In January 1846, a major event occurred, well, it was not a big deal, the original owner of Yisheng Bank, Lin Aqin, was released by the creditors and returned to Guangdong by boat.

Originally, although Yisheng Bank was sold, it was insolvent, and at least more than 900,000 debts could not be repaid.

Normally, Lin Aqin's hometown property will be confiscated, and even his wife and daughter will be sold, but the British do not want Lin Aqin's fate to be too miserable, lest no Chinese dare to help them in the future;

Zhao Dagui has a bad impression of Lin Aqin, and he doesn't think it's useful to clean up a small minion;

In addition, those creditors also thought that they couldn't squeeze any money out of Lin Aqin, and at most they were angry, so they agreed to release him after accepting some compensation from Stark and others.

In the past two years in Shanghai, Lin Aqin originally only came with a few hundred yuan of capital, but later he became the largest monopoly businessman in Shanghai and enjoyed all the glory, but this time he returned to his original form.

If it weren't for Zhao Dagui, in the spirit of humanitarianism, he exempted him from the ticket money and gave him a hundred silver dollars, he would have been released, and I am afraid he would not have been able to return to Guangdong.

Everyone actually knows that the relationship between Yishengxing and Daguixing is very bad, and Lin Aqin contacted Wu Jianzhang and foreigners to suppress Zhao Dagui at the beginning.

Therefore, Zhao Dagui's actions have won a lot of praise, and everyone thinks that Zhao Dagui has a big belly and is a rare good person.

When Lin Aqin went back, Zhao Dagui even went to the dock in person to see him off on the merchant ship, but he played a hypocritical set of tricks.

Wu Jianzhang and Yang Fang didn't know what to think, so they also went to the dock to send Lin Aqin back, and after he got on the boat and left, they also took Zhao Dagui to a nearby teahouse to drink tea, and they were very embarrassed.

Since then, Shanghai's comprador industry has been a three-legged situation.

However, as soon as Zhao Dagui mentioned the three-legged words, the other two shook their hands desperately, saying that Zhao Dagui was righteous, and this rescue of the city was equivalent to saving countless people, and the two of them would definitely follow Zhao Dagui in the future.

Yang Fang is about the same age as Zhao Dagui, and the business has always been under the two of them, Wu Jianzhang, a person in his fifties, is a little disgusting when he says this.

Zhao Dagui was not arrogant, and he was polite to the two, but he was very sober in his heart, Wu Jianzhang had strong financial resources, and this time he was just losing some vitality;

However, at least for a period of time, the two will make exactly the same voice as Zhao Dagui in the business world, and dozens of other compradors in Shanghai will naturally not work against the three giants, that is, in a year or two, the compradors and comprador houses in Shanghai will take the lead of Dagui Commercial Bank.

This is the treatment that Lin Aqin did not get before, and if it is used reasonably, it can make countless profits.

In the following days, the compradors in Shanghai, led by Zhao Dagui, Wu Jianzhang and Yang Fang, began to meet frequently and discuss many things.

The foreign merchants run by Western merchants did not care about this at first, but when they found that the prices of export commodities such as raw silk and tea were slowly rising, while the prices of imported commodities such as copper and iron were falling, they realized that these compradors were going to unite against the sky.

The foreign banks were not good at stubble, and immediately adopted various means, and the open and secret struggle between the foreign banks and the comprador banks began.

The relationship between foreign firms and compradors in China has always been very special, in theory the compradors are just servants or employees hired by foreign firms, but in fact these compradors gradually control all the business in the foreign firms, and then secretly unite to control the business, and in many cases they are on an equal footing with the foreign firms.

Until the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, and even during the Republic of China, foreigners often complained that the comprador house was out of their own control, "when the foreign firm made money, the comprador made more money, and when the foreign firm lost money, the comprador could also make money."

Originally, according to history, after the foreign cloth crisis, the compradors would get closer to the foreigners and help the foreign companies reduce the purchase price of silk tea, but with the backing of the powerful noble firms, the situation is very different.

The price of silk tea in Shanghai was the highest when the port was opened in 1844, and then it has been slowly declining, reaching the lowest point in 1848, and then it began to recover slowly, but it has not been able to recover the original high price, which is in obvious contrast with the price of silk tea and other commodities in Europe, which has not changed much, and even risen, in obvious contrast.

There are a number of reasons for this:

First of all, the loss of silver and the serious shortage of money in the Qing Dynasty led to the high value of silver and the cheapness of money;

Moreover, foreign banks are becoming more and more aware of the prices of Chinese commodities and are using various means to control them;

There is a hidden competition among compradors, who are more willing to lower prices in order to get more business opportunities, and the most excessive in this regard is the previously bankrupt Yisheng Bank, which often competes for business opportunities without making money in order to maintain its position as the number one in the industry.

This phenomenon is naturally very unfavorable to Zhao Dagui's Dagui Commercial Bank, and in fact it is also unfavorable to most comprador firms, only because the previous compradors were scattered, and Lin Aqin, who should have been the boss of the industry, even took the lead in breaking the rules, which led to only competition and no cooperation between compradors.

This time, under the leadership of Zhao Dagui, the compradors began to speak in a unified voice, while the Western merchants of the foreign bank were in a hurry to deal with the heavy losses during this time, but they were unable to exercise sufficient effective control.

This matter seems to be very small now, but it will actually have a very important impact on the business environment of the city for the next ten years.

Also in January, Dagui Commercial Bank held a staff meeting to reward the staff who had made contributions in the previous year, and also promoted many people.

The shopkeepers and guys transferred from Yisheng Bank have no credit at all, but for the sake of the new joiners, Zhao Dagui also paid everyone two months' salary, and comforted them with gentle words, and worked hard to win their hearts.

In the end, Zhao Dagui also put forward the goal of earning two million, that is, all the employees of Dagui Commercial Bank were required to make persistent efforts to earn at least two million net profits in 1846.

In this era, this is not a small amount, although there are big families such as the Wu family and the Pan family in Guangzhou, and the total assets far exceed those of the Dagui firm, but it is also accumulated over hundreds of years, and according to the income of a single year, it may be difficult to reach one million yuan.

Even the Qing Imperial Court's annual financial revenue is between 40 million and 60 million yuan, and the annual surplus is only hundreds of thousands of yuan.

When the famous East India Company collapsed in the thirties of the nineteenth century, its annual net income was about 10 million yuan.

Taking these factors into account, we can understand how ambitious this goal is proposed by Zhao Dagui.

However, the shopkeepers of the Dagui Commercial Bank were intoxicated by the geometric progression of development over the years, and none of them felt that this goal was outrageous, but frantically shouted slogans, vowing to complete such a goal, and the scene was extremely hot and enthusiastic.