A few days later

The royal train stopped at the imperial capital Chang'an East Railway Station, and the returning imperial car was greeted by the subjects of Chang'an, and hundreds of thousands of Chang'an citizens poured into the streets, beating gongs and drums to welcome the holy car back to the western capital.

Only those who lose know how to cherish, the original "imperial capital Chang'an", but now it has become "Chang'an, the western capital", to say that the citizens of Chang'an do not have a strong sense of loss is pure nonsense.

And this time, the spontaneous grand welcome of the people was simply enthusiastic.

This caught both the Imperial Police and the Royal Janissaries off guard, and they had to urgently dispatch tens of thousands of additional military police to maintain order to prevent the situation from getting out of control.

Fortunately, everything went well, and under the heavy sanitation of the military and police, hundreds of black royal motorcades with royal insignia passed through the streets full of welcoming crowds, and returned to Daming Palace in the earth-shattering cheers.

Approaching Christmas, the festive atmosphere of the imperial capital Chang'an is not strong.

The Chinese, who account for more than ninety percent of the city's population, are not accustomed to the festival, and in the traditional concept, the lunar winter solstice is an important festival after ten days, followed by the festival stove and Chinese New Year's Eve.

What a Rausch "Christmas", only those ghost families will spend.

Soon after Emperor Richard returned to Daming Palace, he received good news from the Ministry of Commerce;

Dozens of British market traders on the Chicago Agricultural Futures Exchange have continuously bought agricultural products for delivery in February and March of the following year, with a total amount of 110 million Tang Yuan.

The range of agricultural products includes tens of thousands of tons of refined flour, 100,000 tons of soybean meal, tons of frozen meat, oil, various types of fish, braised pork and canned fruits, thousands of tons of dairy products, sugar, coffee and cocoa, etc., the amount is very staggering.

It is enough to supply more than 40 thousand troops and use it for more than half a year.

Moreover, the British also brandished money and bought a large number of soldiers' leather equipment, such as cowhide belts, cowhide armed belts, cowhide magazine bags, cowhide boots, and cowhide gun holsters, the number of which was often counted at 100,000 sets.

There are also 100,000 pieces of plastic raincoats, tens of thousands of tents, various plastic appliances and an astonishing number of guns and ammunition, and the orders are often worth tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of Tang yuan.

Only a highly industrialized country like the Tang Empire, with strong production capacity, could meet the urgent massive material needs of the British.

And that's not all

The British military placed an order worth more than 50 million Tang Yuan to the Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company to order a large number of new drugs called "Sterilization King" to treat British wounded soldiers in the South African War.

The so-called "sterilization king" is sulfonamides, but the Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company has given it an easy-to-understand name.

The price of this new medicine is very expensive, almost 4.5 times the price of the same weight of gold, and the price of a box is 22 Tang Yuan, which is worth the equivalent of 4 pounds and 5 shillings, which is almost a week's supply.

After several years of large-scale commercial application, as well as outstanding performance in the East Indies War, a large number of wounded were treated, and the mortality rate of wounded soldiers was reduced by 9%, which made the reputation of "antibacterial king" quickly ferment.

This shining "sterilization king" has a wide range of uses and is now a highly sought-after life-saving drug worldwide. It has also become a must-have medicine for nobles and wealthy families in European countries, and has also entered the mass procurement list of the military of European countries.

Another of Royal Coast Pharmaceuticals' flagship products, Secret Gold Drug, also won a large order worth millions of Tang dollars from the British military.

This is a kind of Chinese patent medicine, which is refined by modern technology, which can greatly promote the healing of wounds, has the comprehensive effect of antibacterial and anti-inflammatory, and is the ace drug of Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company.

With these two flagship products, Royal Coast Pharmaceuticals, which was established only a few years ago, has rapidly grown into a world-class large company, which is also a large pharmaceutical company controlled by Royal Absolute Holdings.

The establishment of the Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company, which was another successor of Emperor Richard. It is intended to be a golden mountain for the royal inheritance and future participation in the world competition.

The company's address is still top secret, hidden in the heavily guarded Valley of the Holy Emperor, and the families of loyal officers and soldiers guarding the tomb are involved in the production of medicines, which is extremely secretive.

Production and marketing are two completely separate systems, the purpose of which is to maintain the long-term high value of drugs, and their production costs are negligible and almost entirely profitable.

It is precisely because of the strong royal background that the imperial magnates and overseas countries have no chance to get involved. Even if the British want to get it, they have to pay for it obediently.

The huge order worth 10 million pounds from the British only adds up to more than 2 million boxes of "sterilization kings", and the number of wounded people who can treat them is between 200,000 and 300,000.

With a one-week course of treatment per box of sterilization king, the wounded who have suffered gunshot wounds generally use 5~6 boxes, and those seriously injured who have broken hands and feet are doubled and the treatment time is longer.

If you want to recover completely, it is not uncommon to use twenty or thirty boxes during the entire treatment period.

The British army in South Africa now has more than 17,000 wounded, and the first 400,000 boxes of medicines arriving in early January next year will soon be distributed.

Many British officers were not injured, and they would use their power to intercept some and keep them around.

Whether it's for your own use or for favors, it's better than real money, and many Britons can't buy it if they want to.

Diseases such as colds and typhoid fever, pneumonia and cough, bruises and injuries can all be used, and the potential market is too huge, and there is also a huge demand in the society of the Tang Empire.

Due to the shortage of supply, there have been repeated price increases at home and abroad, and the value has increased by three or four times or even more, and for a time "Luoyang paper is expensive".

This tight supply situation will continue for several more years until production capacity is gradually expanded.

Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company can earn hundreds of millions of dollars worth of windfall profits every year by virtue of the "Sterilization King" product.

This huge profit is partly fed back to the Imperial Government through tax revenues, and partly to the underprivileged through the medical assistance projects of the Royal Charity Hospital and the Royal Yan Chai Hospital.

Combined, the above parts account for about 30% of the total profit.

The remaining 20% was used for the construction of new royal colonies, such as the Kalimantan Ring Road, the marina port, the construction of new towns, the burning of land and colonization, and other projects.

The scope of funding and appropriation includes the vassal states of Central and South America, the mainland and the western Pacific vassal states, etc., and increases efforts to support local colonial rule and construction.

The remaining 50% of the profits are deposited in the large banks controlled by the Royals, mainly in the form of gold reserves, which are used for the royal strategic reserve funds or to pay for the expenses of foreign expansion and colonial wars.

Fifteen years later

The principal and interest of this fund will accumulate and roll to a scale of more than one billion, with the rapid expansion of the production scale of the sterilization king and the popularization of the market, it may be 1.5 billion or 2 billion or more, becoming a powerful hole card for the Tang Empire.

Such a huge amount of money is enough to calmly deal with a world-class war, enough to cope with the impact of a world-class economic crisis, and strongly stimulate domestic demand.

This seems to be the balancing stone of national security, and it is also the real heritage of a great power.

Among the eight major banking consortiums of the world-renowned Tang Empire, there are Royal Red Oak Bank, Bank of America, Royal Chang'an Bank, Bank of Los Angeles, Bank of Communications, National Industrial and Commercial Bank, North American Colonization Bank and Royal West Coast Bank, of which 5 are controlled by Royal and the other three are heavily held.

The five major consortia of Royal Holdings are Royal Red Oak Bank, which ranks first, Bank of America, Bank of America, which ranks fourth, Royal Chang'an Bank, which ranks seventh, and Royal West Coast Bank, which ranks eighth, accounting for about 68.2% of the eight major banking consortiums.

The Royal Red Oak Bank, which ranks first, has a reserve of 766 tons of gold, and the profits of the Royal Holding Corporation, represented by the Royal Coast Pharmaceutical Company, are continuously injected into the major banks every year and precipitated through the purchase of gold.

More gold reserves can issue more banknotes, provide much-needed money circulation in the national economy, and increase the amount of money available while earning interest income.

Currency is the lubricant of the economy, and while injecting the vitality of the world's largest economy into the Tang Empire, it can also maintain and increase its value, and obtain a stable growth rate of 4%~5% per year.

Among the eight major banking consortiums of the empire, the gold reserves controlled by the royal family alone exceeded 2,740 tons, including all the gold reserves held by the imperial government, which doubled, not counting the hundreds of tons of gold jewelry consumed by the people every year.

The Tang Empire is the world's second-largest gold producer and the world's largest gold importer, now importing more than 170 tons of gold from Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium every year.

The British Empire, which owns South Africa, Australia and India, is the world's largest gold producer, and the world's largest gold mine, the Witwatersrand gold mine, discovered in South Africa in 1884, accounts for 30% of the world's total gold reserves.

More than 340 tonnes of gold are produced each year, accounting for about 28% of the world's gold production, making it a huge asset that makes everyone happy.

This was a catastrophe for the Boers of the Transvaal Republic.

The discovery of the Rand gold mine changed everything, and the Boers got rich quickly on the huge production of gold mines.

As descendants of Dutch immigrants, they rekindled their ambitions for hegemony from the Age of Discovery, and they decided to exclude the British and enjoy this incredible wealth on their own.

The Boers took the initiative to contact Germany, imported a large amount of military equipment from Germany, and thus went on the road of madness and death......

The dignified British Empire saw at a glance the little tricks of the Boers, how could it suffer at the hands of this group of peasants?

The current Boer war in South Africa, which is intensifying, is a vivid portrayal of the strategic miscalculation of both sides, and soon everyone will be beaten into a dog's head.

Hit it, hit it all your heart's content!

Whether it is the African war, the European war, or other regional wars, as the world's most powerful industrialized country, the Tang Empire can get a piece of the pie.

Due to the Chinese people's obsession with gold, the scale of civilian and reserve gold imported by the Tang Empire every year has increased year by year.

At the end of this century, 6~7% of the huge orders placed by the British for the war in South Africa will be paid in gold.

In other words, in the first year of the new century and in the next two or three years, the amount of gold imports from South Africa will increase dramatically, reaching 190 tons to more than 210 tons per year.

According to the comparison between real gold and pounds, 1 million pounds is equivalent to 7.33 tons of gold, and 210 tons of gold is worth about 3,000 pounds, equivalent to about 150 million Tang Yuan.

The Tang Empire exported medicines, petrochemicals, infantry leather equipment, large quantities of weapons, ammunition and food in exchange for British gold and pound sterling hard currency.

It is expected that in the past few years, the Tang Empire's gold reserve holdings will increase rapidly, which is in line with the status of the world's largest economic power.

Not only the United Kingdom, but also at a time when the arms race between the two major military blocs in Europe is becoming more and more hot, the gold of France, Germany, Austria and Obi, and other countries is flowing into the Tang Empire through different channels.

In particular, the gold taken from the Boers had not yet been warmed up, and it was handed over to the Tang Empire.

Don't say anything else

Kerosene that can make the aristocratic manor bright all night long, lubricating oil and diesel fuel, which is known as "industrial blood", "antibacterial king" that can save lives, and cheap and high-quality petrochemical products, such as chemical fiber and plastic, all have to be imported from the Tang Empire.

Europe does not have these precious resources at all, and even if Germany can achieve independence in the steel industry, coal and grain, it will have to spend precious foreign exchange or gold in exchange for these resources exported by the Tang Empire.

This was true of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist Empire, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and other countries.

Unless they want their court to be as dark as a ghostly realm, where the factory is not functioning, and the slightest fall or a minor illness will kill them, they have to import these necessary supplies and medicines.

In the long run

The convergence of wealth from all over the world to the Tang Empire is a long-term and stable trend that is almost impossible to change.

Unless huge oil fields are discovered in other parts of the world, and advanced refining and chemical technology is available, it will be difficult to change the status quo.

Among them, the most depressed is the Tsarist Empire.

The Tsarist Russian Empire has the earliest Tyumen oil fields in the world, but the backward petroleum refining technology leads to extremely high costs, and the oil extracted and processed is not as cheap and good as the imported ones.

Millions of barrels of kerosene and lubricants are imported every year at a cost of precious gold and foreign exchange.

With the cold bilateral relations between the Tsarist Russian Empire and the Tang Empire, the Russian side could not even get a bank loan, and could only buy it in francs or gold, because the Tang Empire did not recognize the ruble and did not need to buy any materials from Tsarist Russia.

The agricultural products that Tsarist Russia had in the Tang Empire all had them, and they were better, with more complete varieties and greater output.

The Tang Empire, which was not available in Tsarist Russia, also had such as sugar, spices, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, natural rubber, all kinds of canned meat and fruits, and the output was among the highest in the world.

There are too many good things in the export list of the Tang Empire, the categories are so rich that it makes people drool, and the scale of production is huge.

As long as you have money, you can buy almost anything.

It is a pity that there is almost nothing in the agricultural field of Tsarist Russia, not to mention industrial products.

France provided huge franc loans, and Tsarist Russia, after more than 20 years of industrialization efforts, only formed a rudimentary industrial system around the Black Sea.

So far, its industrialization process has not even reached two percent, and the main body still belongs to the relatively backward agricultural economy.

In trade with Russia, the only thing that the Tang Empire could look at was gold and francs, and the rest were all on the sidelines.