In the northern suburbs of Xiyang City, Xiyang Wangfu Lakeside Manor, Zhang Yu, who had returned from a long voyage, reported the details of the voyage to Lang Lord Yu Wenwen, which was the fourth day they arrived in Xiyang. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

After the fleet returned to Xiyang, Yuwenwen gave all the staff a holiday that day, allowing them to reunite with their relatives and wash away the dust, and after several days of rest and relaxation, everyone finally recovered from exhaustion.

Yu Wenwen looked at the logbook and listened to Zhang Yu's report, the first voyage was successfully completed, and it was necessary to sum up the lessons and prepare for the next voyage.

Zhang Yu, who had tanned his skin, briefly introduced the situation of the voyage, and the process can be summed up in four words: smooth sailing.

After crossing the Gwangneung-Jingkou River, we entered the sea not far away, repelled the attacks of the pirates, and sailed eastward to the southwest side of the island of Chikushi.

Then head north along the coast to Hakata Bay on the northwest side of Tsukushi Oshima and enter Hakata Port.

The goods and gifts on the ship were successfully handed over to the hands of Su Ma Zi, the minister of the Japanese State, and the body of the Buddha statue caused a sensation in the Japanese country, and the various incense medicines brought by the ship as gifts made Su Ma Zi moved.

As all kinds of silk, cloth, porcelain and other items as goods were sold out, Soga Mazi authorized Zhang Yu to choose a piece of land in Hakata Bay as a special berthing and rest area for the Xiyang Wang fleet in Hakata Port.

Of course, this matter is kept secret from the outside world, and this territory still belongs to the territory of the Soga clan to outsiders, so the next trade activities are actually carried out in the name of private trade (between the Central Plains maritime merchants and the Soga clan).

After selecting the address and explaining the various matters, Zhang Yu left a few people in Hakata to handle specific affairs, and he took the fleet back to the west, followed the original route and walked again, and successfully arrived at the mouth of the Yangtze River.

In Jiankang, the pigeons were released to report to Xiyang, and then went upstream, and it took a month to return to Xiyang, from departure to return, the whole process was more than two months, which was in line with the estimated time.

When they set out from Xiyang, the three new ships were already loaded with porcelain and cloth, and after arriving in Jiankang, they added sandalwood Buddha statues, incense and silk, and when the fleet returned to Xiyang, it was still fully loaded.

Each ship carried about 1,000 guiu, and brought back about 3,000 guilds of cargo and gifts, the bulk of which was sulfur, and the remaining two were gold and silver.

The gift given to Yuwen Wen by Su Ma Zi was 1,120 taels of gold, and 162,431 taels of silver, which was both a thank you gift and a payment.

The weights and measures of the Wa Kingdom and the Central Plains Zhou Kingdom are different, and the above figures are the result of Yuwen Wen's re-weighing of the people, so that the funds he invested in opening up new routes have been richly rewarded.

"Minister Su I has cleared the power of Dalian, and the Su I clan has been marrying the royal family, so I am afraid that the power of the Japanese country will tilt towards the government and the opposition, right?"

Hearing Yu Wenwen's question, Zhang Yu nodded and said yes, although he didn't stay in the capital of the Wa Kingdom for too long, he could be sure that Su and Ma Zi had already taken power.

"What Lord Lang said is extremely true, Minister Su I can be called a powerful government and the opposition, so he was able to take out so much gold and silver at once, and he did not encounter any resistance to the division of land in Hakata."

"So much gold and silver? Then tell me, this trip down, loss or not? ”

Yu Wenwen has the heart to test Zhang Yu's economic acumen, but it is easy to lose even his old capital if he has no economic acumen in trade, Zhang Yu is a poor soldier in the navy, and he doesn't know a single big character, but after following him for so many years, he is no longer the stupid boy who was illiterate.

Zhang Yu already knew in his heart that the gold and silver prices in various parts of the Central Plains were different, but in general, an average value could be set: one tael of gold is equal to ten taels of silver, and one tael of silver is equal to a consistent copper coin.

In other words, one tael of gold is equal to ten copper coins, so the gold that Zhang Yu brought back is about 11,200 copper coins; The silver he brought back was one hundred and sixty-two thousand four hundred and thirty.

Therefore the gold and silver together are about 173,630 copper coins.

The cost of this voyage is roughly as follows: the average cost of each new ship is 1,000, and the cumulative cost is 5,000; The production cost of five large bells for navigation is 50,000 yuan, and the cost of purchasing goods in Xiyang and Jiankang is about 100,000 yuan when converted into copper coins.

After deducting expenses such as the money for buying roads when crossing the river, the balance of payments is not lost, that is, there is no loss, but this is only a balance on the books, in fact, it is not.

First of all, when the five expensive sailing bells came back and paired with Xiyang's clock, only one clock was left to go accurately, but the other four were not broken and could not be used again.

It's just that the time is not accurate, as long as you adjust it carefully and replace some accessories, it can still run, and this money has not been wasted.

Second, the Zhantan Buddha statues and incense medicines purchased with money this time were sold as gifts rather than goods, so this part of the profits was not reflected.

In the end, the large amount of sulfur that came back with the ship was not sold on the market for money, so the profit was not reflected.

Zhang Yu also kept an account that the silk purchased in Jiankang could have nearly 20 times the profit when sold in the Wa Kingdom, while the porcelain and cloth in Xiyang were several times the profit, and the other party used gold and silver to buy them.

Especially silver, so many white silver ingots, almost blinded Zhang Yu's eyes.

"Lord Lang, sea trade is more profitable than any business!"

"But it's also risky." Yu Wenwen said with a smile, of course he knew that the profits of sea trade were amazing, otherwise there would be no great voyages in that era, but the sailors had a mortality rate of more than fifty percent of the voyages, making sea trade a high-risk and high-reward industry.

Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver sounds like an astonishing amount, but if you convert the unit into "Hu" or "stone", it is actually not much.

In this era, the carrying capacity of ships is calculated in Hu (stone), and cargo ships on inland rivers (Yangtze River) have a carrying capacity of more than 1,000 Hu, and there are even large ships with a load of more than 10,000 Hu.

And for sea ships in this era, it is very common to have a "thousand Hu", that is, a carrying capacity of 1,000 Hu, which makes it very troublesome for Yuwenwen, who is used to "ton", to understand, so it needs to be converted.

Hu (stone) is usually the unit of measurement of grain, a Hu ten buckets, a bucket of ten liters, in fact this is a measuring unit (volume), to convert into a weighing unit (weight), you have to use another system:

One stone is equal to four catties, one pound is equal to thirty catties, and one catty is equal to sixteen taels.

Therefore, one Hu (stone) is equal to one hundred and twenty catties, that is, one Hu is equal to one thousand nine hundred and twenty taels, so one thousand taels of gold, after conversion, is about half a stone's weight, then the question arises again: one stone in this era is about equal to how many kilograms in later generations?

I don't know, since the Qin and Han dynasties, the size of a stone has changed, and at the end of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, it has changed many times, and in Yuwenwen's residual memories, if a stone at this time is converted into kilograms in later generations, it is probably in the range of sixty to ninety kilograms.

The range is somewhat large, if one stone is equal to 60 kilograms, then this gold is about 30 kilograms, which is equivalent to a standard household LNG cylinder filled with gas in modern times, but it is actually not too heavy.

And those silvers, converted to round weight, are about eighty-five stones, that is, five thousand and one hundred kilograms, and the unit of tons is five tons, which looks a lot, but the gold and silver add up to eighty-six stones (斛).

On a ship with a carrying capacity of 1,000 hundreds, the position occupied is just an inconspicuous corner, although today's Wa Kingdom is indeed a poor and remote country, but as a powerful minister, Su I Mazi, take out this bit of gold and silver, will it be too stingy?

No, you must know that in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the weight of silver that flowed out of Japan every year was estimated to be about 30 to 40 tons if it was measured in tons.

It was not until the late Ming Dynasty, after the discovery of several large silver mines in Japan, that the outflow of silver increased explosively.

Although the weights and measures at this time were different from those in the Ming Dynasty, Yu Wenwen felt that the tons he converted at this time would not be too far from the tons of later generations, and five tons of silver, even in terms of the weight of silver "exported" by Japan in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, was a large amount.

This silver is probably the maximum amount that Su Ma Zi can give in a short period of time, and it is definitely not freshly mined, but an inventory accumulated over a long period of time, so another question arises:

The silver output of the Wa State in this era is definitely not as good as the output in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, so what is the purchasing power of the Wa State at this time?