In charge of the management of Nantang's funds was the Portuguese and deacon Fu Jixun, who had just been taken down for opposing the reform.

Therefore, Xiong Sanba did not know how much money the Macau Jesuits had remitted.

Father-in-law Wei asked Xiong Sanba to ask Fu Jixun, and not long after, Father Xiong came over and said that Fu Jixun had received two sums of Macau Huiyin.

Father Xiong was accompanied by the Belgian Luo Qinan, who knew more about this aspect, and Father Xiong specially asked him to come and explain the situation to His Excellency the Archbishop.

According to Luo Qinan, the two sums of silver remitted by the Jesuits in Macau were one in cash, totaling 15,000 taels. The sea transport first arrived in Shantou, Guangdong, and then the land transport to the southern capital, and then the Cao transport into Beijing.

The other is Huiyin, which is the popular money bank acceptance. It was converted by the money banks in Guangzhou, Yangzhou, and Jingshi, and it was about 35,000 taels.

The transportation and exchange of these two sums of silver went smoothly without any setbacks. At the same time, whether it is sea or land exchange, the handlers are all merchants engaged in maritime trade in Guangdong.

"Your Excellency, the Jesuits in China have a channel of communication with the Guangdong government in China, and there are also special Guangdong businessmen in charge of funding, and in the past, the Jesuits generally allocated funds to Chinese mainland to these Guangdong businessmen..."

According to Luo Qinan, many of Guangdong's "Cantonese merchants" were engaged in maritime trade, and were suppliers of raw materials just like the merchants in Jiangnan.

Therefore, the Cantonese businessmen helped the Jesuits, and the Jesuits in turn helped them to export their goods, so that the two sides helped each other and benefited each other, which was a win-win relationship.

At present, the largest cargo transit point in East and Southeast Asia is Manila in Luzon, while the "economic" center is Macau, and Daming is the largest exporter of goods.

Politically, Macao is under the jurisdiction of Xiangshan County, Guangdong, and both sovereignty and governing power and judicial power belong to the Ming Dynasty, and "lend-lease" are two different concepts.

It is accurate to describe that Macao should belong to the Ming Dynasty in the southernmost part of the empire set up a window for opening to the outside world, the establishment of this window is not simply Portugal seeking residency, but the influence of maritime trade brought about by the Longqing switch.

The most direct impact of Macao's opening up was that every year, about 14 million taels of silver were imported to Macao through the Philippines, and then imported from Macao to the Ming Dynasty.

During the same period, the fiscal revenue of the Ming Dynasty was less than 5 million taels a year.

Half a century of silver imports made the Ming Dynasty a veritable "silver empire", with conservative estimates of hundreds of millions of taels of silver flowing into China through Macao.

In this process, the Macao "Special Administrative Region", which belongs to Xiangshan County in Guangdong, has also undertaken the important task of cultural exchanges between the East and the West.

Under the influence of "learning from the West to the East", there are a large number of officials in China such as the Jesuits and Xu Guangqi who are committed to reform and opening up; It is also the arrival of a large number of Western firearms and technical talents; There is a story of Western mercenaries fighting the Tartars for the Ming Dynasty; There is the story of the Ming Dynasty emperor being baptized into Catholicism; There is the story of the Ming Dynasty asking the Varisean for help......

Even the fall of the Ming Dynasty has an important relationship with Macao.

Because of Macao, the window to the outside world, hundreds of millions of taels of silver flowed into the Ming Dynasty, but this silver did not enter the treasury of the Ming Dynasty, or most of it did not enter the treasury, but into the pockets of merchants and gentry.

In the normal situation of economics, the influx of a large amount of silver must have caused the prices of the Ming Dynasty to skyrocket, in fact, until the death of the Ming Dynasty, the prices of the Ming Dynasty were relatively stable, and the silver not only did not depreciate but became more expensive.

The reason is that although there is a lot of silver, it is in the hands of a few wealthy merchants, because of the single trade structure, the production of silk, tea, porcelain and other goods does not need to spend a lot of money to expand reproduction, so merchants like to hoard the silver in their hands, forming a huge "silver reserve".

If silver does not enter the consumer sector, it naturally does not trigger inflation.

In order to earn more silver, the merchants and gentry planted a large number of cash crops, which directly led to a decrease in grain production in the Ming Dynasty, and the amount of arable land in the famous grain-producing areas of Jiangnan and Huguang continued to decline. At the same time as the decline in grain, domestic demand for cash crops is seriously insufficient, and prices are depressed for a long time, which on the contrary contributes to deflation.

In the late Ming Dynasty, the Philippines and Japan, two important silver exporting areas, suddenly and significantly reduced the outflow due to their own reasons, which caused a "money shortage" in the "silver empire" of the Ming Dynasty. Natural disasters continued to occur in the country, and the imperial court could not provide food for disaster relief, so the famine became more and more intense, and finally even encountered difficulties in military expenses and daily expenses.

In the face of severe deflation, Chongzhen gave two fierce medicines - open source and throttling, but it was these two tricks that completely pushed the crumbling Ming Dynasty to its ruin.

Gonggong Wei is well aware of this history, so he vigorously opened maritime affairs, in order to take back the huge profits of maritime trade from the people, not to mention all of them, half or even half of them.

Silver is a good thing, but it needs to be circulated. When money moves, money will make money, and money will buy things. Holding on to the money piled up at home, looking satisfying is beneficial to a small family, but it is not beneficial to a big country.

The Macau Jesuits were able to send 50,000 taels, and Grandpa Wei was quite satisfied. He asked Xiong Sanba and Luo Qinan to talk about Macau, and something caught the attention of his old man.

This thing is speculation.

In Macao, there are a large number of Western merchants engaged in a new type of trading - "arbitrage." ”

Since the opening of Longqing, a large number of commodities in the Ming Dynasty were exported to the West, and a large amount of silver was exchanged for a large amount of silver at a low price, so the Ming Dynasty became the world's largest inflow of silver.

In the face of the frenzied influx of silver, the administrators of the empire did not keep up with the times, and their methods of managing the currency were very backward.

Luo Qinan said that the ratio of gold and silver in all countries in the world is more than 1:10, that is, one tael of gold for at least ten taels of silver.

In the Ming Dynasty, because the official currency did not recognize gold and silver, the exchange of gold and silver was mainly formed spontaneously by the people, and the exchange ratio was between 1:5.5-7, and about five to seven taels of silver could be exchanged for one tael of gold.

The difference in exchange price between the two was very obvious, and there was room for speculation, so a large number of foreign merchants shipped silver to the Ming Dynasty to exchange for gold, and in this way they made excess profits effortlessly.

The profits of this "arbitrage" are astonishing, and if all the silver that flows into China every year from Macao is arbitraged, it is equivalent to those speculative businessmen taking about 5 million dollars of silver out of China out of thin air every year.

Of course, in fact, it is impossible to have such a large-scale arbitrage space, and Wei Gonggong privately estimated that businessmen engaged in arbitrage business could take away at most one or two million taels a year.

It's not that these Western merchants don't want to take more, but the current private exchange business in the Ming Dynasty is still relatively scattered and has not formed a whole, so the exchange ability of a single family is not strong.

Moreover, the exchange business in this era was not as developed as in later generations, and it was possible to do it at any counter, but to travel to different places, which limited the possibility of large-scale exchange and cash-out in terms of time.

For example, the 35,000 taels of remittance remitted by the church of Macao to Nantang was not remitted directly to Beijing at one time, but was first redeemed by the Guangzhou Commercial Bank, then transferred from Yangzhou, and finally accepted by Beijing Shi. A total of three banks are involved in this business.

"Does the church engage in arbitrage?" My father-in-law was very interested in this.

Luo Qinan has only been in the East for more than a year, and he is not too clear about this.

Xiong Sanba came earlier, so he had heard that there were indeed Jesuit personnel in China who were engaged in this kind of business, but he didn't know who did it.

"If Your Excellency the Archbishop wants to know about this, you can send someone to Macao to find out." Xiong Sanba said.

Father-in-law Wei was noncommittal, and asked Xiong Sanba to prepare the 50,000 taels he had remitted, and he would send someone to pick it up in two days. Xiong Sanba had no opinion on this, because Guo Jujing had already told him that His Excellency the Archbishop needed silver to move the heart of the Ming Emperor in order to persuade the Ming Emperor to send an imperial army to fight against the reactionary Japanese shogunate that was persecuting Catholics.

"Don't call me Archbishop in the future, call me Sect Master."

Wei Gonggong said fairly, Yin Yin looked at Xiong Sanba, "Xiong, Nantang here is to be a pilot for the sinification of Catholicism, China is the weight of the East, and Jingshi is the weight of China, I would like to grant you the position of the head of the Jingshi Catholic Church as the head of the East, and I hope you can shepherd and evangelize and carry forward the cause of God." ”