyuan and the Summer Palace.

The Russian army looted dozens of precious items made of gold and gems from the Empress's palace. French commander Forret alone looted 40 boxes of precious property.

The Eight-Nation Alliance broke into the Western Garden, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the six ministries and nine government offices, the Hanlin Academy, the Imperial Household Department, and other places, wantonly destroying and looting...

The Japanese army stole 291 million taels of silver and countless silks and brocades from the Ministry of Revenue’s treasury, and 32 shi of rice and all the silver from the Imperial Household Department.

Afterwards, the missing funds from various treasuries totaled more than 6000 million taels of silver, which alone could have rebuilt a Beiyang Navy.

At the south entrance of Nanchizi Street there is an Imperial Archives, which is the royal archives of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The Yongle Encyclopedia, which is known as "the largest encyclopedia in the world's history", is stored here, with a total of 11,000 volumes.

Most of the books were burned in the catastrophe, leaving only about 300 copies, 170 of which remained in China, and the rest were scattered among libraries and private hands around the world.

On July 2020, 7, at an auction held in Paris, France, two handwritten copies of the Yongle Encyclopedia were sold at a sky-high price of more than 7 million euros, equivalent to more than 812 million yuan.

In addition to these two times, there was a third major outflow.

During the last few years that Puyi lived in the Forbidden City, the small court was in doomsday chaos. From Puyi to the palace maids and eunuchs, everyone was looking for an opportunity to smuggle things out.

It is unknown how much Puyi took out.

At that time, Feng Yuxiang drove him out of the Forbidden City and ordered him to leave within three hours, but allowed him to take his personal belongings.

Therefore, Puyi took everything he could, and no one knew how much he took away...

The treasures shipped from Prince Chun's Palace to the Tianjin Concession alone filled seventy or eighty large boxes.

After settling down in Changchun, Puyi had two large vaults set up to store his collection of rare and famous paintings, porcelain, jewellery and jade in different categories. Even when he went to the northeast to serve as the emperor of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Puyi built a library to store his treasures and ancient texts.

After being captured by the Soviet Union, in order to keep it secret, he gave away a large number of his treasured agates, jewelry, calligraphy and paintings to the Soviet officers and soldiers who were guarding him.

After the founding of New China, Puyi was worried that his previous cooperation with the Japanese would be liquidated, so he refused to return to China no matter what. He even gave up treasures worth 47.3 rubles to keep them in the Soviet Union.

However, the Soviet Union handed him over to China in 1950.

At the same time, the Soviet government also returned some of the cultural relics that Puyi bribed, including the original copy of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, one of the top ten famous paintings handed down from ancient times! !
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the many cultural relics that Puyi took out.

As for the fourth major outflow, it occurred at the end of 1948!

After the three major battles, Chiang Kai-shek realized that the Kuomintang no longer had any foundation on the mainland.

So Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Central Bank to transport gold, silver and other treasures to Taiwan. More importantly, the precious cultural relics in the Forbidden City should also be transported to Taiwan.

At the end of 1948, 320 boxes of cultural relics from the Forbidden City were transported to Taiwan.

In early 1949, a second batch of more than 2 boxes of cultural relics from the Forbidden City were sent to Taiwan.

On January 1949, 1, another 28 boxes of cultural relics were transported away.

In this way, the Kuomintang shipped more than 2900 boxes of cultural relics from the National Palace Museum to Taiwan in three batches, including 1434 boxes of antiquities, 1334 boxes of books, and 204 boxes of documents.

These include more than 5 artifacts, calligraphy and paintings, nearly 16 rare books, 38 volumes of Qing official archives and documents, and a total of 65 cultural relics collected after the move to Taiwan.

Even after four major losses, the Forbidden City still has as many as 4 million cultural relics! !
Therefore, Wu Youde felt that the 50,000 pieces of his collection were a drop in the bucket and not worth mentioning, and this was not groundless.

……

As for if Niu Longtai and his gang all go to Kowloon in the end, there will be no one in Beijing to help collect old items...

That doesn’t matter. At worst, I won’t charge you.

The rest is up to fate. If you come across it in the future, you can take it; if you don’t come across it, just forget it.

There's no need to force it!
In order to store these 50,000 collections, Wu Youde expanded the space of his backpack many times, from the original one cubic meter to the current 8,196 cubic meters.

Just to upgrade the space of this backpack, he spent more than 85 million in total! !

Just these bad values ​​are enough for him to open the gift box eight times.

But there is no other way, no matter how much I have, I have to spend it, otherwise I will have nowhere to put all these treasures...

……

However, the final situation was somewhat different from what Wu Youde had expected.

Among the four capable people in the recycling of used goods, except Tong Fu and Niu Longtai who agreed to go to Kowloon, Zong Ren and Suo Qian refused.

Zongren said that he had made a lot of money in the past two years following Mr. Wu. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough for him to have four dishes and a soup every day, and it was not a problem to have wine and meat for every meal.

I'm already this old, why am I still messing around?

Suo Qian said that it was hard to leave his hometown and he didn't want to take his wife Chunxi to live in a place where they were unfamiliar with the people and the place. In the capital, they were familiar with everywhere, the food was to their taste, and they had many friends.

How good?

Wu Youde expressed his understanding of the two people's statements, saying that this is human nature.

Wu Youde smiled and said, "In that case, I'd like to trouble you two to continue to help me collect some old items in the future, and we can continue as usual."

The clan members and Suo Qian were overjoyed and quickly agreed, saying that they would do their best to accomplish this task.

Suo Qian even took out an inkstone and said happily that it was a Songhua stone toad-shaped Laokeng Duan inkstone that he bought from Zou Hanwen, and it was also used by Emperor Shunzhi of the Qing Dynasty.

Seeing this inkstone with a special shape, Wu Youde immediately became interested.

He remembered that when he first met Suo Qian at Zou Hanwen's place, Suo Qian mentioned this inkstone. He didn't expect that after so much time, he still hadn't given up and actually got it from Zou Hanwen.

"He shouldn't be short of money, right? Why would he sell this thing?" Wu Youde asked.

"That was before."

Suo Qian smiled and said, "It's not possible now. Zou Ziguang Pavilion is no longer owned by the Zou family. It is a joint venture between the company and Zou Hanwen's monthly income has been greatly reduced.

This guy also likes to keep women and play with money. Which of these two things doesn't cost money?"

Wu Youde nodded.

This is a microcosm of an era...

There are many cases like Zou Hanwen. The power of the original owner has fallen into the hands of others, and the store business is becoming increasingly bleak. Naturally, the revenue is also declining month by month. I wonder how many time-honored brands will go bankrupt and close down in the future and disappear into history.

Speaking of Zou Hanwen,

Wu Youde thought of his brush again...

So far, it has not taken shape.

It’s still the same reason. Due to the shortage of raw materials, the crops need to be harvested one after another, and the cycle is about every three months.

Also, now Chen Xueru has gone to Kowloon with Tian Zao and Li Hongli.

The raw materials of these three people cannot be collected for the time being.

Therefore, we can only wait.

Good things never come too late, so he is not in a hurry.

……

At the end of December,

Wu Youde sent Niu Longtai, Tong Fu and six other brothers on a train to Tianjin, where they would take a boat south to Kowloon.

The two men also carried another reply letter from Wu Youde, and when they arrived in Kowloon, they asked them to pass it on to Chen Xueru.

In the middle of the month,
Chen Xueru sent another letter, saying that she had met with Yang Ergou and Xu Damao, and the two sides discussed the plan to plant a flag and establish a stick in Kowloon. At the same time, she also brought up the current situation of Yang Ergou and Xu Damao...

More than a year has passed since Yang Ergou and Xu Damao went south to Kowloon in November last year.

During this year, neither of them contacted Wu Youde once.

It’s not that they are unwilling to contact, but Wu Youde told them not to contact him, and when the time comes, someone will naturally contact them.

Having said that, Wu Youde still wanted to know about the situation of the two of them.

In the letter, Chen Xueru told Wu Youde in a very surprised tone that the situation was much better than she had imagined. She also praised Wu Youde for his long-term vision and foresight, comparable to the Sleeping Dragon of the Three Kingdoms, who had the ability to plan and win battles thousands of miles away!
how to say?

It turns out that after a year of hard work, Yang Ergou and Xu Damao have now established a firm foothold in the underground world of Kowloon.

Not only that, the two also have their own betting site and their own team.

Even in the underworld, he is a well-known newcomer, and his reputation is growing day by day!
Speaking of which,

We have to mention the current state of the underworld in Kowloon.

There are numerous gangs in Kowloon today and the underworld is rampant. These gangs are generally divided into local gangs and foreign gangs.

The most powerful local gang is the Triads, which is both the name of a society and a large factional organization.

There are several other more famous names of the Triad.

It is also called "Heaven and Earth Society" and "Hongmen".

It was originally an underground secret organization that opposed the Qing Dynasty and restored the Ming Dynasty in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. However, after hundreds of years of development, it spread to all corners of the country and formed different branches.

There are branches of the Hongmen not only in China, but also abroad.

As for the triads in Kowloon...

……

(End of this chapter)