Chapter 522: Shopkeeper Wu's Daily Life (II)

The goods the merchant caravan brought were all urgently needed items for He Family Stockade, and the most abundant among them were two bulk commodities: salt and farming tools.

First, salt.

In the mid-to-late Ming period, as the ruling clique grew increasingly corrupt, the Imperial Household, eunuchs, ennobled nobles, and bureaucrats saw that holding Salt Permits was profitable and flocked to the Emperor to petition for Salt Permits to resell for profit — a phenomenon called "Nest Occupation." This practice, simply put, was a form of rent-seeking, a blatant encroachment on the state's salt tax revenue.

As a result, the Ming court's previously effective Salt Distribution Law for salt collapsed completely.

Later on, as the salt laws decayed, smuggling syndicates formed by wealthy merchants, prestigious clans, and military strongmen began openly and forcibly trafficking salt, causing massive losses in state tax revenue.

Now, in this plane, the situation has changed.

Ever since a certain power base laid out its plans outside Guangzhou City, salt — a commodity the government had run worse and worse — suddenly burst with vitality.

Before this, the monopoly model of the government plus salt merchants had led to ever-higher salt prices, ever-worse salt quality, ever-shrinking salt tax revenue, and private salt lords evading taxes everywhere, while the common people ended up with no salt to eat, especially those in remote areas.

Once the Transmigrators began wholesaling salt in Guangzhou's New District, the previous order was shattered.

Guangdong is not like Fujian; Guangdong itself produced salt before, and had a complete system of salt merchants and official salt. Now that the old system had been disrupted like this by the Transmigrators, it immediately couldn't hold up, and the salt merchants and the Salt Distribution Commissioner instantly bristled.

Yet times have changed. The Transmigrators' wings are now fully grown and their fangs gradually bared; they are no longer the nobodies who once nervously went to Fujian to negotiate Recruitment and Amnesty. Now, even though the Transmigrators openly sell private salt at the New District Pier, the salt merchants and the Salt Distribution Commission can do nothing about it — even if behind the salt merchants stand figures of great influence, even if the Commission's memorials can reach the imperial ear.

This "nothing about it" is truly nothing about it. Whether they come at him with civil or martial means, Cao the Regional Commander fears neither.

If they come with martial means: the moment anyone steps out of Guangzhou City's gates nowadays, they see warships bristling with great cannons and the Cao Family Elite Troops who have exterminated every pirate on the outer seas.

If they come with civil means... it's still the same line: so long as that Cao doesn't raise a rebel banner in Guangdong, and so long as the Tartars in the north aren't exterminated, Chongzhen will absolutely never back the political forces behind the Liangguang Salt Distribution Commission and those salt merchants.

Come to think of it, since the salt administration is rotting by the day in the hands of the salt merchants and the corrupt Salt Distribution Commission, and the court is collecting no tax either way, what difference does it make to Chongzhen whether Cao Chuan traffics private salt for profit or the salt merchants sell salt? One turtle gone, another turtle arrived, that's all.

The most nauseating point for righteous gentlemen was that the one who ought to have been everyone's backer in this matter, the Governor-General of Liangguang, was none other than that old scoundrel Xiong Wencan, who came to assume office aboard a great Cao Clan ship...

After probing twice, openly and covertly, and discovering that what they faced was truly a super-sized tiger that had burrowed into the system, Guangdong's salt administration apparatus felt despair.

What followed was a period of chaos: anyone with money, regardless of status, could go to the New District Pier and wholesale salt.

During this period, one part of the salt merchants still tried to gamble, swallowing all the salt stock in the hands of Cao the Regional Commander to corner the market — and then those iron-headed fools were bankrupted by the endless stream of refined salt shipped from Taiwan. The Taiwan Qigu Salt Field had long since achieved medium-scale production; the New District Pier always had over five hundred tons of salt in stock ready for sale. The Transmigrators crushed the salt merchants while picking their toes.

Through this method, the Transmigrators were able, in the shortest possible time, to use "salt dumping" to collapse the old official and private salt sales channels in one blow, throwing the old order into complete disarray.

At this point, the Transmigrators sauntered out to tidy up the mess. The method was simple: divide into sales territories, set up local agents — same as with other goods.

And the salt merchants who had experienced the behind-the-scenes arm-wrestling with Cao the Regional Commander finally understood his power. No one dared to bristle anymore; each of them obediently hauled carts of silver to the New District Pier to bid for the salt agency rights in various regions.

After declaring their surrender to the new master and successfully bidding for regional salt industry agency rights, a Liangguang salt wholesale agent group, composed of a portion of the salt merchants and newly risen traders, took shape.

And the salt merchants quickly discovered they had joined an efficient, clean, new-style commercial wholesale network. After experiencing the charm of the new model, many far-sighted men were wild with joy — so long as Cao the Regional Commander didn't fall from power, the money everyone would earn from now on would only grow.

The ones truly harmed in this matter were actually Guangdong's salt administration offices. Using vast quantities of refined salt as his weapon, Cao the Regional Commander flipped the table, seized de facto control of Guangdong's salt administration, and eroded the established governmental authority.

In the end, the Transmigrators won a complete victory, replicating Fujian's salt industry structure in Guangdong and forming a new salt industry bloc whose interests were bound to the Crossing Regime.

After this, a contractual requirement all too familiar to later generations but a thunderclap in this plane genuinely upended the understanding of Liangguang's merchants: the Guangdong-Guangxi Salt Industry General Company set a minimum sales volume for every agent. If an agent sold too little the next year, there were penalties; if they sold more, the General Company gave rebates.

The merchants were truly shocked: from ancient times to the present, they had only ever heard of goods being insufficient — never had they heard of a charter that forced everyone to sell more.

In truth, the Transmigrators were rather helpless about this too. For over three years, they had been building industrial zones in Taiwan, madly pursuing industrial construction. Yet to this day, the thing that could truly overturn the traditional seller's market in volume, achieve dumping, and demonstrate the advantage of industrialization was instead a raw material like salt — even though this salt was also produced using industrial methods, it still didn't bring the same sense of achievement as something coming off an assembly line.

The consequence of the massive salt dumping was the immediate elimination of private salt lords. Nowadays in Fujian and Guangdong, the big salt lords have all gone clean and become distributors for the Transmigrators; salt lords have truly vanished. Because distributors everywhere are desperately selling goods within their territories according to their contracts, even the remotest gullies and ridges that no one had visited before have been developed by the distributors. Cheap private salt is everywhere, the profit margins for private salt lords are gone, and this profession has naturally disappeared as well.

With the causes and consequences clear, the true background of Shopkeeper Wu's visit to He Family Basin this time becomes obvious: as the salt agent for Zengcheng County, White Horse Chain Grocery Company now needed to develop the local markets it had previously neglected. That was why Shopkeeper Wu, shortly after the new year, brought a merchant caravan to the remote He Family Stockade. His fundamental goal was still to contact old clients, maintain channels, and find sales outlets for more commodities in the future.

In fact, the Ming people are not stupid at all. After realizing that the salt supply was so abundant that contracts specifying required sales volumes were necessary, White Horse Sundries, having caught on, quickly adjusted its business model from waiting for customers to come to them to taking the initiative. An old brother unseen for many years had now come on his own initiative to visit his elder brother.