March 15, 9th year of Chengtian.

Lundberry set foot on Port Arthur in a bright spring season. According to the Western calendar, it is already the summer of May 1783, but in Port Arthur, the spring breeze is still slightly cool. The climate here is as cool as Lundberg's hometown of Sweden!

Compared with the rainy season that had already begun in southern China at this time, Lundberg clearly preferred the dry Lushun, and in terms of living environment and climate, not only him, but also his brother Ekdal did not like Shanghai so much.

So after receiving the support of his brother, and seeing countless people go to sea to make a fortune, and his eyes were red when he was stimulated, Lundberry finally gave up his comfortable watchmaker career in Shanghai and chose to do business.

-- Doing cotton business.

Sourcing cotton from India, then finding a port city with the highest price on China's eastern coast and selling it.

Ever since China began immigration to North America, the price of cotton and cloth in China has been rising, just like the price of grain in China is now. Although the Chinese don't say anything, some of the goods they produce have clearly opened up markets in the Americas.

Even if it's just a smuggling market.

The news from Europe is that the French cloth has been unsold in the Mexican market, the Chinese's textiles have seriously affected the direction of the Mexican market, and the price of cloth of the same quality of Chinese is much cheaper than that bought by the French, and even the quality of Chinese cloth is better. And the price of French cloth because of the tariffs charged by the Spaniards, they want to engage in a price war with Chinese smuggled cloth, and they don't have the capital.

As an important port in Northeast China and an important part of the North American route, Port Arthur's status and tasks are becoming more and more important.

After March, Port Arthur has entered a busy period, but the workers on the docks are still wearing thick coats. It's very windy here, and they don't want to catch a cold after sweating while working, so they have to pay attention to their health. Although the wages of these dock workers are not low, no one wants to put their expensive salary into the pockets of hospital doctors.

Port Arthur's business involves a wide range of areas, with ships from Japan, Britain, India, the South Seas, the southeast coast and other countries and regions doing business here.

Some of them came to buy soybeans, soybean oil and soybean cakes, and some came to buy fur, Lushun is the largest fur trading market in the north, and some are here to buy ginseng or grain, Lushun is also one of the largest ginseng and grain trading markets in the northeast.

Of course, many ships come to Lushun to sell their goods.

Livestock, cloth, cotton, and even slaves are all sought-after goods in the Northeast market.

The winters here are cold and long, and cotton and cloth are indispensable; At the same time, the Northeast has flat and fertile land, and livestock and slaves are also necessary.

During this season, Port Arthur unloads more than 10 large ships almost every day. But don't forget, in addition to these Northeast market-based buying and selling transactions, Lushun is also a vital link on the North American North Road route.

Every month, there are ships departing from here to North America, and many factories and workshops have sprung up around Lushun, which can make paper, print, produce cloth, ironware and other necessities of life, and a large number of books, paper, cloth, livestock, iron tools, hardware equipment, etc., all have to be shipped from here to the Americas. Some of these things belong to immigrants, and some belong to the smuggling of goods necessary for trade.

The dock workers, who are paid according to the piecework system, are very busy, but they are very satisfied. Because they can finally no longer receive the poor bastard's salary of forty or fifty yuan, which is not much higher than the basic salary of thirty yuan a month. Because in the coldest three months of every year, the shipping business of Port Arthur has shrunk to the extreme, and the dock workers hardly have much extra income except for the basic salary they receive every month. There, like now, they were busy all day long, and although they were tired and tired, the salary they received made each of them happy.

Lundberry has once again landed on Port Arthur land, and this is the second time he has come to the Northeast. The last time he brought a boatload of cotton, which he sold here for a good price, and then he went to Andong's port of Busan, only to be disappointed to find that the price of ginseng in Busan was not lower than that of Lushun.

Although Lundberry does not think that those root-like things can really have the miraculous effect that the Chinese say bring people back to life, Chinese medicine has a set of wonders that belong to Eastern culture, which many Westerners cannot understand.

But since ginseng has become the pursuit of countless Chinese, it has naturally become the pursuit of Lundberry, even if he is a rookie merchant who has just gone to sea, Lundberry is as crazy as pursuing profits.

It stands to reason that the price of ginseng in Busan should be cheaper than that in Lushun, just as the price of ginseng in Lushun is much lower than that in Shanghai.

But Lundberry clearly 'felt' wrong.

In desperation, he bought a batch of copper ingots in Busan, as well as some local and Japanese crafts from across the strait, including ten handmade katanas by Japanese swordsmiths, which made up for the time he wasted after returning to Shanghai.

This time, Lundberg made a deal with a British merchant in Pontianak in the South Seas to buy a large amount of cotton, and then he bought half a shipload of cloth in the port of Songhu.

Lundberry trusted his brother, who had told him that if he couldn't find a more lucrative business, he would keep making cloth and cotton.

It was last summer that Ekdal said this, but it has not expired until now, and the prices of cotton and cloth in China are now on the rise after a long period of decline, and are steadily rising.

Now, Lundberry's loyal employees have been running to the trading center in the Port Arthur area for the first time to inquire about the market of all kinds of goods.

The employee, who was a student of his brother's Latin course, was a small but flexible person, fluent in Latin, and trustworthy.

Lundberry likes the Chinese tradition of respecting teachers.

In China, it is almost impossible to hear of students betraying and cheating on 'other teachers'.

So, Lundberg trusted him.

Therefore, although Lundberry was anxious to know first-hand about the place, he decided to go to the tavern for a drink first. If you want to find out the news, you can do it. His brother's student was named He Ji'an.

Lundberg glanced at the trade center looming in the distance, it was a rather imposing building, with five houses on the front, three stories high, with blue-black glazed tiles on the roof, and its hall was very brightly built. Having been there once, Lundberry is still impressive.

Faintly, he could still see that the two blackboards outside the trade center were crowded with people, many people, estimated to be sixty or seventy if not a hundred. And these people are not all Chinese, many people dress very differently from the Chinese, should be Europeans, Japanese and Nanyang and their retinue. I just don't know if there are Indians.

The Indians who smelled of the odd were crazy, and for the greater good, they were able to advance from the South Seas to the great north of China. White slaves, cotton, jute, tobacco and precious stones from India and Ceylon are their fist products.

Of course, the Chinese accounted for the majority of this crowd, and Lundberg took out his binoculars and looked at it, and saw the Japanese, Europeans, and Nanyangs wearing white hats in the crowd, which could roughly account for 20% of the crowd, which is not a small number. It must be said that the development of Port Arthur has not been long since the opening of the port is really good.

Ekdal had already obtained the yellow book, he had applied for the red book, his brother was reluctant to return to the turbulent Europe, and Lundberg certainly didn't like the turbulent Sweden, but he had not yet decided whether to settle in China.

After all, it's so strange and different.

Inside, he would prefer to return to Europe. Returning to Europe is not the same as going back to Sweden, he can go to London, to Paris, to Madrid, to Amsterdam, as long as he has money in his hands, he can live comfortably anywhere.

Although there are big differences between Western Europe, Southern Europe and Northern Europe, it is not impossible to find a single church, right?

There is not a single church in the whole of Shanghai, and the city is already quite small. There is one in Nanjing, which was left by the Jesuits in the previous Manchu Qing Dynasty, and Chen Han did not explicitly prohibit the missionaries from preaching, but they forbade the missionaries to move freely, and also forbade the construction of churches on the grounds of the various actions of the missionaries in the Manchu Dynasty.

This is also actually restricting proselytizing.

Lundberg had also been to Nanjing, but he had never been to the Jesuit church. Because the latter is a Roman monotheistic religion, while the state religion of Sweden is Protestant Lutheranism. Both regard each other as heretics.

Ekdal is already thinking about buying land in China and building an estate. It's just that he hasn't decided whether to build a larger farm in the northeast, or a smaller plantation in Qilu or Zhili?

Although the land in China's hinterland is not as fertile as in the Northeast, because of the climate factors in the Northeast, the land price is not as good as that of Qilu, Zhili, let alone Jiangnan. The Luo Manor in Xia Mountain, if it is changed to the Northeast, even if it is Liaonan, where the land price is more delicate, it will be more than ten times the area.

Therefore, Miss Rowvier's dowry was not shabby at all, but extremely rich.

Ekdal wants to invest his money in soybeans and cotton, which he is optimistic about in the coming years and decades, but Ekdal has not reduced his funding for Lundberg.

Because the funds he gave his brother were all savings that he had saved, and the other money he needed was borrowed from a Chinese bank in his capacity as an associate professor, plus the Chinese friends and students he had made over the years, and the investment funds he had raised, it was expected that he could raise 100,000 to 150,000 yuan, all of which he would invest in construction. It's just that this money can't build a big manor in Jiangnan. He had to choose the north, and whether it was the northeast or the north of China was Ekdal's own consideration.

In the second half of the year, Ekdal will be looking for land, seeds, livestock, farm tools, and renting slave labor, like labor companies. Because he could not afford slaves, in order to save money, he had to rent slave labor from labor companies in the future.

Ekdal is really bullish on cotton and soybean farming, believing that these two crops will bring him a good income and make his bold investment pay off handsomely.

But Lundberry thinks it's best to grow tobacco.

In China, if you can't buy a tea plantation, it's also an excellent choice to set up a tobacco plantation.

Chinese tea is sold all over the world, and in recent years they have opened up a new market in Tianfang World, and the export volume of tea, especially black tea, is increasing rapidly, and the price is constantly rising, especially those high-quality black tea.

So growing tea is a lucrative business in Lundberry's mind. And the tobacco is grown because of the huge tobacco consumption of the Chinese themselves. The Chinese themselves are the world's largest consumers of tobacco leaves, and there are very few men here who can't smoke. When dealing with Chinese, it has become customary to hand over a cigarette when you meet.

Whether it is drinking tea or eating, there are many people who smoke cigarettes without leaving their hands.

Although a large amount of Indian tobacco has recently entered China, I heard that in the rural fields of Bangladesh, opium poppy cultivation is decreasing in a large area, but tobacco leaves and jute are increasing rapidly, and the export of these two products is all to China, and its profit is a little higher than that of rice cultivation. Because food imports are now subject to taxes?

Therefore, the influx of a large number of foreign tobacco has made China's domestic tobacco business less profitable than before, but Lundberry still thinks that tobacco cultivation is a good business. Although a large amount of Indian tobacco has poured into China, China's huge population market has allowed them to absorb all this quickly, and Lundberg has never seen a sharp drop in tobacco prices, or strong fluctuations, all of which have been a steady decline. Therefore, although tobacco cultivation is not as profitable as it used to be, it is still in demand in China, and the profits are quite stable, and many Chinese tobacco growers are still growing this thing.

But Lundberg knew that his brother, though the most well-read man in the whole family, was also a stubborn man, and he would not listen to what he said. On the contrary, what Ekdal said, he often consciously obeyed it.

This time, for example, when Lundberg failed to find the sugar cane wine he wanted from Pontianak, he turned his attention to cotton.

The taverns in Port Arthur's docklands seemed to be an improvement over the last time he arrived, with the business space inside at least doubled, and business seemed to be doing quite well. The owner of the tavern is still the middle-aged veteran who has lost a leg, and his wooden leg makes one 'clang' sound on the floor whenever he moves.

But Rundberry didn't dare laugh at him. In these days in China, he is well aware of the power of the military in this powerful country.

The fact that this veteran can open a tavern in the best part of this busy dock location must be someone with a background. I can't afford to provoke myself.

Moreover, many decorations on the walls of this tavern also exude this 'prestige' belonging to the army all the time.

A tattered military flag hangs in the center of the tavern.

The flag was blackened so much that the crimson color was abnormal, with bullet holes and some burnt holes, and the tail of the flag was not destroyed by the fire, so that Lundberg could not know which part of the flag it belonged to, and therefore the identity of the tavern's owner. Because the handwriting on the military flag, that is, the position of the formation, was all burned.

A bloodstained saber and a musket were placed crosswise in front of the flag.

Broken guns, bayonets, and Manchu officials' hats, robes, and ridiculous armor were also hung on the walls.

The food served at this tavern is very varied, with beer, sugar cane liquor, wine and Chinese baijiu. There are also Western-style meals prepared by specialized Italian chefs, and very rough Chinese dishes, and of course, barbecued meats.

Lundberg asked for a keg of beer and asked them to serve themselves a roast.

His gaze was more focused on the guests in the tavern.

There were a lot of guests in the tavern, mostly some rude sailors. They talked and laughed loudly, drank ultra-spicy Chinese spirits, and boasted about their experiences and 'brilliance'. It's all boring, and these people's conversations are worthless.

His employee, Waghien, hurried back just after his second drink. With an excited face, he said, "Sir, you're going to get rich." ”

"A fleet to North America has just collected 60,000 cotton horses."

The professor was still right. The price of cotton has risen again, and now it is 38.5 yuan per bag, and each bag is still 100 catties. This price is nearly ten pieces higher than the price we bought cotton in Pontianak. Even if we pay our taxes, we can make a lot of money! ”

Rundberry had a smile on his face, "That's good news. He stood up happily and poured a glass of wine for He Ji'an himself: "Come, dear friend, let's have a toast to the crazy cotton!" ”

"Haha......"

38.5 yuan / bag, this price really makes Lundberry laugh out loud in his dreams.