The eight imperial merchants of the Manchu Qing Dynasty refer to Shanxi merchants Fan Yongdou, Wang Dengku, Jin Liangyu, Wang Dayu, Liang Binbin, Tian Shenglan, Zhai Tang, and Huang Yunfa.

Fan Yongdou and other eight extremely wealthy imperial merchants were veritable traitors according to the current nationalists, and they often traveled back and forth between inside and outside the customs long before the Manchurians entered the customs.

At a time when the Ming Dynasty was becoming increasingly politically corrupt and in social turmoil, the merchants' unique keen sense of smell made them see the strength and ambition of the Manchus, so they secretly transported military supplies to the Manchurians in addition to normal trade, provided various information in the Guan, and engaged in political trading.

After the Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the customs, Shunzhi did not forget to establish a great feat for himself in the Central Plains, and held a banquet in the Forbidden City, personally summoned them, and gave them costumes (presumably horse coats and traitor clothes).

At the banquet, Shunzhi wanted to give them official rewards, and the eight families were flattered and tried their best to resign. As a result, Shunzhi named them "Imperial Merchants" (subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Fan Yongdou was appointed to preside over trade affairs and "give Zhangjiakou as a world business". The other seven also have their own rewards.

From now on. Fan Yongdou and others obtained political and economic privileges that other businessmen could not enjoy. Fan Yongdou not only procured goods for the royal family, but also relied on the royal prestige to open up his wealth and start trading all over the world. In addition to operating the salt industry in Hedong and Changlu, he also monopolized the market for ginseng and other valuable medicinal materials in Ussuri and Suifen in Northeast China, so he was also called "ginseng business" by the people. In the blink of an eye, Fan Yongdou became a great imperial merchant with millions of wealth, the best of the eight families, so we know how the imperial merchant made his fortune.

The reason why the Manchu Qing Dynasty was able to enter the customs and slaughter tens of millions of Han people was that the eight Jin merchants made great contributions to the "national integration"!

The entry of the Qing army into the customs and the conquest of the empire with hundreds of millions of iron horsemen looks very much like a "small probability event". So for decades, the violent subjugation of the rebels was the overriding task. The resistance of the Qing army in the Jiangnan and Guangdong regions was particularly fierce, so the massacre was also the most cruel, "Yangzhou Ten Days", "Jiading Three Massacres", "Bloody Lingnan", from these terms can clearly smell the blood at that time, the prosperous century-old industrial and commercial economy was once again devastated.

At the beginning of the regime, the Manchus were extremely distrustful of the Han Chinese, and were only willing to rely on and support those with whom they had special relationships in business, so there were also merchant groups similar to those of the Yuan Dynasty. However, these people are not other ethnic minorities, but the early converts in the Han nationality, they are called Huangshang, there were eight families at that time, namely Fan Yongdou, Wang Dengku, Jin Liangyu, Wang Dayu, Liang Guest, Tian Shenglan, Zhai Tang, Huang Yunfa, known as the "Eight Families of Huangshang".

The Fan family of Jiexiu in Shanxi is the head of the Eight Imperial Merchants, and the family name is Fan Yongdou.

During the reign of Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty, Fan Yongdou opened a business in Zhangjiakou to engage in horse trading, and he and Wang Dengku and eight other merchant families from Shanxi controlled the local horse market trade. Among the merchants, the Manchus from the northeast were the largest buyers, and they exchanged furs, ginseng and other specialties for horses, ironware, salt, and grain. After the Manchus invaded the Central Plains, the need for horses and ordnance increased greatly, and Fan Yongdou and others became one of the most important buyers.

After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the eight families were rewarded, and Shunzhi specially set up a banquet in the Forbidden City to entertain him, and promised to take an official position, Fan Yongdou and others tried their best to resign. As a result, Shunzhi named them "imperial merchants", that is, merchants who served the royal family and were affiliated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Qing government gave them 500 li of land near Zhangjiakou to reclaim, and the obligation was to "make skins every year and hand them over to the treasury of the Ministry of Internal Affairs" for the exclusive use of the royal family. Among them, the biggest beneficiary is Fan Yongdou, who was appointed to preside over trade affairs, and also monopolized the ginseng procurement business in Ussuri, Suifen and other places in Northeast China.

"War is an important way to create the super-rich", and Jiexiu Fan is an important practitioner of this law. Fan Yongdou became a millionaire with a family fortune by relying on the Manchurians, and when it came to his grandson's generation, he became a millionaire by making war fortunes, and he was actually the richest man in the early Qing Dynasty.

During the reign of Kangxi, he sent troops to quell the rebellion in Xinjiang many times, and due to the long distance and through the desert area, the transportation of military rations became a prominent difficulty, and it took 120 taels of silver to transport each stone of rice to the army. In 1720 (the 59th year of Kangxi), the Dzungar tribe rebelled again. Fan Yongdou's two grandsons, Fan Yu and Fan Yu, in accordance with the favorable conditions of doing business with their father in Cyprus since they were children and being familiar with the roads, carefully checked and jointly petitioned the current dynasty to voluntarily transport military rations at a cost less than one-third of the cost of grain transportation by the imperial court. Kangxi heard the music and immediately approved.

Since then, in the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong dynasties, the Fan family has become the most important military grain transporter, and they have been ordered to transport grain and grass in the desert for thousands of miles, without alarming the local government and the people, and the military grain can arrive on time. The price of military rations, including grain prices and transportation and miscellaneous expenses, was 40 taels of silver per stone at the beginning, and later it was voluntarily reduced to 25 taels and 19 taels. Not only that, the Fan family also took the risk of transporting grain, "Qing Historical Manuscript" recorded that in 1732 (the ninth year of Yongzheng), due to the invasion of the enemy, the military grain lost more than 130,000 stone in the process of transportation, and the Fan family paid out of their own pockets to replenish the transportation, spending 1.44 million taels of silver for this. In the three dynasties of Kang Yongqian, the Fan family transported a total of more than one million stones of military rations, saving the government more than 600 taels.

Of course, the Fan family's retribution to the imperial court was also compensated politically and economically. In 1729, Yongzheng specially gave Fan Yu the title of Taifu Temple Secretary of the Second Grade, and became a veritable "red-top merchant" - another more famous "red-top merchant" in later generations, Hu Xueyan was awarded the title of Jiangxi Alternate Dao from the second grade, and was not as good as the Fan family in terms of official title. Fan Yu was admitted to the martial arts, starting from the thousand generals, served as the chief soldier of Tianjin Town, tired of officials to the governor of Guangdong, died in 1750 (the fifteenth year of Qianlong), and there is a small biography of about 500 words in the "Qing History Manuscript".

According to Liang Xiaomin, an economist from Shanxi, Fan Yu is also the only Jin merchant who was written into the "Qing History Manuscript". To put it another way, the 536 volumes of Huanghuang's "Manuscript of the History of the Qing Dynasty" only left only 500 characters for the most important merchant groups of the Qing Dynasty - and because he was the chief soldier and commander, it has to be said that it is a proof that the merchant class was marginalized by the orthodox historians.

In addition to the political recognition, the Fan family of course had greater economic benefits, and the most important one was that they obtained the right to operate salt diversion from Hedong and Changlu, the two most important salt farms in northern China, and the Fan family became the head of the salt merchants. In Changlu alone, the Fan family held 10,718 salt leads, and according to 200 catties of each lead, they controlled 2,143,600 catties of salt. In addition, the limited salt sales area is very advantageous, close to the salt field, and densely populated. Fan's has established a huge sales network in Lu'an, Zezhou, Zhili and Henan. In 1732 (the ninth year of Yongzheng), Li Tianfu, an imperial merchant who originally undertook the salt industry in Daxing and other Bazhou counties, owed more than 300,000 taels of salt and silver, and faced bankruptcy, and Fan bought it. At its peak, Fan supplied salt to more than 10 million people.

The Fan family also entered the copper trade, which was very lucrative at the time. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, silver was used as the standard currency, but copper coins were mostly used in private transactions. There is only Yunnan copper ("Yunnan copper") in China, and the mineral source is lacking, and "foreign copper" has been imported from Japan since the Kangxi period. Initially, it was undertaken by coastal merchants to exchange domestic silk, tea, porcelain, medicinal herbs and other miscellaneous goods for Japanese copper, which was extremely profitable. The Fan family contacted the five imperial merchants in Zhangjiakou and asked to undertake copper trade with Japan. From the third year of Qianlong to the twenty-ninth year of Qianlong, the Fan family sold 600,000 catties of copper every year, accounting for 1/5 of the imports, and after 31 years of Qianlong, the annual copper sales were 1.4 million catties, accounting for more than 1/3 of the imports.

As the most famous imperial merchant family in the early Qing Dynasty, when the Fan family was at its peak, its family property was all over the north and south, with nearly 1,000 salt shops in Shanxi, Zhili, and Henan; warehouses stockpiling salt in Cangzhou, Tianjin; 6 foreign ships in Suzhou; 3 shops in Beijing, 6 shops in Zhangjiakou, 4 shops in Guihua City; 1 pawnshop in Zhangde Mansion, Henan, 106 hectares of land in Zhangjiakou, and more than 1,000 real estate properties in various places. In addition, Pham was also engaged in the trade of timber, horses, furs, ginseng, etc., and traded glass with British merchants to mine lead ore. More than 50 members of the Fan family have been awarded official positions, and they have walked both political and business paths. Fan Yu built the Fan family compound in his hometown of Jiexiu Zhangyuan Village, which was extremely luxurious and was respected by the locals as "Little Jinluan Palace".

The Fan family prospered because of the government, and most of the business they did was related to the government, so the handle of their fate was naturally in the hands of the officials. In the later years of Yongzheng, the military situation in the north was turbulent, the grain transportation business suffered losses, and the household department recovered 2.62 million taels of silver, and the Fan family couldn't take out so much silver for a while, so they agreed to repay it in five installments, thus planting the bane of decay. In the late Qianlong period, the four seas were stable, and the use value of the Fan family had been exhausted, so they became the object of hunting. Around 1782 (the 46th year of Qianlong), the Japanese shogunate government restricted exports on the grounds that copper mining was exhausted, and the once lucrative copper industry suddenly became unprofitable.

Two years later, the imperial court copied the Fan family on the grounds that it owed 3.4 million taels of silver. At this point, "the fox rabbit dies, the lackey cooks", and the unique imperial business model has come to a miserable end. In this corporate history, the history of the rise and fall of the Jiexiu Fan family seems to have become a specimen, "watch it rise a tall building, watch it feast guests, watch it collapse", such a story is repeated again and again, and the plot is similar, the ending is similar, there is never anything new, this is the most frustrating place for future generations.