Chapter 2928: Tianjin Wei (7)

Li Luoyou could scarcely believe his own eyes. To run into his wife's nephew — in Tianjin of all places!

To be sure, these last years the letters Gu Baocheng sent up from Lingao had been carrying enclosures of some new contrivance of the Australians': photographs. In the picture-paper the nephew had grown sturdier and sturdier, brighter and brighter — only in Li Luoyou's eyes this child, whom he regarded as his own, remained that frail, inward boy of the old days, the boy who blushed to speak, and whom you would never have sent out to trade.

Yet when that nephew, in the flesh, set his own hands to steadying him into the carrying chair, Li Luoyou understood that the timid lad of those years was gone past finding. The young man before him bowed with perfect correctness and spoke with modest warmth, but there was no refusing those arms, and through his every gesture ran a composure, a settled scorn that looked down on everything about it — and that, Li Luoyou knew, was the very weather of the "True Kun." He had felt it strongly enough back when they were still cooped up in their obscure little county in northern Hainan — and now his sister's son had, in some measure, gone Shorn-hair himself.

The banks of the Hai River below the Sanchahe junction, where the water turns southeast, had been a desolate stretch not long since; now wharves stood there in whole fields, godowns rank upon rank, most of them the Merchants Bureau fleet's own. The eating and drinking and pleasure quarters had followed the trade, naturally. There was the Qiwei Inn, known to every soul in Tianjin, and the Green Wave Gallery winehouse built along the water — a branch, so it was said, of the famous Songjiang house. Gu Baocheng plainly knew the ground by instinct: the chair set down before the Green Wave Gallery, and before Li Luoyou could catch all he murmured to the waiter, the man was bowing them both upstairs and into a private room overhanging the river.

"Uncle." Only when the wine and dishes stood complete did Gu Baocheng come to the business that had brought him to Tianjin. "This journey of your nephew's is over the coal money — twenty-seven thousand taels of it — that the cannon bureau under the governor's yamen still owes our Tianbao house, dragged from before New Year's to this very day, till the counting room has worn calluses on my ears with its howling. Your nephew's own view is this: a Grand Secretary in the dignity of that rank, out governing a province — there is not a second such face in the whole Great Ming. And the Dragon Boat Festival is staring us in the eye, and settlement at the three festivals is the rule the old ancestors handed down; so for this your nephew came in person. And if Governor Xu and Intendant Jiang are gone away on imperial business — well then, your nephew can only wait here till they come."

"So that boatload of small coal at Xigu was yours?" Li Luoyou's astonishment was genuine. His nephew had written in past years that the Australians' coal market ran white-hot, and that the Tianbao house had turned the capital once meant for the ocean trade wholly into coal; Li Luoyou had taken it for talk — at most some modest line, like the coal shops of the capital. The truth ran far past anything he knew. The H1200 tonnage originally meant for the ocean trade had been mostly swallowed — the Hong Kong shipyard's expansion and its rush building of new colliers and ore carriers eating up every slip — and the money had been on the edge of going down the well; Gu Baocheng had pulled the capital out clean and gone calling at one office after another, paying his respects to the Chiefs, until at last, under the Energy Department's guidance, he settled on ground at Xiamaogang, on the flanks of the Baiyun hills north of Guangzhou, and opened his mine there. He had not shrunk even from borrowing at Delong to buy the newest steam drainage engine.

After the event, everyone granted that the young master of the Gu house had not only a sharp eye and a bold hand but luck running clean out of the pitcher. The Guangzhou of the seventeenth century was not the capital; its people had small habit of burning coal for wood. But Xiamao's coal came to market exactly as the Senate was moving its bureaus and industries north into Guangzhou. The Honggai coal of Vietnam could not keep pace — and so the locomobile power station of the government district, the little tugs threading the Pearl River's flower-tail ferries to and fro, even the coal depots serving the Wuzhishan and the Baiyunshan at the Whampoa wharves, all came to burn Xiamao anthracite, low in sulfur, high in heat. Master Gao Ju, to be near his fuel, set his brickworks and his "Australian lime" — cement — works over in Xicun hard by the Shijing River, and signed a ten-year coal contract with Gu Baocheng on the spot.

Having tasted that sweetness, Shopkeeper Gu got wind that the Chiefs were digging gold, copper, and coal all across Deng and Lai in Jiaodong as well — only the "mine owners" of record all stood in the names of private persons, some real, some nothing but paper. Gu Baocheng grumbled privately that "this is the plum set to die in the peach's place — a blind for other eyes" — and then, turning square around, volunteered to be that plum himself: he put capital into a coal mine the Senate was sinking in Huang County and took the ownership in his own name — and would take no cash dividends at all, only payment in the coal brought up.

"Whenever the Merchants Bureau's ships stand back south for Nanzhili, the northern goods aboard are light stuff — cotton, wheat, beans. So your nephew made terms with the fleet's managers: let small coal go aboard instead of the great stones for ballast, and half the carriage money is saved on the spot. And consider, Uncle — these Dengzhou coal chunks burn fierce and smoke thin, outlast the best charcoal, and sell in Suzhou and Songjiang at three taels the hundred jin. Sold to the Tianjin cannon bureau, they are priced at one qian two fen the hundredweight. True, Grand Secretary Xu sends war junks round to Dengzhou to fetch it away, at no cost of carriage to us — but even so, what margin remains to squeeze? How comes it that your nephew's red-hearted devotion to the court is repaid with a ledger of debt?"

"You've set yourself aflame with hurry, and hurry mends nothing. Look at the Xigu cannon bureau — its furnaces run day and night. If the debt went unpaid, do you suppose the Governor wouldn't dread your cutting off his coal? Otherwise, the coal blocks of the Western Hills, hauled from the capital down to Tianjin, would not be had at that low one qian two fen the hundredweight — and well you know it. Set your heart at ease. At worst the treasury silver has jammed for a season in its turning, or some joint along the way was never properly greased."

"Treasury silver? Whether you mean the Governor's own silver vault, or the provincial treasuries of the administration commissions, or the Taicang treasury of the Ministry of Revenue—" Gu Baocheng picked up his winecup, and the cold laugh would not be held in. "If there truly were silver enough and to turn in any of them, would we be treated today to the spectacle of Eunuch Deng barricading the Certifying Office and pasting Pinglu bonds on the salt certificates?"

Li Luoyou sat struck for a long moment before he raised his cup and drank it down at a draught. The Gu family's Three-White wine — sold in its little slender bottles of Suzhou porcelain, a rice wine always sweet on the tongue, round and mellow — turned suddenly to a raw burn in his mouth and would hardly go down. He understood now why Grand Secretary Xu and Intendant Jiang had both "happened" to be away inspecting; and at last he let out a long breath and poured out, beans from a bamboo tube, the whole story of the forty-thousand-tael bond levy onto his nephew.

"By the Bond Bureau's own charter, the Pinglu bonds may be pledged and may be sold — free circulation among the people, no obstacle. Uncle might try settling accounts with them."

"And where would that walk? The thing is nothing but another of the Great Ming's treasure-notes! He pays it out as gold and silver; the man who takes it treats it as paper for the privy. Whose hands the Liaohai Trading House's goods come out of is no secret to you — those Jianzhou chieftains have never recognized anything but grain, tea, cloth, and silk. Commander Shen on Pidao might recognize them, I grant — but if you mean to pay him with the court's bonds instead of the notes of the Shanxi money houses, then you and I may as well try to carry one stalk of Liaodong ginseng or one sable skin off that island."

"For that, you must look to the Australians."

"Baocheng, what nonsense is this now — the Australians recognize the court's paper?"

"The Australians, certainly not. But what is lost on the bonds may be made up on the Australians. Let me ask you, Uncle: the Liaohai house deals in Liaodong goods — but is Liaodong goods only ginseng and antler and peltry?" Two cups in him, perhaps, and Gu Baocheng's voice was rising. "The Liaohai Trading House must change its trade — there is no other road for it now. Ginseng and antler and peltry go to none but the rich and the great: sound business, you would say, a business of peaceful times — but look at the court's domains and tell me how many peaceful days are left in them! What sells big in this day is Australian goods! Only think what kerosene and matches move in a single year!"

There was, in fact, one enormous trade beyond even these, and that was Hainan salt — salt lying wholly outside the government's monopoly — which the Liaohai Trading House carried in mass to Liaodong for exclusive sale, and at profits of the most violent kind.

"Counting the Liaohai house's branches in the capital and Nanzhili and Huguang — a dozen-odd in all — their gross receipts only just match the two branches, Qiongshan and Guangzhou. Strip it to the bone, Uncle: the trade you are doing is the Australians' trade."

And that was no more than true. Besides the Tianbao house, the Liaohai Trading House kept branches in Qiongshan and Guangzhou, and like the Tianbao house both flourished by the day. They were, by now, the better part of his profit.

"If you would do the Australians' trade, you must please the Australians' taste. In my nephew's view, it can hardly be said that the Senate honors thrift and bans luxury — but they are men engaged in great matters, one and all, and so their buying in bulk runs always first to the heavy, coarse goods that feed the army's needs and the people's living. Just now it is small coal and copper weight that run shortest, and pay best."

"Oh?" Li Luoyou set down his cup, and his fingers began tapping softly on the table. "And what has that to do with the Liaodong trade?"

"Liaodong produces copper. At Tangchi Fort on the Yalu stands a copper mountain; folk mined it before ever the Jianzhou caitiffs rose, but the mines' men scattered in the Liaodong chaos and the workings have lain waste to this day. As for coal—" and here Gu Baocheng's eyes went brighter still, his body tilting across the table toward his uncle, "when Senator Yu of the Senate took wine with your nephew, he said Liaodong is coal pockets clear through the ground — that near old Fushun there lies one of them the size of the sky, and the hundred-odd coal pits west of the capital bunched together are not one hair of its equal. And that coal is iron-making coal, a rank above the burning sort. What the Senate runs shortest of is precisely that. Would a Chief's golden mouth speak falsely?"

The color began to change in Li Luoyou's face.

"Uncle — you have traded in Liaodong a lifetime; your roots there run deep. Those banner lords and beiles holding power in Shengjing have always received you with bows and smiles. That road — who under Heaven but you could ever walk it? We need only borrow that old friendship — the copper mountain at Tangchi or the coal pocket at Fushun, whichever can be contracted, let us contract it. On the Senate's side there are the ingenious mining machines; on ours it is only a matter of oiling the joints and keeping hold of the men — and those mountains of Australian gold, that sea of Australian silver, drop quietly into the bag."

"'Friendship'?" Li Luoyou's voice went up on the instant. "What 'friendship' have I ever had with the Jianzhou dogs?" His eyes came up hard, the cold in them going straight into his nephew. "The Liaohai house's trade has been no more than feigned courtesies with that pack of man-eating wolves — letting the Jianzhou dogs trade for a little more silver and cloth could never turn the heavens over, that was all. And you — you!" The words came faster and louder, his fingers rapping the tabletop hard without his willing it. "Dig copper out of Liaodong, dig coal — and if it reaches the Jianzhou dogs' hands to be cast into great cannon, how much of the blood and weeping of our Han brethren goes onto your hands and mine? Baocheng — have you forgotten on whose head the blood debt of your whole family is written? I warn you: the man who licks blood from a knife's edge had best not lick too fondly — one slip of the tongue costs the tongue, and worse luck than that may cost the head!"

(End of chapter)