After seven days in Dawan, the combined caravan completed a huge amount of trade.

Ma Yuan also took people to rest in Dawan for a while, replenished food and water, and then carefully selected a group of official business travelers to follow him to the Guishan Kingdom to do business, and most of the other business travelers were allowed to go south to Shache Country to do business, and the soldiers were divided into two routes here.

After Ma Yuan and the others complete their mission in the Kushan Empire, they will return to catch up with them.

Some of the caravans that embarked on the return journey carried 30 first-class horses and more than 500 second-class horses obtained from Dawan, and slowly embarked on the return journey.

Except for the two excellent sweaty horses, these horses will be sent to Luoyang and handed over to Guo, and the others will be sent to the Longyou Horse Farm and the Bingzhou Horse Farm as stallions.

After the preparations were completed, Ma Yuan and the others set off under the leadership of the envoy of King Dawan, who said that he would let the envoy send them to Lan City, the imperial capital of the Kushan Empire.

Ma Yuan and the others followed the envoy of King Dawan and walked through a lot of mountain roads, going around and around, which was very difficult.

It took about half a month's effort, and Ma Yuan and the others finally followed a group of Dawan merchants to a pass.

There were castle towers at the pass, as well as guards and soldiers, who seemed to be inspecting and collecting taxes on the caravans entering the pass.

The envoy of King Dawan could speak Chinese, and after explaining to Ma Yuan, he stepped forward to talk to the officer guarding the pass.

The two of them muttered for a while, and the officer was obviously a little surprised, and then stepped forward with the envoy of King Dawan and watched Ma Yuan and his large number of caravans.

Seeing that Ma Yuan's appearance was indeed different from most of the people he had seen, the officer believed what the envoy of King Dawan said that this was an official caravan from the Wei Empire, a great power in the east.

I believe that Ma Yuan and others came to Guishan to do big business with Guishan people.

The Wei Empire has a historical heritage, and the Guishan naturally has it, as a descendant of the Yue people, the Guishan Empire also has some exchanges and frictions with the Han Empire a long time ago.

Not everyone knows, but there are certainly people who do.

They also knew about the existence of the distant Han Empire, because they also used silk, what they didn't know was that the Han Empire no longer existed, and now it was the Wei Empire that ruled the Central Plains.

However, for them, it is naturally not very important, just as Guo does not know what the current emperor of Guishuang is called.

As long as it doesn't get in the way of doing business, it's fine.

Ma Yuan is not an official envoy, he is not a professional diplomat, but without a professional diplomat, he can barely make a cameo appearance as a diplomat.

Looking at the huge caravan with no end in sight, the Kushan officer swallowed his spit and waved his hand, indicating that he was allowed to let go, and did not even ask for the usual blackmail.

Out of the pass, Ma Yuan had a feeling of sudden enlightenment.

After many days of difficult trekking on the mountain road, I suddenly came to a relatively flat ground, and it was really comfortable to walk.

All the way forward, not many days, Ma Yuan looked at the endless flat land, and at the position of the horizon, he saw a city that looked very large.

"That's Lan City, it's the capital of the Guishan Kingdom, their king is there, that city is very big, except for the city in Liangzhou, I've never seen such a big city, and there are many people in it, if it's a business, it should be very convenient."

The envoy of King Dawan introduced Lan Clan City.

Ma Yuan nodded.

For a large country with a population of millions and hundreds of thousands of troops, his attitude should be different, and he should not treat the Western Regions, which were vassal states of the Wei Empire.

Guo Peng also deliberately explained that these countries should not be treated as vassals, but should be taken seriously.

The Wei Empire will take the initiative to have friendly relations with them, rather than military confrontation or want to take over vassal states, and the order of magnitude of a country with millions of people is completely different from that of the countries of the Western Regions, and the distance is still so far away, it is definitely not a simple military confrontation that can be ended.

The two countries can establish friendly exchanges, they can trade with each other, do business with each other, and make money together, and don't think about the rest now.

Along the way, the envoy of King Dawan continued to introduce the Guishan country he knew, helping Ma Yuan to understand this country better.

The domestic commercial trade of the Kushan was very developed, and unlike the Wei Empire, which focused too purely on agricultural production, the Kushan not only had agricultural areas, but also specialized animal husbandry economic zones.

It is a country that attaches equal importance to agriculture and animal husbandry.

Grains, fruits, handicrafts and weapons are shipped to livestock areas, while furs, livestock, textile raw materials, meat and dairy products are sold to farming areas.

They help each other to complement each other, and use each other's strengths to help each other's weaknesses, so that the meat and milk obtained from farming and animal husbandry can be purchased in any city of the country.

Their merchants are also quite active, and in addition to domestic trade, they are also quite active in international trade.

They traveled west to Anxib and Rome and east to China, and were very qualified middlemen, bringing each other's products from China and Rome to each other's countries.

They also had a very good level of artisanal metallurgy, were good at textiles and jewelry, and not only that, were also very good at coinage.

Before Ma Yuan led the caravan into Lan City, he was trading with some curious Guishan merchants on the roadside, and they were very surprised to learn that Ma Yuan and the others were from China in the east, and then immediately expressed their desire to do business with Ma Yuan.

In this era, in addition to professional spies, business travel always has the most information, where Ma Yuan and the others came from, they understood it at once, and then immediately saw the business opportunity, and immediately expressed their desire to do business with Ma Yuan.

After inquiring about the envoys of King Dawan, Ma Yuan decided to start doing business with them, and by the way, he learned about the local prices.

So on the side of the road, Ma Yuan set up a position to trade with these Guishan merchants he met by chance.

Because each other's goods didn't know how to exchange at an equal price, Ma Yuan took out the gold and silver nuggets he carried, and the merchants of Kushan saw it and also took out the gold and silver coins they carried, as well as copper coins.

Ma Yuan handed over his gold and silver to the Guishan merchant to test the purity, and he also took the gold and silver coins to check the purity.

While sending someone to check the purity, he looked at the gold coin he was holding.

On the front is a bust of a person, and in turn, you can see some statues of people who don't know what they are, and there is a circle of words like words around it that I have never seen before.

Although he couldn't understand it, it didn't prevent Ma Yuan from giving a good score to the level of metal smelting in this country.

At least when it comes to minting gold coins, they're doing a pretty good job.

The pattern of the gold coin looks exquisite, and there are many merits in the details, which shows the good intentions of the craftsmen.

The condition is good, and it is also very weighty in the hand, and it is a very good gold coin, which proves that the economy of the Kushan country is very good.

Moreover, this coinage technique is very high.

Ma Yuan silently gave this country a score in his heart, thinking that this country is very desirable in technology, and if he has the opportunity, he would like to have a technical exchange with this country.

See what technology the country has to learn from.

This is also what Guo Peng explained, to see if there is any technology in the Guishan Kingdom that can be used on the Wei Empire and that the Wei Empire itself does not have.

Now it seems that the coinage technology is very interesting.

It is a pity that there is no general circulation of gold in the Wei State, and the circulation is copper coins, and the legal tender is only copper coins.

Although precious metals such as gold and silver also have the function of money in a certain sense, they basically only appear in the process of commodity trading, or the exchange of interests of the upper class, and the number is not large and the number is small.

Their joint caravan was still to facilitate large transactions, and Guo Peng took out a lot of gold for them.

It is indeed less, not enough, completely not enough for circulation, if gold and silver are used for circulation, deflation can kill the Wei Empire in minutes.

But speaking of which, it seems that there is a lot of gold in the Kushan Country?

Without sufficient gold reserves, such minted gold coins cannot be circulated, and Ma Yuan still understands this.

If there was not enough gold, silver, and copper in Kushan, it would be impossible to allow gold, silver, and copper coins to circulate in the economic field.

The Wei Empire could not use gold and silver to circulate, because the reserves of gold and silver were not enough, and it was not until the Ming Empire that silver could be circulated in the monetary field.

With the great geographical discoveries in Europe, the primitive accumulation of capital developed to its peak, and the triangular trade accumulated a great deal of wealth over the centuries, after which large quantities of silver and gold from the Americas were imported into the Ming Empire through the commercial activities of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands.

Then the Ming Empire had enough silver to engage in the silver standard, so that silver could enter the field of economic circulation.

Before that, it really couldn't be done.

Even the circulation of copper coins is a little tight, and Guo also remelted hundreds of millions of Dong Zhuo's small coins for this purpose.

Guo once had the idea of using copper cannons to develop gunpowder weapons, and then calculated the copper reserves he mastered, as well as the prospects for future economic development, and finally decisively dispelled such an idea.

The Wei Empire lacked precious metals in the country, and even the reserves of copper were not so sufficient.

With the development of the economy, the demand for copper coins in the Wei Empire rose further, and the Dongchang was also set up by Guo in a sense to avoid deflation.

He needs a team of professionals, a team of professionals who will open the mine efficiently and accurately.

The economy is developing so well, it would be interesting if there was deflation due to the lack of money in circulation.

Ma Yuan knew all these things, and Guo Peng had said them when he had a meeting, so Ma Yuan knew Guo Peng's desire for gold, silver and copper.

Guo is really very eager for a large amount of precious metals such as gold, silver, and copper.

Ma Yuan also knew that in the past, gold was used in China in the Western Han Dynasty, and there seemed to be a lot of gold at that time, but then the gold was gone.

Ma Yuan was puzzled.