It is no wonder that these foreigners made a fuss, they traveled all the way from Europe to the Far East, and finally saw the golden country described by Marco Polo.

They came to the Far East almost with a pilgrimage mentality, and for what? Isn't it just to earn cute coins?

But these foreigners who came from Europe to the Far East soon discovered the embarrassing fact that they did not have many suitable goods in their hands to sell to the Ming Dynasty, which in turn had a large number of precious goods that they needed.

Silk and porcelain, in particular, are worth many times or even dozens of times once they are shipped back to Europe.

But in order to purchase these goods, they have to come up with the corresponding goods or gold and silver!

As for the goods, mainly spices, but spices are also urgently needed in Europe, and the demand for spices by Europeans who are very large is even greater than that of Chinese.

As for gold and silver, everyone knows that these things are good things, so how can they be willing to trade them?

This confusion of the foreigners has plagued them for two or three hundred years in historical time and space, and in the process, they were forced to take out a large amount of silver to purchase goods from China, and a lot of silver from the Americas was actually not shipped back to Europe, but to the Ming Dynasty.

This continued until the eve of the Opium Wars, when they finally found a commodity that could be traded, opium, ending the embarrassing situation that had lasted for hundreds of years.

The opium trade also directly led to the outbreak of the two opium wars, which plunged China into a nearly semi-colonial era.

Of course, no one would think about such a distant thing yet, even Li Xuan himself was too lazy to think about it.

Now these foreigners have found that with the outbreak of war, in addition to silver, these Chinese have a great demand for their guns and other arms.

An old twelve-pound naval gun can be bought for more than five hundred taels of silver, while the price of such a brand-new naval gun in Europe is only about two hundred taels.

Any old arquebus can easily be sold for more than ten taels of silver, while the price of this arquebus in the Far East used to be only two or three taels of silver.

Therefore, many foreigners quickly threw themselves into the army of arms trade with China, but unfortunately they did not have much inventory on hand, and it is unlikely that they could really transport naval guns and muskets from Europe for sale, so the transportation cost is too high and not cost-effective at all.

However, this is not impossible, for example, it is possible to forge guns directly in the colonies in the South Seas.

Although the colonization activities of Western countries in Southeast Asia have not been so rampant at present, it is worth mentioning that the Portuguese have already occupied Malacca and established colonial rule.

Spain also arrived in the South Seas and tried to colonize the Philippines, but failed, and the later sea horsemen and Dutch have not yet appeared in the South Seas.

So the Western colonial countries that are currently active in Southeast Asia are mainly Portugal.

Of course, although other Western countries did not establish colonies in Southeast Asia, it did not mean that their merchant ships would not come and trade with the Ming Dynasty.

In addition, it is worth noting that at this time, the colonial forces of Western countries were not strong in the Far East Sea, and the most powerful were actually the sailors of the Ming Dynasty, followed by the pirates who were collectively known as the Japanese pirates.

Among them, because the sailors of the Ming Dynasty mainly stuck to the coast, the maritime forces active in the far sea were mainly pirates from the Far East.

The strength of these pirates is not weak, and there are many large and small pirate gangs, ranging from a few ships with dozens of people, to hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of horses.

If there is a super leader in the waters of the Far East who can integrate all the pirate forces, then the power of this pirate is enough to sweep away the sailors of the Ming Dynasty and the colonial fleets of Western countries, and completely dominate the Far East seas, but unfortunately, this kind of thing is impossible, even Deng Chenggong, who is entrenched in Taiwan in later generations, cannot do it.

Since there are a large number of foreigner fleets in this place, and their ships are basically armed merchant ships, it is okay for both the Tang Dynasty and Wang Yue to purchase artillery and muskets.

It's just that it's more difficult to get a 12-pound naval gun, and ordinary merchant ships don't equip this thing, many are still equipped with 9-pound and 6-pound guns, and 12-pound naval guns are usually relatively rare, and some people generally don't sell them easily.

However, this principle became a non-principle under the silver bullets of the Tang army and Wang Yue, and a large number of artillery and muskets were directly dismantled and then sold, and then they were also eager to go to Malacca and other places to purchase more naval guns and muskets to be sold to the Tang army and the Ming army.

Li Xuan was also happy to see these reactions of the foreigners, and instructed the Ministry of Commerce to make a promise that as long as the foreigners dared to bring in naval guns and muskets, then they would be open to purchase.

Especially naval guns, regardless of whether they are twelve-pound or nine-pound or six-pound, or even three-pound or so small guns, whether they are semi-cannons or long guns, or light robes or even shotguns, all of them are required.

After all, in terms of artillery technology, Europe in these years is already enough to hang the artillery technology in East Asia, just look at the naval guns equipped with the Spanish warships in the 16th century, 48-pound, 32-pound, and 24-pound guns are the main force of naval artillery, and the 16-pounder, eleven-pounder, and seven-pounder naval guns are only secondary firepower.

As for the Franc cannon that the Ming army was vastly equipped with, that is, small and medium-caliber shotguns, people didn't even bother to list the list of naval guns, that thing was just auxiliary firepower.

Under the leadership of Li Xuan, the Tang Dynasty spent so much effort to be able to produce seven-pound artillery, and this seven-pound artillery is actually not a standard cannon, it should be said to be a light semi-cannon, that is, the pursuit of power and lighter gun weight, but not much pursuit of range.

The Ming Dynasty is not much stronger than the Tang Dynasty, at most they can only be equipped with the general cannon and the Franc machine gun, the Franc cannon is not mentioned, the general cannon has three specifications, respectively, it fires seven catties, five catties, three catties of shells, in fact, it is the same as the seven catties, five catties, and three catties of field artillery in the Tang Dynasty, but the number of this kind of general cannon in the Ming army is relatively small, far less extensive than the Franc cannon.

As for why, this involves the question of the combat concept of the contemporary Ming army or the question of what kind of preference, they prefer to use shotshots, this cannon can bombard a large area of the enemy in the past, so even if it is their general cannon or the imitation of the Hongyi cannon in historical time and space, most of the time it is also shot.

Why do you like to use scattered bullets, this is also related to the strength of the enemy faced by the Ming Dynasty, because the Ming Dynasty has never encountered an enemy with a large number of advanced firearms, which is a typical lack of demand and no motivation.

Now that they have encountered the puppet Tang Thief Army, an enemy who likes and is good at using firearms, they naturally attach importance to this aspect and purchase foreigners' ordnance on a large scale.

Naturally, the Tang Army was not far behind, and basically made acquisitions openly, and the more naval artillery the better, and even better if it obtained their artillery-making technical talents.

However, in the case of muskets, the Tang Dynasty did not want to directly purchase muskets shipped by foreigners, and it was best to order them according to the requirements of the Tang Dynasty, and the most important condition was that the caliber must be 14 mm.

Because this takes into account the combined problems of ammunition generality, soldier's physical strength and power, etc., and secondly, it is also convenient to modify these arquebuses purchased from abroad.

That's right, if the Tang Dynasty bought their original muskets, they would need to be transformed.

After purchasing a batch of artillery, in fact, the Tang Dynasty Division also purchased a batch of muskets, but after using them, the generals of the Tang Dynasty Division found that the performance of these muskets with a caliber of 20 mm was not as good as their own muskets.

But it's not easy to use and buy it, because if they don't buy it, Wang Yue will buy it, in line with the attitude of not letting Wang Yue buy more ordnance, but all ordnance, Tang Jun will actively buy it, and it doesn't matter if the price is higher.

Besides, even if the performance is poor, it is a musket, and buying a few hundred can effectively supplement the firearms power of the Tang Dynasty's division, after all, the Tang Dynasty's own gun production has seriously restricted the expansion of the army, so the Tang Dynasty will not let go of any source of ordnance that can be expanded.

However, the original goods bought cannot be used directly, you have to modify one or two first, and the caliber cannot be changed, you can only add sleeve bayonets, crosshairs, rulers and other accessories, and then unify them to fit the whole ammunition of paper shells.

Therefore, when the follow-up procurement, the Tang Dynasty put forward the demand, which was to have a caliber of 14 mm, and to leave room for modification.

This procurement model is basically to entrust foreigners to produce the body of the musket, and some fragmentary spare parts are produced by the Tang Dynasty and finally assembled.

The Tang army and the Ming army made a large purchase at the mouth of the Pearl River, and almost bought all the ordnance on the foreigner's ship near the mouth of the Pearl River, which was naturally impossible to buy now, but some shrewd foreign merchants immediately ran back to Nanyang and other places, ready to bring more arms to trade, and they found that guns and cannons were better to sell than spices or something, and they were more profitable.

And this also caused a rather peculiar thing, that is, inside and outside the city of Guangzhou, the artillery equipped by both sides, especially the twelve-pounder guns, was purchased from the foreigners, or to be precise, from the same Portuguese, and even these twelve-pounder naval guns were purchased from the same ship.

The Portuguese directly dismantled the naval guns they wore and sold them to both sides!

And these artillery pieces also sang the prelude to the Battle of Guangzhou!

The rumbling cannon also announced the official outbreak of the Battle of Guangzhou!