Chapter 419: The Baijiu Trade

If someone from later generations saw these rectangular tin boxes painted army-green, they'd probably guess what was inside: gasoline, lubricating oil, olive oil... nothing more than stuff like that. Auto repair shop windows and plenty of car trunks have these things.

The tin boxes being opened today on the drill field were made of tinplate, and what was inside was liquor.

Baijiu, since it requires staple grains to produce, is not made in the Empire's "homeland." As mentioned before, Tainan has already opened vineyards, and the upper class is vigorously promoting grape wine.

And the baijiu trade with the Ming domain has always worked like this: the Kiln District supplies the glass bottles, and the Hangzhou Station uses distilling equipment to produce the liquor right in Hangzhou, where canal grain is abundant.

This trade model has been very successful.

The beautiful glass bottles, the pure, clear liquor, the mellow and rich taste, and the thirty-five-percent alcohol content specially blended for the gentry class — all of this made the wealthy of Great Ming flock to it; you couldn't even buy it if you tried.

You have to understand, literati drinking is nothing like how the poor and miserable drink. The literati care about a slow buzz — they want to brew, to get slightly tipsy, to trade poems over wine, and finally, when the poetic impulse strikes, to flourish their brushes and splash ink. So when scholar-officials drink, the proof can't be high.

This precise market positioning quickly made "Hundred Years Confusion" and "Shede" — two premium baijiu brands full of artistic conception — famous among the gentry class. If not for the shortage of raw materials, the total profit from this baijiu business would certainly have ranked at the very top among all the industrial goods... just look at Moutai in later generations and you'll understand.

And this time, the tinplate-bucketed baijiu brought to Tianjin by the fleet was a market-testing commercial project specially planned by the Commerce Department for the northern trade environment.

First, because Tianjin is so far away and transport costs are high, the guiding principle was to base the production of goods inconvenient to transport as much as possible on local production — and among these, the most profitable was, of course, baijiu.

Second, Tianjin is the receiving end for canal grain. Brewing here means the grain absorbed by the distillery won't affect purchases in the south, so the enterprises the Transmigrators open here can brew as much as they want.

In this way, a plan for mid- and low-tier baijiu with greater output entered the agenda.

So what liquor is most suitable for trading with the northern nomadic tribes while also meeting the needs of the middle and lower classes?

Without a doubt: Erguotou.

What's in these tinplate buckets on the drill field today is standard fifty-five-proof Erguotou.

Seeing this pile of gleaming tin boxes, the onlookers standing on the drill field looked at each other, clueless about what trick was up their sleeve — could it be broken silver inside?

And at that moment, the two "Recorders" responsible for signing the commercial contracts made their dazzling entrance.

After ordering men to bring porcelain bowls and distributing them to the horse traders, grooms, and all the guards who had come to help — including Clerk Lu Shui and his men — Recorders Xue and Yao, beaming, lifted the tin buckets, unscrewed the caps, and poured the clear, cold liquid into the porcelain bowls in everyone's hands.

In an instant, a powerful aroma of liquor began to drift across the drill field.

The next moment, the people who figured out what was going on all began drinking heartily amid laughter.

Historically, Erguotou wasn't truly created until the Kangxi reign. What the Transmigrators brought out today was standard Erguotou produced with later-generation equipment and techniques.

The liquor, clear as a mountain spring, slid down the throat like a line of fire into the belly, and then warmth began to spread through the whole body. A moment later, as the kick hit, the head began to feel slightly dizzy. This sensation, like a sharp knife and fierce flame, combined with the heat surging through them, immediately made these men who traveled year-round in the cold winds beyond the passes flush red and raise their thumbs: "Fine liquor! Fine liquor!"

After observing the reactions of these hard laborers, Xue Haiyuan and Yao Jianshe couldn't help but exchange a smile: it seemed Erguotou was the same in ancient times as now — the favorite of the common people!

In pre-event testing, the liquor poured from these tin buckets — its clarity, alcohol content, aroma profile, and mouthfeel — had all surpassed the metrics of Ming homebrew. And now the reactions of these tasters finally put the sellers' minds completely at ease.

Since that was the case, it was time to start marketing. So every horse handler and guard present was given one sample bucket: this was to take back for the bosses behind them to taste.

Next came the sales.

The situation was very optimistic. After studying it for a while, the horse traders made their stance on the spot: they were willing to use the entire payment for two hundred horses to exchange for this "top-grade strong liquor."

To the horse traders, silver money wasn't actually that useful. Because when they went beyond the passes to Menggu to buy horses, it was basically all barter trade. What those horse-herding nomads needed most were the various daily goods of the Ming people — liquor, salt — they didn't want silver.

So the horse traders were very satisfied with the Erguotou. They immediately positioned this commodity: a high-grade strong liquor to be placed at the whole-sheep feast, poured personally by Mongol princes and nobles for honored guests.

The reason it was high-grade lay not only in the contents but also in the outer packaging.

This beautiful tin bucket was "ingeniously designed" — it could be carried by hand, could be stacked, and wasn't afraid of bumps during transport, far superior to wine jars bound with hemp rope. In this era of scarce goods, a tinplate bucket that could later be used to hold other things undoubtedly had a higher added value — this was absolutely synonymous with high-grade.

The horse traders immediately concluded the deal with the two Recorders.

However, though the deal was successful, taking delivery would still have to wait a while. Because the liquor displayed on the drill field today was just the promotional samples that had come with the ship.

The next step: the Transmigrators first had to find partners and establish a distillery workshop before they could produce the commodity...

Of course, this process would be very fast. Because that very evening, after the various masters had finished tasting the Erguotou and studying the tin buckets that looked so impressive, by the next morning, the Jinwei tycoons interested in investing and partnering with the Transmigrators to open a distillery were once again crowding the drill field.

Due to the dual advantages of transport and canal grain, Tianjin — just like Moutai Town in later generations — had an extremely developed liquor-brewing industry since ancient times. The homebrew produced here radiated out across more than half of the north.

Among the functional buildings clustered in Dazhigu, besides temples, there was one industrial chain that was most numerous: distilleries and wine shops.

So the local merchants of Tianjin were no strangers to the high-profit liquor-brewing industry — many of them even ran their own distilleries. As a result, after evaluating this exquisite and uniquely boxed liquor, there wasn't a single person unmoved.

Through the gradually deepening understanding of recent years, these great Ming merchants had now all come to recognize the marvel of industrial goods — no matter the quantity, the specifications and appearance of these commodities were always uniform, a completely different concept from the handmade goods they were familiar with.

Now, seeing this boxed fine liquor, the great merchants who truly understood the Transmigrators would also realize the same thing: this good liquor, transparent yet fierce and mellow on the palate, must be just like "Hundred Years Confusion" and those other liquors — its quality would never change.

This was worth placing a heavy bet on: the homebrew produced by the workshops under their command fluctuated in quality with every batch, and could never achieve the "inspection-free" standard of those industrial goods.

After thinking it through, the next day, the entrance to the drill field was once again packed with luxurious carriages.

In recent days, stimulated by various large-value agency contracts, the Tianjin business world — already boiling like a hot wok — today once again whipped up a frenzy of "bid-rigging." Every prominent figure in Tianjin who understood the high profits of baijiu, whether settled merchants, traveling traders, horse dealers, distillers, or gentry, officials, canal gang members, and salt merchants — all swarmed in, every one of them a person of considerable standing.

Seeing such a grand occasion, the Transmigrators were reassured: it seemed everyone had strong confidence in the baijiu industry. Very good — in that case, the Company could be smoothly established.

Yes, this time the Transmigrators intended to use baijiu as the opportunity to introduce later-generation management concepts in Jinwei and establish a proper joint-stock Company composed of numerous shareholders, breaking with Ming tradition.

Before the foreign powers brought the company system in the late Qing, although Chinese merchants did sometimes pool shares with outsiders to do business, this was not the mainstream after all. The various partnership systems were also very different from later generations — very primitive and highly arbitrary.

The true mainstream for Ming people was still the family-run business. This operating model at most hired some outsiders as shopkeepers, while the shareholders behind it were either a single dominant family or the various branches within a clan holding shares together.

And the Transmigrators, who had all along been promoting standardized and formulaic models in their domain, this time also brought the advanced system to Tianjin. This baijiu Company about to be established would be the example, the specimen.

And so, in the newly repaired Point General Hall, the northern merchants packed closely together listened, for the first time like school students, as Comrade Yao Jianshe on the stage read out the company charter and prospectus.

In the Q&A session that followed, the merchants quickly grasped the key essence of a "Company": it was simply that because the scale was too large, the traditional partnership of a few people doing business became a partnership of dozens, or hundreds, of people doing business.

At this point, the question the merchants were considering was actually very simple: did they or did they not trust this set of complicated charters from the General's Mansion Records Office? Or, even simpler and more bluntly: did they or did they not acknowledge the General's business reputation?

Nonsense — was there even any need to ask? Up to now, who among those who had done big business with the General's Mansion hadn't struck it immensely rich? Would someone with mountains of gold and silver like the General need to swindle you out of that bit of share capital?

Once they figured out this key point, the merchants began enthusiastically subscribing for the initial shares. The rules and regulations could be studied slowly later — the word "trust" was the foundation. The commercial credibility the Transmigrators had built up over a long time played a crucial role in backing this.

The share subscription process went very quickly and smoothly. Don't look at how the government acted as if coughing up two thousand taels of silver would cost them their lives — in this era, wealthy commercial capital was the trade where funds accumulated in large amounts.

And so, on that very day, in this plane of existence, the first company-system enterprise in the north was hereby declared established: the Tianjin Northern Liquor Group Co., Ltd.