"Sir, this is a Hu merchant from the north. Hu Fei. Little Beans said.

"Hello." Shang Wu shook each other's hands and greeted him cordially.

"Great, no, good sir." Hu Fei said.

"Hehe, okay. Good. Shang Wu laughed. Obviously, before that, Xiaodouzi must have taught them etiquette, so that they can quickly get to the point.

"This is Tian Qi. It's a salt seller. From Qingzhou. Xiaodouzi introduced.

"Hello sir." The other party said as he looked.

"Hmm." Shang Wu nodded, shook hands with the other party cordially, and in addition to this, there were a large number of cloth merchants, jewelry, and ironware merchants. Their financial estimates are usually small, but they are risk-taking. For example, that Tian Qi, in fact, he is a salt smuggler. In the current era of general increase in taxes, the people generally cannot afford to buy official salt, and they can only buy slightly cheaper private salt. Tian Qi is such a salt seller.

"You are exactly who we need. The Red Turbans welcome you, and for you, there will be more tax attention, and we will only collect a small part of the commercial tax on you, and for the rest, we just hope that you will be able to bring in a large amount of supplies. "Sangwu is very welcome, thankful.

"We want all your goods. In the future, we also hope that you can actively deliver more goods, and I know that it is not easy for you to do business once. Shang Wu said. In this era, although businessmen are rich, their political status is low, although there are many people in history who were born as merchants, but the problem is that their political future, as well as their personal political needs, did not achieve their goals, and in general, their condition is still not very good.

"You can visit our factory, what you need, we can cooperate with each other, we will buy and sell the goods fairly, we also have some goods here that you need to help sell, you can see each other." Shang Wu said and asked Xiao Douzi to take them on a tour, and Shang Wu needed to see the condition of the goods they traded.

"What is this?" The first thing merchants visited was the ironworks. A workshop has begun here, where they specialize in the production of iron horseshoe. Stirrups and other products were exported to the nomadic tribes of the north, from whom the warriors needed to exchange large quantities of meat, cheese, and wool.

The meat eating rate of the Shangwu army is very low. Elite troops, taking the teaching team as an example, can only do two meals a month at most, while the rest of the troops basically have no big extravagant expectations. They have a meat dish in a year, which is already very good. If this is the case for a long time, the soldiers will be seriously deficient in physical strength, and it is an empty word to carry out infantry mobile combat, because you will not be able to increase the physical strength of the soldiers, if you can ensure that they have enough strength to carry out long-distance running operations. In this way, everything is empty talk.

Although the stirrups and iron horseshoes were the most powerful for the cavalry with new technological weapons, Shang Wu had to export such weapons in exchange for food, as he lacked them at the moment. Albeit a helpless choice. But it's also the only option.

Shangwu also wanted to make contact with the official army, and if needed, he needed a short period of peace to develop, but unfortunately, the premise of peace was war. Peace can be achieved only through the means of war.

"What? No wool? Shang Wu asked, a clerk in charge of registration.

"No, sir, most of the merchants from the north trade in horses, furs, or fine furs, etc., and they will never trade in wool, but at most they have sheepskins." The other party introduced it like this. Then he pointed to the sheepskin in the back and said.

"Oh." Shang Wu was a little disappointed, so to speak, very disappointed, he originally thought that those merchants from the north would be able to provide more wool, but now it seems that he was wrong. Because of technical limitations, it is not difficult to blend cloth, but for the nomadic tribes in the north, it is very difficult, and it is difficult for them to believe that there is such a cloth, so they do not like to shear the wool very much. Instead, the sheepskin is cut off.

"How many sheep and how many cattle are there?" Shang Wu then asked.

"Hmm. There are only a few hundred heads, and we can only barely eat them, because these sheep and cattle also need a lot of forage, and it is very inconvenient to transport them long distances. So, in this case, the number is naturally much less. The clerk then explained. Shang Wu recorded it. Due to technical limitations, the nomadic herders in the north could only make meat jerky, or rudimentary cheese and canned meat. This means that their mode of transportation is extremely primitive, and in the process of long-distance transportation, it is easy to cause a large number of cattle and sheep to die.

"It would be nice if we could set up a meat processing plant there with them." Shang Wu said. This can solve the long-distance transportation, as well as the process of local wool production, but unfortunately, they are still far away from the north, they are located in the Jizhong Plain, to the north, it still needs more than 500 kilometers or so to reach the border area, where it is still difficult to set up a food processing factory. But it's good to have such a direction.

"Here's a method I wrote, making canned meat and letting the women in the kitchen try it. If you can, do it in large quantities. Shang Wu said. Sealing materials, Shang Wu found, there were still in ancient times, for example, jars, and sealing mud. It seems that the ancients have long known the idea of eliminating the release of air and creating a vacuum environment that can preserve food for a long time.

Then, Shang Wu checked the salt, Shang Wu picked it up and looked at it, and knew the quality of the salt. This is the coarse salt of coarse salt, because there is some sand in these salts, which is the common practice of some salt merchants to reduce costs and increase profits.

"There is a lot of salt in this table salt, and we need to process it further, maybe this processing will be good for us." Shangwu needed a large amount of sodium hydroxide, as well as sodium carbonate, and if it weren't for the small amount of sulfur, Shangwu would have been eager to use it to refine sulfuric acid. Because he lacks such things, these are important industrial raw materials for upgrading.

But he can make soap, so they can export it on a large scale.

"Sir. We don't have this saline-alkali land, but we have this saline-alkali land, and in many places, especially some places on the river beach, the salinity there is very serious. The clerk reminded Shang Wu to arrive. Perhaps their governor will be able to solve the land problem.

"Saline?" Shang Wu asked curiously.

"Yes, sir, there are many places, and there are places like this." The clerk said. The salinization of cultivated land in China is still relatively serious, and many lands have such a situation, large-scale transformation is very costly, which is also an important factor limiting the grain production of land, but for Shangwu, this is good news, so that they can get a large amount of caustic soda, and then can make soap on a large scale. It is also an important export commodity. For example, if you sell it to the densely populated and commercially developed Luoyang area, such a thing can definitely bring great progress. At the same time, it can also generate another important industry, cost. Constantly phosphate fertilizer, ammonia fertilizer. All these can greatly promote the increase of grain production.

"You quickly let Xiaodouzi stabilize the mood of those businessmen, let them visit more places, if necessary, you can also visit our military factory, I need to make a new thing for them, that is, soap, which can greatly help them clean up things, if they can do this, we will be rich." Shang Wu said this to the clerk, and then he left here with a bag of salt, he needed to refine a large amount of sodium carbonate, even calcium carbonate was good, and then use quicklime to carry out a large-scale chemical reaction to obtain sodium hydroxide and some sodium carbonate. With these things, saponification can be carried out. Thus getting soap, as for soap, this is something that needs to be further processed, but at the moment things are too luxurious for them. Or the market for soap is larger.

Inside the textile factory in Lijiazhuang. Hu Fei, a northern Hu merchant, was very interested in the fabrics produced here.

"Light, but also warm. Breathable. It's a fine fabric. We are willing to exchange twenty sheep for such cloth, even ten cows, and we are willing to exchange them. Hu Fei said very boldly. He immediately saw the value of this kind of cloth, wear-resistant, warm-keeping, these have always been a suitable cloth for the northern steppe peoples, their winter clothes are extremely heavy, and it is difficult to move.

"And those iron horseshoes, we also need a thousand, no, ten thousand. Ten thousand, we need ten thousand iron horseshoes, and if there are more, we will ask for more. Hu Fei said. They are mainly horses in their business, and they know that horses can damage the hooves of horses after long journeys, and some good horses also run too much, resulting in the hooves being wasted. But with the iron horseshoe, they can avoid such a situation, and the speed of the horse's march will be greatly increased.

"We still need the chief's approval for this, but don't worry about that, we have other goods for you to see." Xiaodouzi introduced.

On the contrary, stirrups did not attract Hu Fei's attention, because they are a people on horseback, they have a strong ability to balance on horseback, and such a thing as stirrups is a burden to them, and they don't need such a thing to maintain balance yet.