Maritime merchants are relatively rich at any time, and this is the money that they have worked hard for.

To run the sea is to fight for your life, to fight with the wind, to fight with the waves, and to fight with the storm. Since the Sui Dynasty, for more than 100 years, the imperial court has not banned salt and mines, so although selling salt in these years is profitable, it is far less profitable than selling smuggled salt after the Middle and Tang Dynasty.

But now, Li Xiao spent half a month, with more than 8,000 Goguryeo slaves, to prove one thing to the maritime merchants who flocked to Chishanpu from all over the world, and it was no longer so dangerous to run to the sea.

In one day and one night, you can run back and forth from Dengju Chishanpo to Goguryeo Pyongyang's Hunjiang estuary, and there is still some free time. It is not even necessary to wait for the monsoon, whether it is a downwind or a headwind, it does not affect the voyage. The blue deep sea is no longer a nightmare for sea runners.

Li Xiao shortened not only the time between the two sides of the strait, but also the risks.

"This is a brute gold from the maritime merchants of Guangzhou."

The captain looked at the boxes of gold and silver, and said with a sigh.

Manjin is also known as Nanjin, because it is mostly used in Lingnan, some of which are produced in Lingnan, and most of them are gold and silver obtained from the trade between Guangzhou, the trade center of the South China Sea, and Hu merchants.

The Tang Dynasty has always been short of copper coins, and there is a shortage of money, which is a problem that has plagued the Central Plains Dynasty for countless years. The limited production of copper, the high cost of copper coinage, and the inconvenient transportation operation, coupled with the high price of copperware, led to the imperial court not only the amount of copper coins minted has not been high, but also the price of copper coins will even be lower than the market value of its own copper, resulting in the private destruction of money and the melting of bronze objects.

Datang only mints more than 300,000 yuan a year, which is far from enough for such a huge central empire, which leads to the Tang Dynasty having to use the strategy of money and silk and treat silk as legal tender.

Even in order to avoid the loss of copper coins, many monetary policies have been formulated, such as prohibiting copper coins from flowing into Lingnan, the Western Regions, the grasslands, and the barbarian lands in the southwest.

After the secession of the feudal towns of the Tang Dynasty, the feudal towns even forbade the flow of copper coins out of their own towns.

For example, Shudi, which has inconvenient transportation, even in the Song Dynasty, has become a unique currency area that can only use iron money.

At this time, Datang is also short of money.

For this part of Lingnan, the monetary policy of the imperial court is to prohibit copper coins from entering Lingnan. But on the other hand, although Lingnan is barbaric, it is also connected to the South China Sea, and Guangzhou is an important commercial and trade town in the south since the previous dynasties.

The imperial court forbade copper coins to enter Lingnan, and Lingnan was prolific in gold and silver, and Hu merchants came to Guangzhou to trade, generally bartering, or shopping with gold and silver, so gradually, the Lingnan area gradually became a unique currency area.

Unlike Shudi, which became an iron money area during the Song Dynasty, Lingnan became a gold and silver currency area during the Tang Dynasty.

As the so-called sea country war riding elephant, Manzhou City uses silver.

The city is noisy and the thieves are broken, and the gold thieves are coming.

In the Central Plains, gold and silver were rarely used, but in the Lingnan region, gold and silver became the main currency, especially silver, which was mostly used by both merchants and ordinary people.

Gold and silver are stable in price and easy to cut, making them easy to trade and stable in value, making them the most circulating currencies in the Lingnan region.

This time, many maritime merchants from Guangzhou also took out Nanjin to make deals with Li Xiao.

All kinds of gold, silver, and even all kinds of styles. There are ingots, blocks, leaves, strips, collars, sand and so on, and it is said that in Guangzhou, there is a very prosperous business, that is, gold and silver shops, specializing in gold and silver identification, casting, and exchange business.

Among those various kinds of gold and silver, there are even many gold and silver coins from Hu Shang, Persian gold coins, Roman gold coins, Dashi gold coins and even Frankish gold coins.

In Li Xiao's view, these gold and silver coins are actually very rough, and generally their processing methods are also simple, a piece of weighed gold or silver ingots, put on the mold and beat, so that a piece of irregular disc is formed, on which there will be a head or text left by the mold, as for the corners are very irregular, can not be regarded as a complete circle.

Such gold and silver coins actually have to be weighed when they are used, mainly by weight, but generally speaking, each coin has similar rules, so it is more convenient to use, much more convenient than pure gold and silver ingots.

"These southerners are very smart, the price of gold in the south is cheap, and when they get to the north, they trade at the price of the north."

It is also gold and silver, but the price is higher in the Central Plains, for example, the exchange rate of gold and silver in Chang'an City is now one to five, and silver and copper are worth one or two silver and 1,600 yuan.

However, in Lingnan, the price of gold and silver is about 1 to 11, and the purchasing power of one or two pieces of silver is only about 600 yuan.

There is a big difference between the gold of the Central Plains and the gold of Lingnan, the gold of the Central Plains can be worth eight copper coins, while the gold of Lingnan is only worth six and six.

One tael of silver in the Central Plains is worth 1,600 wen, while Lingnan is only worth 660 wen.

The value of Central Plains gold is more than 1.2 times that of Lingnan gold, while the contrast of silver is even more severe, nearly 2.5 times.

In the past, the imperial court's monetary policy against Lingnan was simple and rude, and the copper coins in the Central Plains were no more than Lingnan, and the gold and silver in Lingnan did not enter Lingbei except for a few tributes.

Now these Lingnan maritime merchants are very clever to take Nanjin and go to Li Xiao to buy a ship and buy a compass, and use Nanjin, but they have to trade at the price of Central Plains gold.

A new type of Haijiao-type Mulan sea boat, Li Xiao sells for 5,000 yuan. If you use the gold and silver of the Central Plains, you will get six hundred and twenty-five taels of gold, or three thousand one hundred and twenty-five taels of silver. But the Lingnan people traded their southern gold, and originally obtained 758 taels of gold or 8,333 taels of silver at the market price in Guangzhou.

"We were paid more than one hundred and twenty taels of gold less." Although Lao Wang used to be the captain of Yangzhou, he was clear about these things.

Li Xiao knew these things in his heart, but he didn't care.

Maritime merchants, they are engaged in trade, that is, the most hated Naba people in the previous dynasties, in their words, these merchants do not produce, they will only buy low and sell high.

Since it is to do trade, then buying low and selling high is the essence.

Later in the Age of Discovery, when the Europeans ran to the Ming Dynasty, the European gold and silver price was high, reaching the level of 1:1345, especially Spain found a large number of gold and silver mines in the Americas, so these guys transported a shipload of silver to the East, took silver from the Ming Dynasty to take away gold, take brass, and buy silk, porcelain, tea and so on.

Judging from the performance, Li Xiao seems to have lost more than 120 taels of gold on a ship, but from another point of view, this group of maritime merchants with a large amount of Nanjin is Li Xiao's big customer, if he refuses, then the other party's desire to buy or purchasing power may be discounted.

Anyway, five thousand guan a boat, or six hundred and twenty-five taels of gold a boat, Li Xiao earned.

The Central Plains is actually a place where there is a shortage of gold and silver, but the demand for gold and silver has always been great. The key reason why gold and silver cannot become a circulating currency is that the quantity is too small. It is so small that it can only be collected, and can only be used for the emperor's rewards, etc., and cannot really be used in circulation.

"I am going to build a mint in Chishanpu, mint gold and silver coins, use molds to stamp, each of which is rated as a standard weight, and adopt a uniform standard shape, with embossed text on both sides, and a circle of tooth patterns around it, as long as those tooth patterns and reliefs are not damaged, then the gold and silver coins can be traded directly according to the marked denomination, instead of having to weigh them every time!"

Minting gold and silver coins is actually a very simple thing, especially gold and silver coins are actually better than copper coins, the process is simpler, the production is more convenient, if the gold and silver coins are mixed with a certain amount of copper, then the gold and silver coins will be more strong and wear-resistant.

Gold and silver coins with denominations would definitely be an improvement over weighing gold and silver coins, which would be more conducive to commercial trade.

Of course, this will be more beneficial to the mint, the weighing of pure gold and silver coins to the denomination of copper gold and silver coins, the profit is extremely high, after all, the price difference between gold and silver and copper is too large, and the copper is actually equivalent to the income of the mint.

In later generations, gold and silver coins generally had at least 10% copper content, which means that there is a profit of nearly 10 percent, even if the copper price and the cost of coinage are removed, then the final minting profit can reach at least 5%.

Compared with minting copper coins, minting gold and silver coins also has the advantage of being fast and convenient.

A copper coin furnace starts day and night, but more than 3,000 coins a year, and if you don't do it well, you will lose money.

But if a gold and silver coin mint can mint more than 300,000 coins a year, then the profit will be huge. Five percent also has a net profit of more than 15,000 pieces, and if a gold coin directly weighs one tael, then it will be a profit of 15,000 taels of gold, worth more than 100,000 yuan.

Even if it is fifteen thousand taels of silver, it can be worth more than twenty-four thousand yuan.

The Tang Dynasty forbade the private minting of copper coins, but it did not prohibit the private mining of gold and silver, as well as the processing of gold and silver.

For Li Xiao, this will be a loophole.

He had already established the Wuzhen Prefecture Jinju Yuan Money Village in Chang'an, which could easily mint gold and silver coins. It is illegal to mint copper coins privately, but the minting of gold and silver coins is only equivalent to the processing of gold and silver utensils.

There is only one problem in front of Li Xiao.

That is, how much gold, silver and copper he can get to process coinage, gold and silver can be obtained from Lingnan merchants, but copper is actually more troublesome, the imperial court allows private mining of copper mines, but the mined copper has to be handed over to the copper class, and then the rest of the copper has to be handed over to the imperial court to buy.

This is a troublesome question.

If you want to buy copper directly in the market, it is basically impossible, except for a very small amount, if a large amount, it is difficult to reach the sky, and at the same time illegal.

Before finding a stable source of copper, Li Xiao could only mint pure gold and silver coins to earn some processing fees.

Or, by selling ships and slaves, they purchased Nanjin and Nanyin, and took advantage of the different exchange rates of the two currency areas of the Central Plains and Lingnan to arbitrage and make profits.

"The next step is to build a new shipyard in Guangzhou." Li Xiaodao.

When a shipyard was built in Lingnan, the price was naturally calculated at the market price of southern gold, and when Li Xiao transported the gold and silver obtained from the sale of the ship back to Chishan to mint coins, he naturally succeeded in arbitraging foreign exchange.