New Shun 1730

Compared to the price after the Dutch made a fortune as a middleman, it must be said that the price of tea on the Dashun ship is quite affordable.

Speaking of tea alone, it can be seen that the merchants on the Dashun side are much more honest than the East India Company.

The East India Company actually couldn't get any good tea.

To put it bluntly, given the national conditions of Dashun, the Western Trade Company supported by the state also engaged in tea trade and export. How could the UK get the real good or cost-effective tea?

Wuyi tea is of course of good quality, but compared to the various tea families of Dashun, there are still too few categories.

And Dashun, with the development of foreign trade, is also actively improving the taste of tea. After all, Dashun has an absolute monopoly on tea making technology at this time - you can't say that rubbing tea leaves is not technology.

In response to the strange tastes of Europeans, some of them add some cinnamon powder, some ferment the taste of longan, or add some lemon and other fragrances that have become popular with the development of navigation.

The more high-end teas on the Dashun side are green teas, while the European side prefers fermented teas. This is the difference in aesthetic style between the two sides.

In addition to these specially processed teas, the merchant ship also brought the product of the technological revolution this time, the first processed tea made with the participation of the steam engine in Dashun.

This kind of tea is chopped into tea foam, which is different from the "high foam" drunk by the wastes of the Eight Banners in the later period in history. This thing is a kind of "low foam".

The quality is low. Anyway, the tea leaves are chopped into powder. As for how big the leaves are, God knows.

Don't worry about transportation loss. They are already tea foam. After packaging, they can be shipped tens of thousands of miles to Europe and America without worrying about crushing.

The quantity is large and the taste is heavy, because it can be mixed with some strange spices, dried fruits, fruit peels and other things.

The price is of course low.

This is mainly due to the previous British shit policy and the Dutch making a profit as a middleman. A pound of the most common Wuyi tea can be sold for about seven or eight coins in North America.

Although we earn a lot here and have a lot of land, we basically don't have to worry about food, but if you say that you need to spend one tael of silver to buy a pound of tea, not everyone can afford it.

After Dashun went to Southeast Asia, its trade ideas were different from those of the Netherlands. The Netherlands wanted monopoly and would rather cut down trees than increase production; Dashun's direction was to make small profits but quick turnover, because Dashun's primitive accumulation was not the goal, but the means, that is, to create more industries and accommodate more people to break away from the tenancy system of growing grain.

This kind of tea foam after the use of steam engines appeared under this idea, and the price was so low that it could ensure that coffee was completely killed.

And there are some high-end ones, and they will not be attributed to low-end consumption by rich people. If you really want to buy, let alone seven or eight coins per pound, there are also tea leaves that cost seventy or eighty taels of silver per pound.

The trade ambassador from the Dashun side, who had an official status, invited Hancock and other North American merchants to have tea, and gave them some relatively good silk from Dashun, and then tried to convey the real task assigned to him by the superiors.

Before instigating the North American merchant group to gather here, the trade ambassador still talked about the theory of free trade that Liu Yu had been shouting about in Europe before.

Now, smuggling is a "victimless crime" recognized by morality in North America and even Scotland and England.

Then, it is very simple to get closer and give a sacred explanation to low-tariff trade.

In other words, on the moral level, it was "gray" before, at least there were some murmurs in the heart; and now, it is to apply a layer of holy light to the "gray" and turn it into sacred.

This is the meaning of the debate.

If the scriptures are not changed, some behaviors will also murmur in your heart, is it right to do so?

If the scriptures are changed, for the same behavior, you can hold your head high and be justified, what I do is right, and those who hinder me are bad.

The Thirty Years' War and the Reformation only solved some of the shackles of Catholic etiquette and laid the foundation for the glory of making money.

The new trade theory is to find a legal basis for what they are doing now.

Otherwise, like the Boston Tea Party, for a long time, because the scriptures did not make it clear, until 1834, the United States deliberately downplayed and avoided the tea party, and there was not even a special term "Boston Tea Party". Because it involves destroying other people's property and whether private property is sacred.

It was not until the scriptures were completed that they began to publicize it. Almost at the same time, there was also the Mayflower myth.

As for now, from the simple moral level of this time, Dashun and Britain are at war.

This is similar to the end of the Ming Dynasty, when Ming Dynasty merchants ran to Liaodong to sell grain to the Later Jin. After all, in terms of simple morality, some scriptures are still needed to remove psychological barriers.

Although, since these people have come, there is no need to both serve and establish. But if they can establish, it is always good.

The trade ambassador approached the issue from the perspective of Confucianism's people-oriented ideology, and criticized the trade policy of the United Kingdom.

What they learned was cold and cold. But what they said was full of humanistic truth.

Although what they learned, critically speaking, was that Britain's trade policy was to criticize primitive accumulation as a goal rather than a means. The purpose was naturally to instill in them the concept of shaping industrial capitalists after primitive accumulation.

But when he relayed it from his mouth to Hancock and other North American businessmen, it was full of tenderness.

"From our point of view, your government's trade policy is undoubtedly a view derived from a philosophy with the 'country' as the main body."

"Your government's focus is on how much tax is collected and how much money is earned."

"From the time of Cromwell to Colbert in France, when they formulated policies, they only calculated based on the country as the main body - they only needed an accountant to calculate how much silver entered our country today and how much silver flowed out. As long as more enters and less flows out, then it is right. ”

“We have always been against this. We never count how much goes in and how much goes out. Because, here in the Celestial Empire, people are the foundation, and it is a philosophy that takes the people and the masses as the subject…”

“For example, for commodities, we are more concerned about whether the ‘subject’ we are studying can drink enough tea? Can they eat enough salt? Can they wear cotton cloth to keep warm?”

“The difference in the ‘subject’ of this philosophy is the root of the current differences in trade between China and Britain…”

He was full of nonsense, talking freely, but Hancock and others nodded repeatedly.

The only reason why Dashun did not pay attention to how much silver went in and how much went out was because Dashun had no chance of a “trade deficit” at all.

People’s thoughts did not fall from the sky. Since the Ming Dynasty, China has completely lost the environment for the concept of “trade deficit”.

And with the expansion of trade, Dashun had the concepts of surplus and deficit. The problem is that in a trade system where a trade deficit is impossible, it is meaningless to pay attention to how much silver went in and how much silver went out.

Because that's the reality.

The tariffs of Dashun were very low, and only goods such as opium were strictly prohibited from import; religious items were strictly controlled due to religious issues.

For the rest, there was really no specific policy of tariff protection: British woolen cloth could not be sold to Dashun, not because Dashun increased tariffs, but because it could not be sold.

The trade ambassador was clear in his mind. He was very sure that if European cloth was cheaper than Dashun cloth one day, he would definitely support expanding the army and starting a war to cut off trade.

But as the saying goes, the same lie, told by different people, sounds completely different to the audience.

If these words were said by the French, Hancock and others would definitely curse in their hearts, saying it was bullshit.

But when said by the people on the Dashun side, it changed its flavor and sounded so reasonable.

It was just like the debate that European economists were having at this time: Is the reduction of interest rates the cause of economic development? Or the result of economic development?

And the similar maze that Dashun can follow now is: Is free trade the cause of industrial advantage? Or the result of industrial advantage?

The trade ambassador has his own answer in his heart.

Because the customs of Dashun has been busy adding high tariffs on raw silk exported to Japan in recent years, the new policy this year is to strictly prohibit Bangladeshi raw silk from entering Japan in the future.

However, Dashun encourages silk, ready-made clothes, finished products, etc. to enter Japan in large quantities.

As for whether this is free trade, the trade ambassador is still very clear in his mind.

Now that it is said, it is naturally to take advantage of the current China fever in Europe and turn the result into the cause.

This is also something that the elites of the Dashun New School have been trying to build.

Although they may not be able to summarize what they want to build.

But the discourse system of later generations is actually: some new production relations, new morals, and new trade theories that are bound to emerge with the development of productivity, such universal things, and superstructures that are different from the previous ones that are bound to change with the change of the economic base, are shaped into national characteristics and tied to national symbols.

Turn the "free trade" that must be shouted after an industry is developed into something of "national tradition" and publicize it to the outside world.

And distort "free trade is the result of industrial advantage" into "free trade is the cause of industrial advantage".

Now it seems that this is very effective.

Along with the spring breeze of the Enlightenment's "borrowing from the East to criticize the West", Liu Yu had been distorting this issue as early as when he visited Amsterdam to incite a coup.

It avoided the silver inflation transmission of the price revolution, avoided the labor cost under the situation of too many people and too little land, avoided the handicraft advantages accumulated over two thousand years, avoided the agricultural revolution and key technologies such as smelting furnace iron that were completed in the Han Dynasty at the level of the British agricultural revolution, and so on.

The reason for opening the mouth is that because Dashun's system is a free trade system, Dashun's industry is developed and can sell fans, tea, porcelain, silk, cotton cloth, etc., etc. to Europe.

The trade ambassador has heard this set of rhetoric many times, and he can speak it out directly.

Of course, this is under the background that Dashun's strategy is to divide North America.

Otherwise, if the intention is to tear Britain apart, then this set of rhetoric is directly derived from [If the monarch regards his subjects as his own hands and feet, then his subjects will regard the monarch as their own heart and soul; if the monarch regards his subjects as dogs and horses, then his subjects will regard the monarch as their fellow countrymen; if the monarch regards his subjects as dirt, then his subjects will regard the monarch as their enemy]: Britain regards the East India Company and the big Anglican merchants as its own hands and feet, but regards you North Americans as dirt.

And it is easy to divert this issue directly from the Navigation Act and the previous North American coinage issue.

However, it is obvious that the trade ambassador's current strategy is to compromise and win over, rather than ignite conflicts. With a slight change of tone, this issue has been trivialized.

To put it more seriously, the Tea Tax Act and the Sugar Tax Act are to protect the East India Company at the expense of the Thirteen States, and to protect the West Indian plantations at the expense of the New England brewers.

To put it more lightly, it is the British "trade philosophy" tradition that has led to some mistakes in trade policy. The Celestial Empire has sent some warships to talk to your king about reason, and he will soon be able to make sense, and he will soon realize that he has made a mistake. Just correct it if you make a mistake.