Chapter 92

Late at night, the lamps were still lit in the guest room of the County Academy, and Wang Yang was holding a pen to calculate his family assets, with money baskets and money boxes placed around him.

Chen Qingshan sat with her legs together, resting on her buttocks, carefully wiping her flying knives. Her cold and clear eyebrows and eyes did not add a trace of warmth and softness under the reflection of the candle, but instead showed a different kind of cold and charming meaning.

Cold and charming, the colder, the more charming.

However, Wang Yang did not notice this; he was concentrating on making the "first financial report of the Wang Group since the crossing."

The 100,000 coins won from the academic debate were divided into 50,000 for the County Academy, which was what Wang Yang had planned long ago.

Not to mention that he already owed Liu Zhao 16,200 coins, just the banquet tonight, and the people and carriages he had used at the County Academy these past few days, as well as food and lodging, had not cost him a penny.

Liu Zhao was a sincere gentleman and did not care about these expenses, but Wang Yang could not take advantage of others for nothing. In order to prevent Liu Zhao from refusing, Wang Yang thought of three ways of speaking, and it took a lot of effort to barely make Liu Zhao accept it.

Thirty fans were snapped up, ten black-handled fans for 100,000, and twenty natural wood-handled fans for 160,000. After deducting the one-tenth share for the shopkeeper, there should have been 234,000 coins left. But what Wang Yang didn't expect beforehand was that he also had to pay market tax!

Originally, the gentry could be tax-exempt. But what the gentry were exempt from were "poll tax" (head tax), "household adjustment" (tax in kind), land rent, customs duties, and miscellaneous taxes; market tax could not be exempted.

The so-called "market tax" is the transaction tax in the market. For large transactions of 10,000 coins or more, 400 coins are taxed for every 10,000, of which the seller pays 300 and the buyer pays 100.

So Wang Yang had to pay 7,800 coins in market tax, and then 226,200 coins remained.

300 copies of "One Hundred Questions on the Book of History," after deducting the 3 copies given away and the 1 copy he kept for himself, all 296 copies were sold. Each copy sold for 1,000 coins.

There was a consideration for not setting the price as high as the fans.

Because the number of words in this book was really not much, and it was not difficult to copy, it was common for several people to read it together. He was afraid that a high price would lead to sluggish sales, and once sales were sluggish, as soon as those "pirated" book merchants came out with copies, these books would be even harder to sell.

So Wang Yang just took advantage of the heat to raise the price a little, getting 290,000 coins.

An unexpected gain was that the handover with Chengde Bookstore was handled by Xie Xinghan, and he didn't know how she operated it, but she handed 290,000 coins in full to Wang Yang without deducting the market tax part. Wang Yang saved a small expense.

The above is the income.

The expenditure was that Wang Yang prepared to make 10,000 folding fans and transport them to the capital by the Xie family's ships to sell.

These 10,000 fans were not a small number. Wang Yang let the fan shop owner act as an agent, integrating the fan workshop and fan makers. Wang Yang didn't care how he talked to those people; anyway, he gave him 30 coins per fan, which was to make 10,000 fans with a capital of 300,000 coins.

A business of 300,000 coins, there is a lot of room for operation in between. You, the boss, act as a liaison, you can suppress prices and earn oil and water, but the premise is that you must ensure that the quality of the fans does not change.

And Wang Yang was not at ease handing over the 300,000 directly to the boss and then becoming a hands-off shopkeeper, so he let the Black Man be responsible for this matter and follow up the whole process. Firstly, it could prevent the boss from playing tricks, such as making inferior fans to reduce costs, and secondly, it was to see the Black Man's ability to handle affairs. If he could do it, he could be reused; if not, it was also a training.

Another small expense was the 7,800 coins owed to the clothing store before the academic debate. And the 2,000 owed to Little Fatty.

Income minus expenditure, Wang Yang had 256,400 coins left, which could be used to buy a house.

It wasn't that he was uncomfortable living in the County Academy, but it wasn't his own home after all, and it was not easy to be too casual in his daily life or eating. No matter how well Liu Zhao treated him, he didn't feel at ease living there.

Besides, he still had to let the Black Man run the folding fan business in the city, and there was little A-Wu at home. It was too far for them to continue living in Baying Village. Not only was it inconvenient to take care of A-Wu, but it was also not easy to contact him if something happened.

What's more, that broken thatched cottage was indeed too simple. With the friendship between Wang Yang and the Black Man and his daughter, plus the fact that the two were about to become his retainers, both emotionally and reasonably, he had to arrange a suitable place for them to live.

After Wang Yang and Xie Xinghan finished eating, they went to look at houses.

His initial idea was to buy a small courtyard, just enough to live in. But the problem was that his external identity was the Langya Wang clan after all. If he lived in the same courtyard with the Black Man and the others, it would be "mixing the noble and the common," which would not only be criticized but, more importantly, might lead to suspicion of his identity.

But he didn't have enough budget to buy the kind of multi-courtyard houses like the big families, so after looking around, he wanted to just buy a smaller house for the Black Man and A-Wu to live in, and he would still live in the County Academy.

In the end, he picked an old house in "Haojing Alley" in the old city in the northwest. The advantage of this house was that it was a "pseudo-two-courtyard" house.

Houses on four sides surrounding a courtyard is called "one-courtyard."

Houses on four sides with two layers, two courtyards connected, is called "two-courtyard."

The house Wang Yang took a fancy to had two courtyards, but not that many rooms.

The east, west, and north sides of the first courtyard were all courtyard walls. Only on the side of the street gate in the south were there two large rooms without partitions facing the street, which could be used as a gatehouse, similar to the inverted rooms of a four-sided courtyard. They were generally for servants to live in. So the beds inside were also shared beds.

There were stables and carriage sheds in the courtyard, as well as a large locust tree.

There was an empty gate at the north wall of the courtyard, connecting to the backyard.

In the north of the backyard was the main hall, plus two spacious main rooms that were opened up, which could be used as a study and bedroom; there were two wing rooms on the east and west; the room in the northeast corner was set up as a kitchen, and the room in the southwest corner was a toilet.

Wang Yang slept in the main room, A-Wu was a study boy, and Chen Qingshan was a guard. It was reasonable for them to live in the inner courtyard with Wang Yang. As for the Black Man, he could only live in the shared bed in the outer courtyard.

Because it was a "pseudo-two-courtyard" and the house was not new, the price was not high, and there was room for bargaining. After talking back and forth, it was finally settled at 150,000, but the condition for the transaction was that Wang Yang had to cover the 4% transaction tax (also known as "valuation tax" at the time).

So Wang Yang had to pay an extra 4,800.

Minus the 154,800 for buying the house, Wang Yang only had 101,600 coins left in cash.

Wang Yang rubbed his eyes after calculating the account, rested for a while, and suddenly asked: "Qingshan, if someone wants to hire you as a guard, how much would the commission be?"

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Note: Housing prices in the Southern Dynasties ranged from tens of thousands to millions. Of course, records of over ten million can also be found. Although the house Wang Yang bought was a small bargain, it was still considered very low-middle among the scholar-officials. The ordinary ones lived in by the gentry were all 400,000 to 500,000. For example, in the Southern Qi Dynasty, Cui Weizu, the son of Cui Qingxu, the Inspector of Liangzhou, "sold the house for 450,000" (Book of Southern Qi: Biography of Cui Weizu). When Cai Kuo was the Prefect of Yuzhang in the Liu Song Dynasty, he built a house for his brother Cai Gui, and Cai Gui "sent 500,000 coins to supplement the house price" (Book of Song: Biography of Cai Xingzong).

Wang Yang has not yet been hit by the housing prices in the capital, not to mention that he hasn't bought a villa yet (yes, villa manors were very popular in the noble circle at that time). After Wang Yang enters the capital, he will know what "living in the capital is not easy" means.