Vice Premier Li Hongzhang, Cabinet member Wu Chongyao, and Minister of Commerce Guo Songtao were summoned to report to Emperor Feng Yunshan on the current state of domestic and foreign commerce in the Chinese Empire.

Today's Chinese Empire, after defeating the British, has become the world's largest military power, and not only militarily, but also economically, becoming the world's largest power.

Even if the industrial penetration rate and urbanization rate of the Chinese Empire today are far from being comparable with European countries such as Britain, France and Germany, or even with the American Federation, but this is only because the territory of the Chinese Empire is too vast and the population is too large. If there are such statistics as in later generations, Feng Yunshan can predict that the current GDP growth rate of the empire is probably a terrifying figure of about 25%, that is to say, maintaining such a growth rate, in three years, the total economic output can be doubled.

In fact, the economy of the Chinese Empire, from the very beginning, was not low. After all, the size and population of the Chinese Empire are now firmly in the first place in the world, far surpassing the other Britain, France, the United States, and Germany. What's more, today's Britain and the United States are different from the historical ones, and they are seriously degraded.

Although China during the Manchu Dynasty was backward and had little industrial base, its agricultural wealth still ranked first in the world, after all, it was the land area and huge population base for cultivation and grazing. And can be compared with it, it is nothing more than India, the United States and Tsarist Russia, but India is still a large and small princely state colonized by the British, the output can barely feed itself is already very good, although the United States produces more food, but after all, the population is small, it has only been developed for less than a hundred years, the same is true of Tsarist Russia, Siberia has not been developed at all, but the Eastern European Plain and the Volga River and other river basins are barely the granary of Europe, but after all, the population is there, and the history of development is so long, How can it be compared with China's thousand-year-old development and the intensive cultivation of hundreds of millions of people?

Moreover, after 200 years of plundering and accumulation of operations by the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Chinese Empire also accumulated a lot of actual hard-circulation wealth such as gold and silver, which was received by Feng Yunshan's Chinese Empire.

In addition, the wealth accumulated by the local squires for more than 500 years since the Song and Yuan dynasties, and even the wealth before the two Song dynasties, has been continuously accumulated and passed down to the present day, hiding among the folk squires and common people of the Chinese Empire. None of this wealth can be compared with countries like Tsarist Russia or the United States, the so-called Muscovy, or the Mayflower criminal exile ship.

Thus, the real wealth of the Chinese Empire, which cannot be measured solely in terms of industry, was not said to be much less than that of the European countries from the outset. After all these years of hard work and rapid development, the absolute value of today's industry has caught up with and surpassed that of the European powers, not to mention the total amount of comprehensive wealth.

These riches, in fact, can be well reflected in the volume of domestic and foreign trade of the Chinese Empire.

According to the separate reports of Li Hongzhang, Wu Chongyao and Guo Songtao, Feng Yunshan also became more and more clear about his family background.

In terms of domestic trade, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Commerce, the inter-port trade volume above the county level last year reached about 5.7 billion holy dollars, that is to say, from this point of commercial tax alone, according to the minimum ratio of 20 draws, the imperial court received more than 285 million holy dollars, if some goods are more taxed, it will be higher.

And that's not even counting the trade between the many other towns and remote counties. After all, in this era, despite the rapid development of the empire's railway construction and official highway construction, it is still the area above the county government that can be opened to traffic, and it is a small number of cities with concentrated populations, while the vast towns and countryside are still remote places, mainly relying on the original old official roads and township roads or newly built county roads, so a large number of people have not gone far away, but only carry out economic activities near their hometowns. The transactions between them have not been counted by the Ministry of Commerce and cannot be counted, but it can be roughly speculated that the transaction volume of this part must not be less. It's just that some can be taxed, and some are difficult to collect.

However, it can also be seen from this aspect that the internal trade activities of the Chinese Empire are frequent and the society is prosperous.

Among the tens of thousands of merchants and stores in these hundreds of industries, the number of employees, capital, and turnover are all increasing significantly month by month. According to incomplete statistics from the Ministry of Commerce, there are now about 1.6 million merchants and more than 11.2 million employees in the entire Chinese Empire, and more than 4 million merchants wander between county capitals and towns, while the original merchants between villages are completely uncountable.

Within the entire empire, the number of people engaged in business for a living and supporting people was estimated at 20 million. And last year's statistics showed that the commercial capital of the imperial people had reached a huge amount of 3.4 billion holy yuan.

However, these numbers seem to be huge in scale and large in personnel, but their strength is still not comparable with the foreign trade bureau under the Nanyang Company, the Dongyang Company, the Beiyang Company and other trading companies run by the imperial court and the later Erma Company, which were set up by Feng Yunshan himself. Today, the total assets of these giant commercial or industrial companies have exceeded 5 billion holy dollars.

The foreign trade of the Chinese Empire was even more gratifying. Feng Yunshan knows that internal trade is the foundation of the country's economy and is the most important, but the superficial results and the accumulation of national wealth are not as obvious as foreign trade.

According to the report of Wu Chongyao, a member of the Cabinet, among the various commodities and goods of the Chinese Empire's foreign trade, from tea, raw silk, homespun cloth, porcelain, and other local specialties during the Manchu Dynasty and the beginning of the founding of the Chinese Empire, have now become all kinds of cotton cloth, tea, tobacco, silk, holy oil, daily necessities, sugar, rubber, arms and weapons, porcelain, other industrial products, and agricultural products.

At the beginning of the establishment of the empire, relying on the largest export output value of the project of tea, it was a huge surprise to be able to make a profit of less than 30 million holy yuan, but now, last year's tea made a profit of more than 50 million holy yuan, but this can not be ranked first, but retreated to the second place, the cotton cloth imported in the past, it has risen rapidly, becoming the first export goods, last year alone from the export of all kinds of cotton cloth, the total export value reached 450 million holy yuan, and the profit was nearly 220 million holy yuan.

What surprised Feng Yunshan the most was tobacco. He experimented with growing tobacco on the islands of Luzon and Ceylon, but after only a few years of harvest, the Ministry of Agriculture extended it to India, and then purchased tobacco leaves to process it into tobacco, and mixed it with some opium chips from Bangladesh and Myanmar, which was very popular in Europe and South America. Although the output value of today's tobacco industry is much smaller than that of tea, the profits are very amazing, unlike tea, which is only about double the profit now, and tobacco has four or five times the profit directly, that is to say, although the output value of tobacco exports last year was only 50 million holy yuan, but the profit was as much as 42 million holy yuan, this proportion is so high that the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Commerce can not help but vigorously develop the tobacco industry, which is simply a huge profit. （）