On October 18, 1731, at 4 p.m., Pan Guangfeng's large passenger ship "Yanfeng" slowly sailed into Suichang Port (now Colombo, Sri Lanka), and then docked steadily at the berth on the east side of the wharf under the traction and towing of two tugboats.

Pan Guangfeng, surrounded by the captain and many attachés, was the first to step on the gangway and board the dock.

As soon as I got off the boat, I felt a stuffy and moist smell, which was very uncomfortable. The dock was wet, with standing water in some low-lying places, and it was obvious that it had just experienced a heavy rain, so that the whole air was still damp.

"Has the Department of Immigration started a mass migration to the island of Ceylon?"

Pan Guangfeng noticed that two special migrant boats were docked on the west side of the wharf, and under the guidance of the crew and the wharf officials, a long line stretched from the side of the ship to the port quarantine yard. After a long journey, everyone looked extremely aggrieved, carrying their own small baggage, meekly obeying the arrangements of the immigration officer, and moving forward little by little.

"Ambassador Hui Pan, as early as eight years ago, after the Dutch sold this island to our Qi country, they began to immigrate here one after another, but the number is not very large, and there are only two or three thousand people in a year." "However, since three years ago, there has been a sudden increase in the number of immigrants, almost doubling to more than 5,000 people a year to Ceylon," a port official respectfully replied. Well, these immigrants on the dock now should be tea farmers specially introduced from Qin by the Ministry of Immigration and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Industry, and this is the fifth batch introduced in the past two years. It is estimated that there should be more than 2,000 people before and after. After passing the 10-day quarantine period, they will all be transferred to the Central Highlands to work on tea cultivation with the tea farmers who have arrived before. ”

However, for the high-level of Qi State, Ceylon Island is suitable for planting tea, or it can produce rubber, which is not enough for Qi to spend a lot of effort on development and construction.

Gluttony is greedy, but business is still done, who made this tea only be produced by the Qin State?

In addition to establishing a colonial government on the island of Ceylon and sending officials to directly administer it, the Qi State also imposed the usual **** on the obedient people of the island, just like the Nanyang Islands, and tried their best to eliminate the local civilization and historical relics, trying to wipe out the culture, traditions and languages here, and completely erase them.

In September and October, tea from all over the world will gather in Shanghai or Guangzhou. The monopoly merchants in the two places, as overseas trade operations chartered by the Great Qin government, took over almost all tea exports. According to the current year's tea production and market conditions, they will start the price and sell tea with an average cost of only three or four taels of silver per quintal (100 catties) to Qi overseas trading companies or individual merchants at a price of nine to twelve taels of silver, earning as much as 230%-300% excess profits.

However, to the delight of the technical experts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Industry, the 100 tea trees transplanted in the central plateau area of the island not only grow vigorously, but also the quality and taste of the tea leaves picked after stir-frying, which are no less than the tea produced in the Qin State on the mainland.

However, there are exotic crops that are well suited to the local soil and environment, and rubber is a cash crop that is well suited to the environment of Ceylon. The local government then began to enclose land on a large scale, solicit businessmen, and vigorously develop the rubber plantation economy.

It's really special, it's not too easy for the people of Qin to make money!

The market is vast, and the profits are even more excessive, and there is no reason for the people of Qi to give up such a huge business opportunity, and they are not willing to become the "porters" of Qin tea in the mainland forever.

England alone imports 1.2 million pounds of tea from Qi every year, equivalent to more than 540 tons (the original historical tea import was only 900,000 pounds in the same period), and the trade amount exceeded more than 400,000 pounds.

In order to maintain safe trade routes, how many ports have we developed and built over the past few decades, how many military bases have been set up, how many naval warships have been raised, how many pirates have been killed, how many hearts and minds have we played with Xiyi, and how many countries have fought wars with them!

You Qin tea merchants only need to spend a small amount of money, and with a single move of your mouth, you will buy the tea leaves from the tea mountains all over the country, and then wait for our Qi people to come and purchase them, and then earn two or three times the profit.

Located in the Indian Ocean, Ceylon Island is the key point of the northern gate of the Indian Ocean, a strategic fulcrum to hold the Indian mainland, and a key node connecting the shipping routes of Arabia and East Asia and Southeast Asia.

If this is to build a tea plantation on a large piece of land on the island of Ceylon, it is equivalent to holding a golden rice bowl, and the wealth is rolling in.

"Oh, the tea trial on the island of Ceylon has been successful?" When Pan Guangfeng heard this, he couldn't help but be surprised.

Eight years ago, Qi and the Dutch East India Company signed a package settlement on the ownership of colonial territories such as the islands of the South Seas, Ceylon, and Cape Town, and almost all of the colonial territories of the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean region were received by granting trade preferences, low-interest commercial loans, converting shares, and paying large land purchase fees.

You must know that with the spread of tea in the world, the total consumption is also increasing year by year, the market demand is extremely strong, and it is a large industry with a scale of more than tens of millions of yuan.

No way, this is God's reward!

The thousands of years of tea cultivation history in the Shenzhou Continent is not that the Qi Kingdom wants to completely subvert the dominance of the tea kingdom through simple transplanting and cultivation.

Vacating cages for birds and replacing populations is also a matter of course. For this reason, the Qi people adopted a forced labor system on the island of Ceylon, and a large number of Sinhalese and Moors were transported by the Qi people to Cochin, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Africa for "labor export", contributing their health and even their lives to the opening up and construction of new colonial territories by the Qi people.

It is true that for some strategic places, the ultimate goal of the Qi people to colonize them is to try to achieve local management and bring them under the actual control and jurisdiction of the government.

In addition, there are several populous countries such as India, Persia, and Ottomans, and their consumption is also increasing year by year due to the influence of the fashion of Qi country.

As is customary, agricultural experts have also set up several botanical gardens on the island to try out a variety of crops in order to make better use of the island's superior growing conditions.

After some trouble, coffee transplanting was not ideal, and cocoa proved to be unsuitable for local cultivation, but the growth of various fruits was gratifying, and the local humid and warm climate environment was not satisfactory.

However, after obtaining Qin's tea, the trading companies and merchants of Qi often doubled the purchase price and resold it to India, Persia, Arabia, Ottomans, and European countries to earn higher trade profits.

Every year in April, the Wuyi Mountain of the Qin State will usher in the tea picking season, and the fresh tea leaves are collected, fried, and packaged to make Wuyi tea, which is purchased by the tea merchants, and then shipped north to Shanghai, or south to Guangzhou, for repackaging, processing and storage, waiting for the merchants of Qi to come and buy.

But how could the people of the Qi Kingdom, who had mastered the world's main trade channels and key routes, tolerate the tea merchants of the Qin State to make money so easily!

After our Qi State bought the tea of Qin, we had to cross thousands of miles of sea waves, go through all kinds of storms, and work hard to resell the tea to the Western gang of "Kaizi".

Look at the tea monopoly merchants in Shanghai and Guangzhou, which one is not worth a lot of money, and which one is not a wide range of industries in our country? As soon as you make a casual move, it is tens of millions of taels of silver, and it is inhumane!

Thus, although Ceylon is separated from the Viceroyalty of Funnyin, which borders mainland India, by a narrow Channel of Paulk, and is far inferior in terms of the size of its territory and the size of its population, it is politically equal to it and is directly under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Subsequently, more than a dozen expeditions, under the protection of the army, carried out a detailed survey of the entire territory of Ceylon to see what minerals and resources were worth exploiting.

"What Ambassador Ban said is very true." The port manager chimed in: "Last year, I heard from officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Industry that our Qi State imports more than 20,000 tons of tea from the Qin State on the mainland every year, and the total transaction volume is nearly 2.7 million yuan. Well, when converted into silver, it's more than eight million taels. Hey, with such a big industry, I don't know how many Qin people have been fed. In the future, if the tea trade is transferred to Ceylon, I am afraid that it will make those tea plantation owners on the island make a lot of money! ”

More importantly, our Qi State will have its own source of tea in the future, and will no longer be casually stuck by the tea monopoly merchants of the Qin State, and from time to time there will be a wave of so-called weather disasters and unauthorized increase in the export price of tea.

With the increasing prosperity of India's trade, in order to meet the material and personnel exchanges between the two places, a number of commercial giants, including the Indian Trading Company, the Bangladesh Trading Company, and the Imperial Overseas Liner Shipping Company, have successively opened regular passenger and cargo liners, and the ships put into operation are all large-tonnage, all-steam-powered ships, so as to meet the needs of customers at any time and in any weather can take (cargo) ships to and from the two places.

During the Taizu period, the State of Qi tried to transplant tea trees from the mainland in Weihai, Guangling and other places in the northeast of Hanzhou, but after decades of cultivation, although thousands of tons of tea can be produced every year, the quality and taste have never been comparable to the tea of the Qin State, and can only be reduced to low-grade tea for ordinary consumers to drink, and sold to local buns in Nanyang, Myanmar, India and other regions.

Instead, countless new immigrants from Han China, Qin, Korea, Japan, and Annam, arranged by local colonial government officials, took up the houses and fields abandoned by the aborigines after they left.

The Indian subcontinent is vast and has a large population, although Qi can occupy it with strong military power and include it as a colonial territory, but it cannot really digest and absorb it, and can only occupy some corners.

"Tea cultivation on the island of Ceylon was successfully planted on a trial basis three years ago." The port manager said with a smile: "Moreover, the tea cultivation technical experts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Industry also divide highland tea, midland tea, and lowland tea according to the different altitudes of the central plateau. The cultivated varieties are also dominated by black tea, and after picking and cooking, its quality and appearance are no worse than the tea produced in Wuyi Mountain of the Qin State in the mainland. What's even more rare is that the climate on Ceylon Island is warm, tea can be picked all year round, and each tea producing area has different characteristics due to different altitude, temperature and humidity, which can meet the preferences of consumers with different preferences. Officials from the Ministry of Immigration said that more than 30,000 people will be relocated in the next five years to meet the needs of farmers for tea production. ”

After obtaining the island of Ceylon, the state of Qi immediately mobilized nearly 10,000 army and Qi-Indian servant troops, and simply and neatly destroyed the Kandy Kingdom entrenched in the central plateau of the island, thus completing the unification of the entire island of Ceylon.

As a result, Ceylon Island immediately became a fragrant bait, attracting the attention of countless people, and naturally some businessmen with a sensitive sense of smell came to the city to invest in enclosures and tea plantations.

However, the emperor paid off, and after so many years, the people of Qi finally found a feng shui treasure suitable for cultivating tea trees.

The continuous tea trade brought countless gold and silver to the Qin state, and it was one of the few commodities that the Qin state surpassed in the alignment trade.

Pan Guangfeng did not stay too long on this island, which is known as the pearl of the Indian Ocean, and after being invited to attend a reception dinner hosted by the governor of Ceylon that night, at noon the next day, he continued to take the large passenger ship "Yanfeng" towards Hanzhou mainland.

In Europe, there are many countries such as France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, HRE, Prussia, Sweden, etc., although their average consumption level of tea is lower than that of the Kingdom of England, but so many countries combined, the total consumption of tea is also a considerable number.

However, the land of Ceylon is not rich in population and has extremely high strategic value, so it is natural to completely annex it and become part of many overseas territories directly under the jurisdiction of Qi State.

In January of the following year, Qin's tea would be shipped out of the mainland and enter the global trade chain through the trade transit channel built by Qi.

Qi did not hesitate to buy half of the territory of Ceylon controlled by the Dutch East India Company at a cost of 400,000 yuan, mainly because of its excellent strategic location.

Of course, Qi not only tried to plant tea trees in Hanzhou, but also tried to transplant tea trees from the Nanyang Islands, Annam, Luzon, India, and even overseas territories such as Qianzhou (now South Africa) and Yinzhou (now America), but the tea leaves were always a little worse in taste, and they could not replace the tea exported by Qin.

"Very good!" Pan Guangfeng nodded and said: "If the scale of tea on Ceylon Island is formed in the future and the output is rapidly expanded, then in the future, our Qi State will be able to gradually reduce its dependence on the tea of the Qin State on the mainland, so as to control the source of this huge industry in our own hands." ”

It is said that in order to improve the comfort of customers, the Imperial Overseas Liner Shipping Company plans to purchase several all-steel steamers with a displacement of more than 4,000 tons and put into operation, and will also extend the routes of regular liners to Persia and Egypt to meet the needs of trade and personnel exchanges in the northern Indian Ocean region.

After decades of operation, the Indian Ocean has become the "Golden Ocean" of Qi, and the wealth and countless minerals everywhere have flowed to Qi through the vast Indian Ocean, enshrined in the world's most powerful and richest empire.

(End of chapter)