On the next two days, Wang Qiu, who wanted to enjoy a romantic encounter, patiently acted as a tour guide in person, accompanying Princess Snow Ji Dailan and her two handmaidens to walk around the port of hope for a long time.

First of all, the first stop, of course, is the bazaar - no matter what the era, women are always born with a love of shopping.

After two years of construction, the commercial district of Hope Port has begun to take shape, and it feels similar to the rural markets or suburban wet markets in rural China in later generations - full of crowded street stalls, a variety of people, a few decent shops, and managers carrying sticks and red armbands patrolling back and forth...... The biggest difference is that there is always a row of sturdy standing cages at the entrance of the Hope Port Bazaar, and a gang of thieves and pickpockets who have been beaten to death: there is no concept of civilized law enforcement these days.

Of course, even compared to later wet markets, the market was too "dirty" - rotten fruit and garbage were often seen on the ground, as well as more eye-catching droppings, and the air was filled with all sorts of disgusting smells. Vendors have no qualms about dumping dirty water on the streets, which soon attracts swarms of buzzing mosquitoes and flies in the humid heat of tropical beaches......

However, if you compare it with the cities of the same era, this little mess of Hope Port is nothing—in this era when the whole Shijie people were not very hygienic, the romantic French rarely took a bath in their lifetimes, the serious English gentlemen reclaimed land in London with dung, and the streets of small German towns were covered with man, horse, and dog dung, and were as strong as a roadbed under the pressure of wheels. The dung heap outside the city wall of Huadu Paris was high enough for the enemy army to directly step on the dung heap to attack the city wall, thus posing a serious safety hazard to the capital. But lazy Parisians seem to enjoy this environment surrounded by dung heaps, and even then they do not want to bulldoze the "dung hill", but instead raise the walls directly on the "dung hill......

To get back to the point, thanks to the strong production capacity of modern industrialized China across the wormhole, the bazaar is extremely rich in goods. It can be said that there are a dazzling array of "royal family" wholesalers in the Hongxiutizgan Kingdom, under the instructions of Wen Dehei, not only dumped sugar, refined salt, matches, candy and other daily necessities at low prices to the second-tier dealers from all over the country, but also light industrial products such as cotton cloth, chemical fiber cloth, porcelain, glassware, umbrellas, plastic slippers and sandals, steel knives and axes, farm tools, pots and pans, and other production tools, but also recently began to provide anti-heatstroke medicines such as wind oil essence, cool oil, Rendan, and flower water, as well as Yunnan Baiyao, aspirin, Oral penicillin and other "miracle medicines" are basically popular for every cargo.

The main means of payment for foreign traders who came to purchase goods were timber, gold and silver, and labor. However, as previously recounted, despite Mexico's abundance of gold and silver minerals, the amount of gold and silver in the hands of indigenous Mexican tribes was not large due to the level of mining at this era. In fact, the massive importation of cheap industrial goods has already begun to have an impact on the economic situation of the entire Central American region - like Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Shanghai in China's modern history, the port of hope has become almost a black hole that swallows gold, silver and jewelry. Therefore, under the strong adsorption of this black hole, the gold and silver products in the Pacific coast of Central America have begun to show signs of gradual depletion.

But the surrounding tribes may be able to do without porcelain, cloth and sweets, but they cannot do without salt, a commodity that has been so great in human history and the great wealth it has created. And the massive dumping of cheap refined salt in Hope Port is a temptation that no one can resist...... Even if you resell or hoard these beautifully packaged modern iodized salts, it is very profitable. …,

After the gold and silver were on the verge of running out, many chiefs and nobles took out some ancestral natural gems such as jadeite, agate, ruby, and dark crystal to buy things, but this is not a long-term solution after all. As a result, Mexican hardwoods of all kinds are becoming a major item of trade across time and space - because of the inconvenience of transporting timber over long distances, and the lack of forests around Port Hope, only labor, they usually bring many young people to work in the field to cut down trees, or sell slaves to Port Hope who can be used as lumberjacks. As a result, the price of slaves rose sharply: a slave who was worth only about a hundred cocoa beans at the cheapest time is now worth more than a thousand.

In addition to the fluctuating prices, the more frustrating problem was how to settle the bills - since there was no concept of minting money in the entire American civilization, the bazaars of Port Hope were initially bartered. As a result, when they scattered the bazaar to calculate their income, Wang Qiu and his family got a lot of corn, pumpkins, dogs, rabbits, tobacco, turkey, and cocoa beans in addition to gold, silver, and precious stones of different colors...... Bookkeeping alone is a headache, and it's impossible to tell if it's lost or earned. Moreover, the price of various industrial products is also a problem: not only how much gold and silver should be exchanged for a hundred stainless steel kitchen knives, but also how much corn, pumpkin, cocoa beans, and turkey it can be exchanged for......

Therefore, in order to find a general equivalent acceptable to all, it became imperative to establish a simple monetary system.

Wang Qiu and Wen Desi discussed whether to simply introduce the renminbi. But if you use paper money, it is estimated that no one will admit it on this shijie. And if it is to use coins, whether the Indians will accept it or not, according to Professor Yang, is politically incorrect in the first place - in principle, most modern countries do not allow large quantities of their coins to flow out. Because the cost of minting a coin is usually much higher than the face value of the coin. For example, the price of the new dime coin, which is now commonly used in China, is more than a dime.

This is because in modern society, the minting of small denominations by the government is often a loss-making business, and large denominations are redundant (there are already paper money). Therefore, in some countries that are particularly picky, such as Vietnam, the government simply does not mint coins and only uses paper money.

As for the traversers themselves, they use a method similar to customizing game currency to design and produce a batch of "tokens" in modern metal processing factories...... This is not a problem on jishu, but due to the 24 times time flow rate difference on both sides of the wormhole, it is a bit too late in time, and the price is too expensive.

It wasn't until the spring of 1519 that the official currency of Port Hope was identified as a glass bead - the kind we often use to play checkers and marble, about the size of a finger. This kind of "glass bead coin" has a precedent in the Age of Discovery. For example, the glass beads produced in the Venetian workshops have long been widely used as currency by blacks in Africa. Of course, the more popular general equivalent is the black slave......

In short, through cheap glass beads, European explorers have swindled many good things from the natives of various places, and even a lot of land - it is said that Manhattan Island in New York, USA, was "bought" from the Indian tribes by a group of Dutch people with glass beads and knives.

Compared with the Age of Discovery, which still relied on handmade jishu to produce glass beads, in the 21st century China's Shijie factory, the price of glass beads has become cheaper, and the supply is extremely abundant - many manufacturers usually sell glass beads by the ton, and if they are wholesaled in large quantities, the cheap ones are only a dime a piece. Wang Qiu only spent about 100,000 yuan to load a truckload of at least one million glass beads of various colors and came back. …,

After these glass beads were put on the market, they were very popular. Before the travelers had time to push it, the beads were already widely used as their general equivalents - although they were not as portable as copper coins and banknotes, they were better than cocoa beans that would spoil over time. Wang Qiu planned to change the in-kind salary paid to the loggers to glass beads after a while, and the prices of various goods were also calculated by how many glass beads. In this way, at least you can calculate how much you make on each day's trading, rather than just a complete mess.

This time when she was shopping, Princess Snow Ji Delan showed great curiosity about the various goods she saw along the way, and she was always eager to try them, but she also made a lot of jokes.

In fact, since her arrival at Hope Port, there has been a flurry of jokes due to huge differences in communication and perceptions.

For example, last night, when Wang Qiu visited again after dinner, he gave Xue Ji Dailan a bottle of flower water and a bottle of red wine as gifts, and briefly talked about the use of flower water. However, due to Wang Qiu's rough speech and some incomprehensible misunderstanding, Princess Xue Ji Dailan actually drank the flower water into her stomach in a blink of an eye, and then smeared red wine on her forehead...... Then, the next morning, Xue Ji Dailan asked Wang Qiu, who was about to hang out with her, with a tangled face: Weishenme, the wine you sent yesterday smells very good, but it tastes so strange. And that bottle of red strange potion, when applied to the body, has no effect on mosquito repellent at all?

After figuring out what was going on, Wang Qiu was stunned at first, and finally resisted the urge to hold his stomach daxiao, but then he was afraid for a while-fortunately, the bottle of flower water he gave was a first-class product, claiming to be a pure natural herbal essence or something, and it seemed that no industrial alcohol (methanol) was used. Otherwise, it would be too tragic to get poisoned and make a blind princess or an idiot princess.

Next, in the bazaar, Xue Ji Dailan mistakenly took a piece of translucent soap with a good smell as some kind of delicious pastry, and took a bite of it without waiting for Wang Qiu to come over to stop it...... Fortunately, she just took a sip of soap and spit it out, and didn't pour the shampoo into her stomach as a drink, otherwise Wang Qiu really didn't know how to give first aid - for that situation, artificial respiration didn't seem to work!

Later, fearing that the Aztec princess, who was too curious and lacked some modern common sense, would accidentally eat something strange, Wang Qiu had no choice but to drag Xue Ji Dailan to the sweets...... The result finally calmed her down for a while - most girls would be very unresistant to the sweet smell that permeated her nose. How else can you say that "a woman puts sweets in her other stomach"?