Chapter 1122: What? Who Got Sold? (Please Subscribe)

The entire area around Huasheng Village was now one enormous construction site.

The bastion fort built from sandbags and timber was now complete, guarding the entrance to a peninsula. To the north of the fort lay a fairly flat peninsula, its trees all cut down, leaving only large stretches of level ground. According to plan, the first city of the United Provinces of New Continent would rise on this flat peninsula. Basic construction of the city had already begun: the embankment around the peninsula was half built, a newly built dock was already in use, a residential area of log cabins was sending up cooking smoke, and between the dock and the residential area stood a market. At the top of the peninsula, a circular shore-defense battery had also been completed. And between the battery, dock, market, residential area, and bastion fort, smooth dirt roads had been laid.

Inside the market enclosed by a wooden palisade, the most imposing building was the trading house with the sign "Xu-Liu-Liang Company" — the name Xu-Liu-Liang Company was a bit of a mouthful, so the people of Huasheng Village never used it, calling it instead the "Slave Trader Company," a firm that specialized in trafficking people!

What a truly wicked place!

Maeda Kiku, who had arrived at Huasheng Village aboard a Xu-Liu-Liang Company merchant ship carrying her infant son, now lived inside the "Slave Trader Company." By this time she had already lulled her son to sleep and had begun working again — because she had a child with her and did not know how to do farm work, she had become an unwanted "slow-selling item." But Liu Liang, who managed the Xu-Liu-Liang Company's business in the New Continent, was unwilling to sell her at a discount, so for the time being he kept her on to help around the firm.

Maeda Kiku was in fact the daughter of a samurai serving at the garrison post the Saga Domain maintained in Nagasaki. She had grown up in Nagasaki, spoke fluent Chinese, and could keep accounts and work an abacus — the Saga Domain had long borne the duty of maintaining order in Nagasaki, and so had established a garrison post there and stationed samurai there permanently.

Moreover, the Saga Domain's territory had long been a major hub of Sino-Japanese and Japanese-Korean trade. So there were many samurai who could speak Chinese and conduct business. Maeda Kiku's family had been merchant-samurai for generations, and she had absorbed a commercial mind from childhood.

So she quickly adapted to the Xu-Liu-Liang Company's wicked trade — trafficking in people!

Of course, the "wickedness" of the Xu-Liu-Liang Company would not be exposed until more than two hundred years later. At the time, no one considered the Xu-Liu-Liang Company wicked.

Even the girls who were sold did not think ill of the Xu-Liu-Liang Company. One had only to look at the company's buildings to see why: there were no facilities for confinement here, and the Japanese women living there were not restricted in their freedom. They could stroll about as they pleased, seek out buyers on their own, and then bring the buyers back themselves to pay!

It sounds unbelievable, but reality is sometimes this absurd!

Most of those brought to Huasheng Village by the Xu-Liu-Liang Company were daughters of peasants. In Japan itself, they were "surplus" existences — because it was very hard for non-heir sons of peasant families to marry, these surplus daughters of peasant families were unwanted. Once they grew a little older, they would be sold off by heartless parents. The lucky ones might become concubines of merchants or samurai; the less fortunate would end up as yujo (prostitutes); and if they were plainer still, they could not even become yujo, and could only do farm work at home, likely never eating a full meal in their lives!

But in Huasheng Village, these people who were surplus in their homeland suddenly became hot commodities — they had only to take a stroll around the nearby work sites, and immediately tall, handsome men who also owned large tracts of land would come up to ask the price. Men of such stature, owning so much land — if they were in Japan, these girls would never have dared even dream of them!

The price of each girl was fixed, written on the kimono she wore, and no bargaining was accepted. If several men took a fancy to the same girl at once, then the girl could choose one buyer she liked from among them.

Eloping with a buyer was out of the question, because there was nowhere to run — the market entrance was guarded!

Soon a girl named Axiang came into the Xu-Liu-Liang Company shop, pulling along a big, sun-darkened fellow (the men of Huasheng Village all seemed like giants to Kiku).

"Sister Kiku, here are ten sable pelts!" Axiang said cheerfully, handing a stack of pelts to Kiku. "Count them."

Kiku smiled as she took the pelts, inspecting each one carefully, then wrapped them up and put them away. Only then did she take out a box containing sale contracts, find the one belonging to Axiang and place it on the table, then bring out an ink-pad box and another sheet of white paper covered with handprints.

"Axiang, make a handprint — right thumb."

"Hai." Axiang answered, and obediently pressed a handprint onto a blank space on the white paper.

"Sir, please verify." Kiku handed the white paper bearing Axiang's handprint and the sale contract, which also bore Axiang's handprint, to the big dark fellow — this was to confirm that Axiang was indeed the property of the Xu-Liu-Liang Company.

"Checked, it's all correct, correct." Having finished verifying the sale contract, the big dark fellow was grinning from ear to ear.

Back in the Great Ming, he had been a bankrupt tenant farmer. Because he owed a landlord's usurious loan, he had been forced to sign a contract to go do hard labor in the New Continent — all the doing of those big and small shareholders of the United Provinces!

To get people to develop the New Continent, they had used every kind of threat and inducement!

This big dark fellow had thought the New Continent would be as bitter as hell, but once he arrived he learned that wages here were especially high, land cost nothing, there was meat to eat every day, and there were cheap girls to marry as wives — he only had to go into the woods, catch ten foolish sables, and skin them, and he could trade them for a fair-skinned, tender fourteen- or fifteen-year-old woman to bear him sons!

This place was simply heaven!

"Here is the receipt, please keep it safe." Kiku had already written out the receipt — the Xu-Liu-Liang Company's trade in people was a lawful business! So there were receipts, and taxes had to be paid according to law, at a rate of ten percent — that is, one sable pelt, or the equivalent in silver, gold, wheat, and so on.

"A receipt? What use is it?" The big dark fellow was illiterate. He took the receipt and looked at it, uncomprehending.

Kiku explained: "Sir, the guards outside the market must inspect the receipt before they will let you take Axiang away. Also, the headman of the village where you live must inspect the receipt before he will register Axiang's household and issue a household register."

The administration of the America Prefecture was indeed very strict!

Population, land, and all trades and industries were registered in the books!

Able-bodied men had to serve in military and labor service; land had to pay taxes in kind according to law; all commercial and industrial operations not only had to pay taxes according to law, but also had to serve the interests of the United Provinces and accept the "guidance" of the America Prefecture. For example, the Xu-Liu-Liang Company's business was conducted under the "guidance" of the America Prefecture!

This was acquiring strategic resources for the America Prefecture!

According to information held by the America Prefecture, every Japanese woman capable of marriage could bear on average seven to eight children in her lifetime.

That is to say, if ten thousand people could be transported to the America Prefecture, then in the future seventy to eighty thousand children would be born in the America Prefecture! In the New Continent, that was an enormous number!

While Kiku was selling people for the Xu-Liu-Liang Company, two of the company's three major shareholders — Liu Liang, who managed the America Prefecture business, and Liang Youxin, who managed shipping (he had originally been a boat captain, brought into the partnership by Xu Kan) — were in the America Prefecture office inside that bastion fort (the America Prefecture Bastion), making a report to Wei Zhongcheng.

It was not a report on how many more people had been successfully sold, but a report on an encounter between a transport ship commanded by Liang Youxin and a Spanish vessel in the North Pacific.

It turned out that Liang Youxin's Pacific junk (a type of large stiff-sailed ship) had encountered a ten-thousand-dan great bird ship flying the Spanish red cross flag in the North Pacific, near the America Gulf!

Moreover, the sailors of the Pacific junk had discovered that there were quite a few Easterners aboard the Spanish great bird ship; judging by their dress, they appeared to be from Japan.

(End of Chapter)