Fujian in this era is the largest province in China with the largest tea planting area, with a total planting area of about 300,000 mu, although the industrial planting area of Jiangxi, Guangdong and even Hunan and Hubei is also continuing to expand, but the importance of Fujian is still ranked first, there is only one reason, other tea areas produce a large number of green tea consumed by Chinese, and Fujian's tea is mainly black tea for export. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

More than half of Russia's tea is still transported to Russia from Fujian through Jin merchants, who will have to wait until the end of the Taiping Rebellion to open up the Hankow tea industry.

The importance of the tea trade to Russia is self-evident, the tea tax once accounted for one-tenth of the British tax revenue, although Russia did not reach such an exaggerated extent, but as the earliest large-scale tea drinking country in Europe, the importance of tea to the Russians is not lower than the British, in the Crimean War, tea has become a military rationy for the army, it can be said that tea has penetrated into all aspects of Russia, but unfortunately the cold land of Russia can not grow tea, the Russians do not know that their Black Sea can actually grow tea, It was not until the Soviet Union that the Chinese government sent tea workers to help Russia develop indigenous tea cultivation.

Fujian is now occupied by the Ming Dynasty, if it cannot maintain good relations with the Ming Dynasty, it will inevitably affect the import of tea from Russia, and once the British have obtained the trade monopoly of Fujian tea, the Tsar found it difficult to accept the thought that the Russian nobles would have to buy tea from the British in the future.

At this time, the magnates began to play again, and they also collected a lot of information at this time, they told the Tsar that the Ming Kingdom and Britain still have territorial disputes, and the negotiations between the two countries that have just concluded in London have also been deadlocked for a while, and they think that the Ming Kingdom will definitely not maintain friendship with Britain in the future, and they think that maintaining relations with such a country will help Russia to fight against Britain in the East.

In the end, they also fooled the tsar that Russia's current strategic goal was to give up its expansion to the Americas, and because they had obtained China's Vladivostok, they would definitely develop southward in the future, and the Ming State was in the south of the Great Qing State, and the alliance with the Ming State was also conducive to ensuring the smooth expansion of Russia to the south.

In a royal meeting, the ministers of the two sides of different opinions had a heated argument, and finally the tsar thought that selling Alaska to the Ming State had various benefits, what the tsar didn't know was that the two ministers went out and made an appointment to go to the ball, because both of them took the benefits of Xu Rongcun, and the losing side deliberately lost, which was just a play to coax the tsar to play and make the tsar think that it was his own decision.

The agreement to buy the land was signed in London, and it was not to disgust the British that London was deliberately chosen, anyway, the Ming did not mean that, and it is unknown whether the Russians had this consideration. Xu Rongcun chose London, mainly to facilitate remittance, and all the financial support for the purchase of Alaska was handed over to the Bahrain family, a big London bank family.

The Bahrain family divided the purchase money into two instalments, a huge sum of 8 million taels will be deposited into the account of the Russian government, and the other 2 million taels will be deposited into the accounts of more than 30 large and small nobles.

At this point, the business was successfully completed, the two parties signed, agreed on the procedures for the delivery of the land, and then Xu Rongcun went to France.

The French were very unhappy, they thought that the Ming Dynasty chose to negotiate with France after Britain and Russia, which was a deliberate attempt to belittle France's international status, and the glass-hearted French diplomats embarrassed Xu Rongcun and put forward all kinds of reasonable and unreasonable demands.

In the end, Xu Rongcun thought that the French did not want to recognize the Ming Kingdom at all, so he chose to suspend the negotiations, and then went to Prussia, which had just won a war with the Austrian Empire, and the object of the war was Denmark, because of the ownership of the state of Herstein-Schleswig.

This state should be Danish without dispute, and even the new Danish royal family is contributing to the Duke of Herstein's family, but the problem is that these two small states are both German states and joined the German Confederation, and they refuse to join Denmark, and after the new Danish king came to power, he hoped to directly annex the family territory to the Danish territory, first, to win the love of the Danes for himself who has little prestige, after all, he is not the biological son of the previous emperor, and the second is to simplify the complex situation in this region, The two small states, which were both dependencies of the Danish crown and members of the German Confederation, wanted to break the chaos.

Europe and China are two completely different models of system development, later generations of Chinese first heard the model of one country, two systems, feel very creative, very imaginative, for the leader's clever invention admiration, but do not know that in European countries, the unified household Qi people, all regions have no differences is unimaginable, their historical legacy is extremely complicated, not to mention one country, two systems, one country more than a dozen systems are normal, later after the reunification of Germany, Bavaria and other states still have some diplomatic rights, even the army has, This is the real one country, multiple systems.

Prussia's Bismarck played a trick this time, Denmark was very worried about the interference of the German Confederation, and as a result, in their diplomatic exchanges with Prussia, Bismarck hinted to them that the Danes thought that Prussia would not interfere, and as a result, as soon as their king signed and announced that the two territories were directly incorporated into Danish territory, Prussia immediately jumped out, carried out various protests, and united with Austria to start pressuring, telling Britain and France all kinds of reasoning, saying that Denmark had violated the power of the German Confederation.

In short, Denmark was put on a side by Bismarck, and the battle was lost, and directly gave up these two lands, before the First World War, France used two pieces of land as bait, hoping that Denmark would cooperate with them to encircle Germany, but Denmark did not want it at all, they did not want to cause trouble, and only held a referendum to include the Danish settlement in the northern region into Denmark, and the areas inhabited by the vast majority of Germans, they did not want.

Prussia had just won a war, and Bismarck had planted another fuse, that is, the question of the division of the two states, which he would use to provoke Austria in the future, and thus start a war with Austria, but that would be two years later.

Now Bismarck warmly greeted Xu Rongcun, who was quite unfamiliar with Western diplomacy, a diplomatic master, a diplomatic rookie, and the two talked very happily, fortunately, Prussia really could not have an impact on Daming, otherwise Bismarck, the old fox, would be able to bite a piece of Daming meat from Xu Rongcun at this moment.

As there was no huge conflict of interest, a diplomatic treaty was concluded on a fairly equal footing, with neither extraterritoriality nor trade privileges, and everything else was the same as that of the British.

After that, the other German states came down one by one, as short as possible, and the content of the negotiations was very sketchy, but it was only a matter of general direction, sending envoys, etc., and did not include trade negotiations.

Therefore, it only took a month, the main states of Germany were taken, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and other countries in Northwest Europe, and finally to Sweden, Xu Rongcun was welcomed in Sweden, at this time Sweden has become the largest iron ore supplier in the Ming Dynasty, because this country really can not find qualified iron ore, the best iron ore is the iron ore of Luoding Prefecture, the craftsmen of Foshan use the iron ore here to cast the iron pot sold well in Southeast Asia, but these iron ore used to make iron pots can also be used to cast cannons, Lin Zexu used it, and the Humen Fort was cast by Foshan craftsmen with the steel of Luodingzhou, and it was not an opponent of British artillery at all.

With the continuation of the Ming War, the annual import of iron ore has reached 50,000 tons, the Swedes believe that with the development of the Ming machinery industry, they need more iron ore, and they are very confident that the Ming will develop into one of Sweden's largest trading partners in the world.

After leaving Sweden and visiting Spain and Portugal, and then returning to France again, the French were even more unhappy, and still did not negotiate, at this time they made a railway to the south. Europeans will not block the envoys, this is called the right of free transit, and later extended to the commercial field, which is very important for Switzerland, a landlocked country without a coastline, and can even be said to affect survival, so slowly developed this kind of diplomatic rules, in China can never have this kind of rules formed, but in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, countries generally do not block the diplomatic envoy team, and even friendly countries have the obligation to provide material supplies to each other.

He took the train to Switzerland, reached a diplomatic agreement with the mountain country, and became a trading nation. From Switzerland to Italy, from Italy to Greece, then to Turkey, they went to every country that the French and Swedish advisers told them it was necessary to go.

So it was impossible for Xu Rongcun to return to China for a while, but the treaty they signed came back early, including the agreement to buy Alaska.

Zhu Jinglun was quite happy and held a grand ball and invited ministers from various countries.

The first is to celebrate the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Ming Dynasty and other countries, and then he talked about the problem of agriculture in Alaska, Zhu Jinglun made it clear that Alaska is a huge piece of land, enough to feed all the people of the Ming Dynasty, and he decided to immediately hire Western geologists to explore Alaska and measure where the arable land is.

The ministers of various countries held back and did not laugh out loud.

They have enough reason to laugh, because this is really not suitable for agricultural farming, later generations of Americans report that there is a potential of 100 million acres of agricultural land, but the United States just does not develop, the reason is very simple, the cost of development is extremely high, the geographical location determines the sunshine time here, plants need photosynthesis, so even if the temperature in some bay areas is affected by warm currents, in fact, it is not as cold as imagined, but to develop agriculture, the sun does not give face, which is the biggest constraint, Unless large-scale greenhouse technology is adopted, it is impossible to grow anything, and greenhouse technology is too expensive, for the United States, which has no shortage of arable land, there is no need for development.

In this era, it is even more unimaginable, so all countries think that the emperor of the Ming Dynasty is too lacking in geographical knowledge, and some people even kindly reminded Zhu Jinglun that he should not send people to explore, where is too far, and he is embarrassed to say where to explore in vain. It was also suggested that it would be better to hire geologists, because gold mines might be found, but no one would mention the stubble of the cultivated land.

In short, the land of Alaska in the Ming Dynasty, in the eyes of these people, was completely slaughtered by the Russians by the Ming Emperor without geographical common sense. (To be continued.) )