Business has business rules, different business culture, or different rules, London's business culture is naturally different from Guangzhou's.

There are such people everywhere, who use rule-based means to achieve results that the rules do not want to see, and such people are called barbarians in the capital market.

But these barbarians didn't break the rules, they just challenged the rules.

Due to fate, Zhou Lang began to play the role of a barbarian in oriental commerce.

Through the continuous transmission of commercial information from Guangzhou, all of this was sent back by Wei Lianli, but with Wei Lianli's professional level, it was impossible for him to realize the value of this information. Therefore, there is a special person to guide, Wei Lianli has no business vision, but he has the vision of knowing people, and he is very good at observing words and feelings, and communicating with people is his strength.

After he arrived in Guangzhou, he spent a lot of money to win over a few old shopkeepers in the thirteen lines, and the information he sent back was selected by these old shopkeepers.

Zhou Lang carefully analyzed this information and found that many places in Guangzhou's business form are anti-market, and often anti-market situations occur due to the intervention of administrative power, and these anti-market situations are no exception.

For example, monopoly operation, which in itself is very anti-market and violates the law of supply and demand. Violating the laws of the market will definitely be retaliated by the market, such as the monopoly of tea exports by the thirteen banks, which will cause high tea prices, limited sales, and merchants seeking excess profits. The profits are indeed excessive, otherwise the Thirteen Lines would not be able to easily make millions of family properties, but the merchants only got a part of these money, and a large part of them were wasted in maintaining various abnormal channels, for example, in order to maintain the relationship with the government, the Thirteen Lines paid a large amount of tribute to officials at all levels, and these costs were finally added to the difference for the foreigners to bear.

But the Chinese did not get much benefit, the thirteen merchants accumulated a lot of wealth, fed a group of corrupt officials, and what did the largest number of tea farmers get? Nothing.

If trade is liberalized and all merchants are allowed to participate in this market, then the price of tea will definitely fall, and soon the profits will become meager, at this time only the most competitive businessmen can make money, they will try their best to cut costs, of course, cutting corners to reduce quality is a way, but this inferior method in fully competitive business relations, will also be eliminated, only those who maintain the quality, and at the same time can lower the price of businessmen, can win the competition, in order to reduce costs, but can not reduce the quality of the situationSome people will choose to deduct workers' wages, but some people will improve workers' work efficiency, that is, use machines for production. That's why, in an environment of free competition, technology advances.

And free competition brings far more to tea farmers than monopoly, because now tea farmers can trade with more businessmen, and they have more choices, instead of only trading with those monopolists as in the past, the other party has pricing power, and it is impossible to give them excess profits.

This was the first anti-market phenomenon, the monopoly of trade brought about by the Qing government's monopoly rights.

The second anti-market phenomenon is the transportation of tea.

At this time, the main production area of tea in China was in Fujian, whether it was the tea sold to the Russians by the Jin merchants in Shanxi through the Kyakhta trade, or the tea sold to the British by the Thirteen Banks in Guangdong through a single trade, most of them were produced in Wuyi Mountain, Fujian.

Take Chong'an County, a tea-producing area in Wuyi Mountain, as an example, the county comes every year when the tea season comes, the leaves on the trees are picked and transported to Xingcun and Chishi Street outside the county, classified, baked, blended and packaged, starting from Xingcun and Chishi, trekking by water, walking on a detour, first loaded on a raft, each raft loaded with 12 boxes, transported to Chong'an County, and then carried by the coolies to climb Wuyi Mountain to Jiangxi Lead Mountain. Along the way, the trail is about six feet wide and paved with small squares of granite. The coolies carried one or two boxes of tea at a time, and it took eight days to reach their destination. The small boat starting from the lead mountain should be loaded with 22 boxes, transported to the estuary, and then replaced by a boat with a load of 200 boxes down the river, out of Poyang Lake, tracing the Ganjiang River, and arriving in Ganzhou through 18 beaches. To Ganzhou, it was transported to Nan'an by ship with a load of 60 boxes. Then the coolies carried the tea boxes through Meiling, loaded them on a ship in Nanxiong to Shaozhou, and then changed to a large ship with a capacity of 500-600 boxes, and went south along the Beijiang River to Guangzhou. From Xingcun to Guangzhou, this tea route is 2,885 miles long and takes 50 to 60 days.

The anti-market situation of this trade route is as puzzling as the Chinese government's grain is not transported by sea and land.

You must know that Fujian is close to the sea, and Fujian is rainy, Wuyi Mountain is a large mountain range that runs through the north and south, and most of the rivers in Fujian originate from Wuyi Mountain, which means that it is not difficult to find some waterways leading to Wuyi Mountain in Fujian.

But the merchants of the Qing Dynasty just put the convenience of going down the river from Wuyi Mountain, but instead traveled thousands of miles from Fujian to Wuyi Mountain to Shanxi, and then changed ships many times by land and water, and finally crossed Meiling into Guangdong, and then changed the waterway to Guangzhou for trade, they were not too tired and not too annoying?

The reason is very simple, the government does not allow tea to go through the waterway, the reason is the same as the grain through the canal instead of the sea and land, it is not safe, the more agricultural civilization the government cares about the sense of security, because what agricultural production seeks is to have the wind and rain smooth. So they couldn't accept the risk on the sea, wind and waves were one reason, and another very important principle was to worry about hostile forces at sea, worried about the threat of pirates, and Fujian happened to be one of the most severely invading areas in history. Therefore, the Ming Dynasty government would rather pay a heavy financial burden, but also use inefficient canals to transport grain, and would rather take thousands of miles of land to transport tea than take convenient and efficient waterways.

The same is true of the tea transported by the Jin merchants to Kyakhta, starting from Fujian over the Wuyi Mountains, crossing Jiangxi to Hankou in Hubei, continuing north through Henan and Shanxi, north to Mongolia, and finally arriving in Kyakhta. If you change to take the sea from the coast of Fujian to Tianjin, and then go to Kyakhta, both time and cost will be greatly saved.

Historically, after the British forced the Qing government to open up the Fuzhou trade, the Fuzhou tea ceremony surpassed Guangzhou in just a few years after the opening of the tea ceremony. The Russians took advantage of the convenience of the Hankou Yangtze River waterway to transport the Yangtze River and the sea to Tianjin and Kyakhta, and in just a few years, they broke the tea trade monopolized by the Jin merchants for hundreds of years.

In the case of anti-market operations, once encountering market-oriented competition, there is often only one way to go bankrupt. Both the Thirteen Lines and the Jin merchants relied too much on obtaining privileges from the government to improve their competitiveness, rather than improving their competitiveness through technology, and as a result, they naturally failed in the face of competition from foreigners that even the Qing government could not control.

Although Guangzhou is full of a lot of anti-market phenomena, Zhou Lang now happens to have a force to resist the government, and if he is a barbarian in front of the Thirteen Elements, it is estimated that the Thirteen Elements will lose a lot. But to damage China's capital power, that's not what Zhou Lang wants to do.

Zhou Lang's aim was to compete with the foreigners, especially the British, who were the potential biggest threat.

Why did he dare to compete head-on with the British East India Company, because Zhou Lang also caught an anti-market behavior of the British East India Company.

Like the Thirteen Banks, this is a monopoly that has been monopolizing the tea trade with the help of privileges granted by the British government.

Monopoly inevitably brings high prices, inefficiency, super-profits, and the exorbitant salaries of the East India Company's employees, which are the milk extracted from these monopoly privileges.

So as long as a force beyond the control of the British government is found, the anti-market behavior of the East India Company can easily be used by Zhou Lang to cause the death of the East India Company.

The British East India Company has many things that have been criticized, but it has one principle that is commendable, and that is to abide by the law. Yes, this company has law-abiding written into its corporate code. Wherever you go, in any country, companies are required to comply with local laws, no matter how unreasonable they may be.

This company was inseparable from black slaves and opium, but after the British government banned the black slave trade after the Napoleonic Wars, the East India Company ceased to do it, and in the Daoguang period, the Manchu government ordered a ban on the import of opium, and the East India Company also did not do it.

Of course, they obey the local laws, not out of high morality, but out of trade security concerns.

This is the same as China's state-owned enterprises in later generations, although there are many dark sides, in fact, state-owned enterprises have far fewer illegal acts than private enterprises. Why, because the business motivation of the managers of state-owned enterprises is not profits, but the stability of the officials, so doing illegal things, even if they earn high profits, the result is trouble, resulting in the removal of the CEO of the enterprise, which is not in the interests of the managers. Therefore, although there are some violations of law and discipline in state-owned enterprises, they are far less than private enterprises on the whole, and they do not do as much as private enterprises, nor are they as frustrated as private enterprises.

The same is true of the East India Company, whose managers have long since moved beyond the profit-driven era, and the biggest driving force is to maintain a monopoly position, and if they violate British law, they may be stripped of their franchises by the British government, and if they violate Chinese law, they may be banned from trading by the Chinese government.

Therefore, they are reluctant to break the law, and the cost of breaking the law is too high. But if they are unwilling to break the law, but not out of their inner conscious compliance with the law, then they will try their best to continue to obtain benefits without breaking the law, that is, bypassing the legal channels and continuing to profit from illegal businesses.

Most of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have taken the measure of outsourcing their labor, and most of the employees who appear to work in the SOEs are dispatched by the labor outsourcing company, which allows the SOEs to avoid the risk of violating labor laws by workers working overtime.

The East India Company took the measure of transferring the opium trade, a prohibited trade, from the company to the names of the individual merchants who were attached to the company. In the early days of the Opium War, the amount of opium imported into China every year was indeed huge, but it was rarely sold by the East India Company, but by the merchants of the port who were attached to the East India Company, such as the Jardine Matheson Company, the Baoshun Company, and the American Qichang Company. However, just like the state-owned enterprises that outsourced labor, the biggest beneficiary was actually the East India Company, because although the East India Company withdrew from the transportation and sales links because of breaking the law, they took advantage of their political monopoly in India to monopolize the production of opium, and those port-foot merchants ended up just running errands for the East India Company.

Since the law-abiding East India Company did not break the law, their goods entering England were taxed according to the regulations, and it can be said that the East India Company stamped every box of tea shipped to England by sea.

The East India Company's tea tax was so important that the British Treasury's tax estimates showed that profits from the tea trade accounted for 10% of the total British revenue.

The East India Company paid taxes legally, and the tea tax alone could bring 10% of the tax revenue to the British government, and among all the trade items of the East India Company, the profit of the tea trade was also the largest, so it can be said that the tea trade was not only related to the financial balance of the British government, but also related to the stability of the profits of the East India Company.

Zhou Lang wanted to crack down on this, both to the British government's finances and to the profits of the East India Company.

And from the information he received, he happened to find such an opportunity to strike, that is, Zhou Lang discovered that the Danish and Swedish companies, whose main business were smuggling tea to Britain, purchased more tea from Guangzhou every year than the British East India Company.

The markets of Denmark and Sweden obviously cannot be as large as the British market, so the amount of tea they smuggle into the UK must be huge. Zhou Lang did not know the core data of the two companies, otherwise he would have known that the tea smuggled by the two companies to Britain accounted for ninety percent of the amount of tea they sold.

Therefore, the method is much simpler, use the supply in their own hands to supply these two companies in large quantities, as long as they smuggle a certain amount of tea into England, the market price will fall, and the East India Company's tea entering the British market through legal channels will begin to be unprofitable, and even fall into losses. The East India Company was unable to profit from China's trade, so it would not be investing more resources in China, which indirectly reduced the possibility of penetration into China.

For Zhou Lang, there is no loss in supplying large quantities to Danish and Swedish companies, but it will increase the industrial export volume of the whole country, tea farmers will get more income, and the society will get more capital inflow, which will one day accumulate and transform into a majestic capital force.

Of course, the methods that Zhou Lang is about to implement are not reasonable, he is equivalent to indirect smuggling to Britain, but he has not violated any rules, so he is just a spoiler, a challenger, and a barbarian.

As for what effect it can have, Zhou Lang does not know, because he does not know that in fact, the smuggling trade has destroyed Britain's tea finances. Attracted by the huge profits of the tea trade, British merchants joined the Chinese tea trade in large numbers, and these merchants did not have the East India Company's law-abiding code, and in areas that were not controlled by law, they themselves smuggled tea into their own countries, and as a result, the annual sales of tea imported into Britain were as high as 4 million to 7 million pounds, which greatly exceeded the legal import of tea imported by the East India Company. As a result, the price of tea was crushed, destroying the profits of the East India Company and destroying the fiscal balance of Britain.

Under the pressure of the loss-making East India Company, Prime Minister Pitt had to change his policy and greatly reduce the tea tariff so that the East India Company's tea could be restored to its competitiveness, and the tea tax rate was reduced from 119% to 12.5%, a tenfold drop.

The tax was levied according to the number of windows in each house, tea could be smuggled, and the windows could never be hidden. So the British ridiculed that even bathing in the sun in Britain had to collect taxes, and there was a style of the CD warlord Yang Sen leviing dung donations on dung diggers during the Republic of China, which was satirized by the local poet Liu Shiliang, who made a poem and said: Since ancient times, I have never heard of a tax on dung, and now there is only a fart without donation.

The reason why Britain has introduced such a bizarre tax is because the tea tax was irreplaceable in the previous fiscal system.

The introduction of a window tax was ten years earlier, in 1784, when the British Parliament passed the Tea and Windows Act.

This week, Lang began to crack down on the remaining 10 percent tax rate on British tea, while the British faced even more intense financial pressure to provide military support and military aid to the ongoing anti-French coalition in order to defeat France after the Revolution.

At this time, the fierce general of the French Revolution and the opponent of the British, Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte had just emerged, but Zhou Lang began to plot to attack the British finances, and the powerful British government may not be crushed by the financial burden, because they can offset the tax decline caused by tea smuggling by imposing various strange taxes, such as the collection of toilet taxes that cannot be avoided, people can drink smuggled tea, but they can not go to the toilet, put a tax collector at the door of each toilet, and collect taxes when they enter and exit.

However, it is difficult to say whether the East India Company will survive this difficulty, and it is difficult to say whether the East India Company will go bankrupt early without losing the most lucrative profits from the tea trade, but it will definitely be weakened and will not be able to invest more forces in expanding in China.

This is Zhou Lang's most important purpose, to accurately attack the British East India Company!

Soon, the Western merchants in Canton discovered that a new trading house had sprung up, and a large number of Danish, Swedish and British merchants like Kirks Richard found that they could bypass the East India Company and purchase the best-selling tea from Canton.

The public banks that supplied them with tea were even slightly lower than the market price, and lower than the price offered by the Thirteen Banks to the East India Company. Of course, the main thing is the quantity, and the amount that this public bank can provide is much more than the amount that the thirteen banks have deliberately controlled.

These merchants were curious, where did the tea come from?