open sea

Chapter 832 Porcelain Box
When Alva sent envoys to various plantations to the border to discuss with the plantation owners about buying and selling grain to the Ming Dynasty, these new nobles had already sold all the grain that could be sold.

Hundreds of plantations hung with white cloth bags on the east side of the Mingxi border have become the most beautiful scenery here.

There are also large characters printed on the bag: Flour and half a stone.

People say that this is a symbol of friendly frontier, and a monk recorded in his autobiography that this scene shows the prosperity of Mingxi frontier trade.

If you don't delve into the background of the prosperity, the border trade is indeed very prosperous. Planters and merchants are keen to exchange their goods for Wanli Yazhou Tongbao, and then go to the other side of the official road to buy silk and porcelain.

There are not many goods in Zhangjiagou. It is said that more goods are still on the way, but the price of porcelain and silk is relatively cheap. The purchase price of the Netherlands, even with the sea freight, is still profitable.

They drove the grain of several carriages and exchanged thousands of Tongbao in Wangjiabao, or simply bought Tongbao with silver, because the casting process of silver coins was not good, and a silver coin weighing one tael could be exchanged for [-] Tongbao.

Then in Wangjiagou on the opposite side, four thousand tongbao can buy a piece of silk with excellent workmanship of various colors, and if five thousand tongbao is sold, you can buy a piece of silk with dark ribs and dark vertical lines. The silk with dark ruyi pattern is more exquisite in workmanship, ranging from seven thousand to eight thousand.

Of course, the most expensive ones are not those sold well in Daming, but black silk or silk with variegated bright patterns. In Daming, basically no one wears such patterns, like bumpkins, but people here like it, even Spain. The aristocrats and merchants in the country are still placing orders across the border.

Of course, they also want bright red silk and satin, but the merchants don't sell them, not even ten thousand pieces.

Big red, crow blue, and bright yellow are not for sale. In the words of the merchant: "You are not worthy of wearing it!"

As for the Western merchants who want to buy porcelain, they have been in a hurry for a long time. They stayed overnight in several Western plantations east of Wangjiabao and Zhangjiagou. There are goods on the side, but here they keep saying that porcelain is on the road, porcelain is on the road, porcelain is on the road...

Porcelain is really on the way.

In the Ming Dynasty, porcelain was a luxury item for daily use. It was divided into coarse porcelain and fine porcelain, and coarse porcelain and fine porcelain were divided into upper, middle and lower grades. However, even the top-grade fine porcelain was not very expensive.

If there is no historical significance or fine carving, the price of high-quality fine porcelain bowls, plates, cups and bottles is three to five cents of silver, while the price of low-grade fine porcelain is even cheaper, and you can buy ten pieces for three to five cents of silver.

Therefore, in the early years overseas in Southeast Asia, such as Borneo, even if there was a premium for sea trade, ordinary people could still buy one as a family treasure.

But in the Mingxi trade in Asia, Chen Mu didn't intend to sell them at such a 'cheap price' as the porcelain that flowed into Europe.

The baggage transported by the ship in the second phase of Beiyang, those celadon plates and white porcelain bowls were bundled with straw ropes and stuffed into the cabin for shock absorption, which was much more than the population of the people transported. It was a big project to put more than 15 pieces of porcelain on the ship.

More than 15 is just the number after the fall and slamming are removed. Almost every group of porcelain is damaged due to external force during shipping. In the process of loading and unloading Lifu in Changsheng County, there are some damages, and there are some problems in the sub-package. Negligence, resulting in a loss of more than [-]%.

But if the porcelain had been shipped with the silk, it would have arrived long ago, but they did not. These batches of porcelain were slowly repackaged under the orders of the Asia Economic Strategy. The burnt pattern is packed into sets and put into a tightly fitting lacquer box.

The cost of a lacquered wooden box even exceeds that of a set of porcelain.

Each set of lacquer boxes is painted with the same decorative painting as the porcelain inside, and is combined with a copper lock buckle. The inside contains several dishes, wooden chopsticks, display plates, and porcelain bottles, which are combined into a set. Set the upper, middle and lower classes.

After completing these procedures, they will be escorted by the banner army guards and transported to the border.

15 to 30 Tongbao for low-grade lacquer box porcelain, [-] to [-] Tongbao for medium lacquer box porcelain, and [-] to [-] Tongbao for high-grade lacquer box porcelain.

And on the inside of the top cover of each set of high-quality lacquer boxes, there is a handwritten message written by Chen Mu himself.

Since Zhao Shizhen entered the shogunate, Sai Lugong's calligraphy attainments have not improved at all in the past few years, but he has completely let himself go. After realizing that he does not need to rely on foreign objects to raise his status, he has a very easy life. More than [-] sets of high-quality lacquer boxes are handy for writing gifts.

Although Zou Yuanbiao, Zhao Shizhen, Xu Wei and others in Changsheng County felt that Chen Mu's inscription on the lacquer box was indeed a good idea, but everyone found that the starting point of Chen Mu's inscription seemed to be different from others.

The key to other people's inscriptions is the word, leaving a name is only one of them, but what about their Marshal Chen?The key is the name, it doesn't matter what word is mentioned, even chanting goose.

For a set of lacquer box porcelain, he can divide his name into seven or eight places to write, for example, leave the word Jinghai on the wooden box, cover his own private seal on the bottom of the plate, leave the date on the bottom of the bowl, write Beiyang important ministers on the handle of the cup, and write on the bottle. In the body, Jing Haibo, Chen Mu, the important minister of the Northern Seas of the Ming Empire, the Asiatic strategist, should be written.

To be honest, as far as Chen Mu is showing off, Zhao Shizhen plans to deduct a part of his salary to buy a set for the Duke of Alva, and put Chen Mu everywhere at home to eat and sleep—how ​​troublesome?

Of course, not all porcelain is sold at such a high price. There are also many pieces that cannot be assembled into a complete set. Those are relatively cheap, but even if they are cheap, these porcelains are pulled to the border by trucks, and no merchant on the other side of the border can be transported by trucks. of.

By the way, Alva can.

Because Chen Mu still paid for the [-] tons of grain sent by the Western Army earlier, he was not petty and would not give this little grain money to others. In fact, there was not so much money on the border at the beginning, and the money had to come from Changsheng County print.

Of course, whether the Duke of Alva is happy with the money is another matter.

27 Tongbao, 270 eight pieces of [-] Tongbao denomination notes and four [-] Tongbao denominations.

The purchase price of grain given by Chen Mu was already low. Except for the plantation owners who were frightened by the "green cloak" on the border and had to pay protection fees, the closer the other plantation owners were to the east coast, the less willing they were to sell grain. Not to mention buying cotton bags, it will take a long time for them to transport the grain there.

Not to mention that all the rice and noodles are transported. The rice here is planted by the nobles near Valencia in southern Spain. The output is not high. It is eaten by the nobles and mercenaries. Now Part of it will also be sent to the border under the order of the Governor's Office of New Spain.

The escorted slave workers have never eaten anything, and accidents are easy to happen on the way. For example, the escorted slave workers secretly picked up a bag of Spanish rice while the guards were sleeping-this is still good, near the border For the purpose of transporting grain, groups of slave laborers repeatedly attacked the guards, carrying grain bags and crossing the border to join Daming.

Freedom in the west!
The slave workers have spread the word that the Ming army looks almost like them, and treats them as brothers of the same clan. They are paid for working for the Ming people, and they can rent their own land after saving money, except for the taxes and hard labor of serving the emperor. You don’t have to spend anything outside, you can own your own property, and people in the Ming Dynasty didn’t just sleep with their wives.

Although planters are not very willing to sell grain, they are happy to buy goods from the other side of the border. If it is not appropriate to exchange grain, they will exchange it with silver coins. None of these planters has a net worth of several thousand silver coins, 22 silver coins It is very suitable to change three or four bolts of silk and satin and go back to make a suit of clothes.

After all, the silk mills in Mexico City have not produced these things for a long time because there was no import of Nanyang raw silk and the subsequent uprising.

Trade across the border had flourished even before the official arms trade between the two countries had begun.

　Good morning!

　　
　
(End of this chapter)