Even if there are similar products in Japan, as long as Chinese products can enter, the rich Japanese are still keen to buy Chinese products. This is mainly due to the long-term accumulation of Japanese society, the sense of reverence for Chinese culture, so that Made in China enjoys the brand effect in Japan. Even a mat, the rich Japanese have to use Hangzhou to weave it, and they respect it, who to reason with.

Due to this plot of the Japanese, there are many kinds of handmade products exported to Japan by China, and Zhou Lang is ready to bring them to Japan for sale, including white silk, large flower silk, medium flower silk, small flower silk, big red crepe yarn, large yarn, medium yarn, small yarn, colored silk, Tokyo silk, Tokyo silk, large roll silk, Tokyo 紦, medium roll silk, plain silk, cotton, color satin, gold satin, Jiajin, Hangluo, Da Song Jin, West Silk, flower yarn, light Luo, red felt, blue felt, silver Zhu, mercury, atractylodes, Tokyo cinnamon, cinnamon, mountain yellow meat, cowhide, mountain horse skin, deerskin, rest iron stone, Fish skin, fish gelatin, sumac, lacquer, Shenxiang, cinnabar, rock sugar, wood fragrance, white sugar, three basins of sugar, black sugar, bowl green, Lingling incense, grass rows, Huang Ling, dry pine, hay, Chuanxiong, Jin snake, musk, ginseng, small ginseng, ink, ancient paintings, books, magnets, realgar, material incense, Huoxiang, angelica, Gananxiang, croton, knife plate, yellow wax, alum, white lead, gold thread, color line, antique, Morinda officinalis, Yu Yuliang stone, iron pot, fennel, sand kernel, gypsum, Epimedium Huo, Garcinia cambogia, sheepskin, rhubarb, artemisia wood, ejiao, vegetable oil, fritillary and other nearly 100 kinds of commodities.

Compared with Europeans who send goods to the Oriental market, as long as there are similar products in the market, everyone generally gives priority to their own products, while China sends goods to the Japanese market, as long as there are similar Chinese products in the market, the Japanese generally give priority to Chinese products.

There is only one limitation, and that is that Japan also implements a closed country, and it is more tightly closed than China. Although Canton was open to trade, at least all countries were allowed to come and trade, and the arrogant Manchu court said that the Tianchao Shangguo treated the vassal states equally. Therefore, the difference in the treatment of merchants from various countries is really small, there are only three special ones, one is to allow the Portuguese to enjoy a special tax rate in Macao, and the other is that the port tax per ship of Sulu is reduced by 100 taels of silver compared with the regular tax, and France adds 100 taels of silver.

However, Japan's lockdown only allowed China, Korea, and the Ryukyus to trade with Japan, and Western countries only allowed the Dutch to trade, making a total of only four countries to trade.

Moreover, the scale of trade is still severely limited, even in China.

First of all, you need to enter the Japanese port trade, you need to get a letter plate issued by the Japanese shogunate, similar to the license issued by the Guangzhou Customs to foreign ships, and you can't enter the port of Guangzhou without a license.

The Japanese government controlled the number of trading vessels and the size of the trade by issuing letter plates in advance.

In the 10th year of Genroku (1697), there were still as many as 80 Chinese merchant ships allowed to enter Japan, and the trade volume was as high as 8,000 kan (1 kan is 100 taels), but after the third year of Kansei (1791), the number of ships allowed to trade dropped to 10, and the trade volume was limited to 2,740 kan (2,740,000 taels).

The main reason for this restriction is that trade with China has led to a continuous outflow of silver. In addition, Japan has imposed restrictions on its exports, such as allowing Chinese merchants to purchase copper for 3 million catties per year.

Due to these restrictions, Zhu Lian has not been able to get enough copper from Japan, so now Zhou Lang has begun to cast iron cannons.

But with the expansion of Zhou Lang's power, the Japanese shogunate began to give corresponding respect. When Zhou Lang occupied Fengshan County, he wrote several letters to the Japanese shogunate, and Zhu Li, who went to Japan with these letters, was unable to get any preferential trade policies from the Japanese shogunate, except for the temporary approval of Japan for a few ships without letter plates to enter the port for trade.

But when the news of Zhou Lang's occupation of Fujian reached Japan, the Japanese shogunate finally replied to Zhou Lang with a respectful wording and sent twenty letters. This broke through Japan's previous limit of allowing 10 Chinese ships per year, but those 10 ships were of little use to Zhou Lang, because Zhou Lang had never been given these cards. The letter card has always been in the hands of the maritime merchants in the Zhejiang area, who had close ties with the Japanese shogunate, and they used Zhapu Port as a base to travel to and from Japan several times a year.

Although Zhu Li knew those seas, it was difficult for him to get the letter card from them.

Zhou Lang didn't care about this, every time he asked Zhu Lian to bring all the official documents and let him go to Japan as a diplomatic envoy, the Japanese seemed to acquiesce in this behavior, and each time they more or less let a few ships go, and Zhu Mian would also guide the goods to put more goods into the authorized ships and bring them into the Japanese port. In this way, Zhu Lian earned nearly one million taels of silver from Japan in the past two years, and gave Zhou Lang 500,000 taels of profits.

Every time Zhu Lian went, he would also bring a letter from Zhou Lang to the shogunate, in which Zhou Lang always expressed to the Japanese shogunate the justice of expelling the Tartars, hoping that Japan could support Zhou Lang's cause by liberalizing trade. The Japanese shogunate never replied to the letter, and every time he went, he quietly released a few ships as support.

Finally, at the end of winter, Zhu Lian brought back a reply letter from the Japanese shogunate, and this time they vaguely expressed their support for Zhou Lang. He also gave twenty letters, indicating that Zhou Lang was allowed to send twenty ships to trade, and the trade volume doubled to five million taels.

The shogunate also vaguely reminded Zhou Lang in the letter not to rashly send merchant ships over beyond the permission of the letterboard. Obviously, they are tired of Zhou Lang's "diplomatic" behavior several times a year. The shogunate also relaxed the limit on the amount of copper Zhou Lang could purchase, allowing Zhou Lang to purchase five million catties of copper per year to be used to cast cannons.

To be honest, these preferential treatments given by the Japanese are still very sincere, because Japan's trade has been restricted by the shogunate, and the market demand is actually suppressed, so those merchants who get permission can often make huge profits, and Zhou Lang can basically get half of the profits when he sells five million taels of goods to Japan, that is, more than two million taels.

This amount of money is still quite considerable for Zhou Lang. The Sino-Japanese trade route, the Song Dynasty has been opened up to be able to go back and forth four times a year, Zhou Lang does not plan to run four times, he plans to use the letter card at a time, to form a fleet of twenty large ships.

The deterrent implications are self-evident.

Why deter Japan, because Zhou Lang learned from Zhu Lian where did the Japanese not only issue letter cards to Zhou Lang, but also did not reduce the letter cards given to Zhejiang maritime merchants in the past, or ten yuan, which means that the quota occupied by Zhejiang maritime merchants in the past was given to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which shows that the Japanese bet on both sides and cannot offend each other, no matter what the result of the competition between Zhou Lang and the Manchu Qing is, Japan must not offend anyone.

Deter Japan, as for whether Japan is reducing the number of letters of Zhejiang maritime merchants, Zhou Lang does not care, he hopes to let Japan see its own strength, enhance confidence, feel that Zhou Lang is strong, if he is more likely to win, maybe the Japanese will give a few more letters, each letter is worth 100,000 profits.

In addition to sending a fleet of twenty armed merchant ships to India and Japan, Zhou Lang also sent a fleet of the same size to Siam.

However, the purpose of the fleet in Siam was secondary, and the main thing was to go to Siam to purchase rice. Due to the war, Fujian's grain production was affected last year, resulting in a high price of rice, which could not be satisfied by Taiwan's rice imports alone, so Zhou Lang needed a channel that could supply rice in large quantities. Siam has exported the largest amount of rice to China in recent years.

Xie Qinggao had already visited Siam last year. Although it was known that Zhou Lang had a hostile relationship with the Manchu Qing and that Siam was still nominally a vassal state of the Manchu Dynasty, the Siamese government did not dwell on this issue, because he could not afford to offend anyone, and only tacitly accepted to trade with Zhou Lang's forces.

In other words, the Siamese did not care about the power of the so-called suzerainty, they were nominally subordinate to the Manchus, and the purpose was only for trade, and most of the tributes were not the so-called Siamese envoys, but Chinese merchant ships. They are under the banner of tribute envoys, and of course they have a complete legal process, there will be a credential, there will be an envoy, there will be the seal of the king of Siam. This set of programs is all real, and as for how they got it, only they know.

In short, every tribute is a lucrative duty-free trade. Chinese merchants contributed, the King of Siam became famous, and in the end the two sides divided the fertilizer. Just as small countries in the West generally advocate trade, so do the small countries around China. There is only one reason, the country is small, the population is small, and it is unable to support a complete production system, and can only meet demand through trade. If the country is slightly larger, like Japan, it will follow China's lead in imposing trade restrictions.

During the Qing Dynasty, Siam's population hovered around four million, and it was impossible to divide into a complete handicraft system, so ordinary consumer goods could not be produced, and they had to choose to trade with other countries like Westerners.

Historically, Siam has traded with the Netherlands and Japan. Trade with the Netherlands continued, while trade with Japan was interrupted by Japan's lockdown. Trade with China has not only been maintained, but is expanding. Because both sides had their own needs, Siam needed Chinese handmade goods, and in the late Kangxi Dynasty, the rice in southeast China was no longer self-sufficient, and the Qing government encouraged Nanyang countries to sell rice into China, giving low tax rates or even tax exemptions.

Siam encourages trade for the same reasons as Western countries, but the results are different, Western countries develop the concept of free trade as a kind of power, and restrictions on trade often have serious consequences; Siam's trade, however, was controlled by the powerful because of its high profits. In the end, it was concentrated in the hands of the king, and it was called the royal monopoly on trade.

All the trade goods in Siam were purchased by the king, and private trade was strictly prohibited, and even shops were opened in the bazaar for retail. The same is true of foreign trade, where the King of Siam is nominally the big boss of all trade, the largest merchant in the country.

But it was generally impossible for the ruler to conduct transactions in person, so lacking the necessary business knowledge, the Siamese king's practice was to find an agent. The Chinese became the best choice, and by the Qing dynasty, Chinese merchants basically monopolized the trading agents of the Siamese royal family. Westerners refer to these Chinese merchants as royal stewards or brokers. Due to the dependence of the Siamese royal family on Chinese merchants, it gradually attracted a large number of Chinese merchants to trade in Siam, and there were already Chinese merchants who settled in Siam all the year round during the Ming Dynasty, and the fall of the Ming Dynasty led to a large number of merchants stranded in Siam, forming a Chinese settlement in Siam.

The increase in the number of Chinese gradually made them an economic class in Siamese society that could not be ignored, and the relationship with the royal family and other upper elites made them begin to intervene in politics, and even in the era of Tak Shin, the Chinese even established a Chinese Siamese dynasty by expelling the Burmese invaders, but unfortunately it only lasted for one generation, and was replaced by the Rama family.

However, the Rama dynasty, like previous dynasties, still insisted on royal trade and still entrusted Chinese merchants to act as agents. The Chinese in Siam are still a special economic class, and the area where the Chinese settle has become a bustling main street. In order to attract Chinese to trade in Siam, the Siamese royal family even gave the Chinese more preferential treatment, and the tax rate for Chinese merchants doing business in Siam was lower than that of local Siamese merchants. It lasted until the time of Chulalongkorn's reforms, when the privileges of the Chinese were abolished, and the Chinese even rose up to protest. Obviously, at that time, both psychologically and in reality, the Chinese had already established the concept of being superior to the natives.

Due to the monopoly of Chinese merchants in Siamese commerce, even in the name of acting as agents for the royal family, private trade was also very popular. Therefore, Zhou Lang sent a fleet to Siam to purchase rice, basically there would be no trouble, Zhou Lang also wrote a letter of state to the king of Siam, so that his subordinates could not purchase rice from the market to fill the ship, show the letter of state, ask the Siamese government for help, hoping that they can use the rice stored by the government to help Zhou Lang in emergency.

The fleet to India, the fleet to Japan, and the fleet to Siam, Zhou Lang has already sent three fleets this year, and the fourth fleet is sailing today.

However, the fleet that set out today was not going to India to test sell goods, nor to Japan to trade in violation of regulations, let alone to buy rice from Siam, but to attack Guangzhou.