Li Chengqian was very interested in the establishment of the South China Sea Commercial Bank, and the sea and sailing ships seemed to have infinite charm in his young mind. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

"Teacher, I'm going to be a director."

"Why don't you ask to be chairman?" Li Chao asked with a smile.

Cheng Qian pushed the wheelchair himself and approached Li Chao's table. "Of course, the chairman has to be the teacher, and I can be a director."

In fact, the board of directors is not new in Datang. Because Li Chao did it a few years ago, when the Li family first started, they got seven or eight Guogong partnerships, and also cobbled together a board of directors, Li Chao is the chairman, and the eldest grandson Wuji, Qin Qiong, and Cheng Yanjin are all directors.

But that time, it was pure nonsense, and the princes didn't take it seriously, just Li Chao entertained himself. But this time is different, the Nanhai commercial bank that Li Chao plans to build, and the amount of share capital raised is planned to be 1 million directly.

A million dollars, not a million dollars. That's a full 300,000 silver dollars, more than 180,000 gold coins.

The amount is quite large, so the shareholders will be very large.

A direct issuance of one million shares is a thousand dollars per share.

Although the decision-making unit is also a thousand dollars per share, there will be some attached cooperation conditions, such as the Li family's commodities and the Zhang family's routes.

Raising so much equity and investing so much, of course, it can no longer be self-entertainment, there must be a set of detailed rules. If you approve, you will join together, and if you don't recognize, of course, forget it.

However, even if it invests so much capital and recruits so many shareholders, in the end, this commercial bank is still the same as the major tycoons in running the industry, which is a professional manager system. Even if Li Chao becomes a major shareholder, he will not personally operate in it, and the Li family will choose an excellent shopkeeper to represent the Li family.

As the crown prince, of course, it is impossible for him to be a director in a commercial bank, no matter how large the scale of this commercial bank is, it will definitely not work.

"You can find someone you trust to replace you in the firm, as your representative, as a director, etc."

Li Chengqian was a little disappointed.

"Of course, the representatives you elect are only in front of the stage, and you can control them behind the scenes. Your representative, of course, represents your opinion, and he still listens to you. Li Chao said with a smile. Now the major wealthy families and even the Xun Qi clan, which family is not like this. Who will personally show up to run the industry, they all elect stewards or relatives, etc., and let them run around outside, but the general direction must still be controlled by these family members behind the scenes.

They just think it's shameful to run a business, but which one doesn't run a business?

"Teacher, I don't have such a person." Cheng Qian sighed.

Although he already has an East Palace, he also has many official subordinates. But the important officials of the East Palace are basically concurrently served by court officials, such as Li Chao is the prince Zhan Shi, Ma Zhou is the prince's middle house, Fang Xuanling is the left concubine, Du Ruhui is the right concubine, etc., Li Chao also has a prince left guard rate, and the important military guards of the East Palace are led by Li Chao.

Li Chengqian found that he didn't have a few henchmen.

"Teacher, can you recommend a few people for me, the Li family has a lot of affairs."

"No problem with this, I can help you."

There was no one in the Li family at the earliest, and Li Chao had to show up to preside over the business by himself earlier, but after he had some strength, Li Chao no longer showed up. At the beginning, the people were Qin Qiongcheng who bit the gold and they gave them. Later, I bought a few by myself, and then married Cui Yingying, and she brought a lot of people.

Then Li Chao became famous and took the initiative to take the initiative.

Gradually, the Li family now has a large number of people.

Cheng Qian is mainly too young, otherwise, there are not too many people who want to vote for the prince. Li Shimin and his wife have a tight control over the prince, and the people in the palace are basically the old people around them before. People are reliable, but they are all people of the emperor and empress, and they are not very satisfactory to Cheng Qian.

"Teacher, what are you doing?"

Cheng Qian looked at the drawings on Li Chao's table, and couldn't help but ask curiously.

"Some drawings of sea vessels!"

"Sea ship drawings?" Cheng Qian became more and more curious, this teacher always made him feel omnipotent, and now he is still studying the drawings of sea ships.

He turned his wheelchair around to Li Chao's side, leaned over and looked at the drawings on the table, these drawings drawn with pencils, very detailed, all kinds of line graphics, and a lot of data attached.

The ship that crosses the ocean is called the Mulan Boat.

This kind of ship has nothing to do with Mulan, it is a giant ocean-going ship made of a trunk called magnolia. Such boats are quite large and can carry six or seven hundred people at a time.

Rugged and resistant to wind and waves, they were known in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and even sailed in the Persian Gulf, but because of their large size, these ships had to rely on the ports of southern Iran in later generations, and their cargo had to be changed to small boats to continue westward to the mouth of the Euphrates.

It is precisely by virtue of this sturdy and safe Mulan boat that the Central Plains maritime merchants such as the bearded Ke also possess very skilled navigation skills and are good at using the monsoon to sail.

Every year, after waiting for the monsoons to arrive, the merchant ships sailed to various parts of the South Seas in winter and spring. In the summer and autumn, they would sail from Persia, India, and the South Seas back to the Central Plains, or from the Central Plains to Silla and Japan.

Li Chao and Zhang Zhongjian have reached a cooperation agreement, and the bearded guest also told Li Chao a lot about these specific situations at sea.

Li Chao couldn't believe that during the Sui and Tang dynasties, he actually had such mature navigation technology.

He was also curious about Mulan Zhou.

The bearded guest gave him the drawings of the Mulan boat, and there was a lot of detailed data. This kind of ship should be said to be relatively old, far inferior to the treasure ships, Galen ships and other galleons of later generations, but they still rely on such ships to sail all the way to the Persian Gulf.

It's amazing.

What is even more admirable is their mastery and use of the monsoon.

It is precisely because they have long mastered the use of the monsoon that the former maritime merchants had to temporarily live overseas because they were waiting for the monsoon when they were overseas, and those Han merchants on Pearl Island lived there temporarily in order to wait for the monsoon at the earliest. Some people later opened shops in the local area, some people married wives and had children, and some people fled the Central Plains, and it was difficult to return home.

However, in addition to being amazed, Li Chao made a careful investigation of the navigation technology of the Sui and Tang dynasties during this time and found that the Mulan boat was actually not so good, and the navigation technology did not exceed the limits of the times.

The navigation of this era was actually not the kind of navigation that Li Chao originally imagined directly from the southeast coast to the Persian Gulf. Rather, it is a segmented route, such as the Mulan boat from Guangzhou, which may only sail to Jiaozhou. The ship enters the port, the goods disembark, and then transfer to the ship of Jiaozhou Port to load the cargo to the south, sail to Linyi, change to Linyi's ship to Pearl Island, etc., such a relay voyage one by one, and finally arrive in Persia.

The owner and cargo have not changed, but the ship and the owner and crew have actually changed many batches.

Again, this is due to a number of technical limitations. For example, from Guangzhou to Persia, it is too far away, and few shipowners can fully grasp such a long route. And when a ship runs for a while, the route must be mastered in much detail.

Even the boats on the Yangtze River do not run the entire Yangtze River, but are divided into downstream, midstream, and upstream sections, and many boats only run a fixed section.

In this way, of course, it is more familiar, but also safer and more situational.

Another reason is that the segmented shipping is also related to the local countries on the route. For example, in the Persian Gulf, it is safer and more reliable to use Arab ships.

The real direct voyage of the whole process, when the middle and late Tang Dynasty was obtained, the navigation technology at that time was more advanced. At the time of the Song Dynasty, it was even more brilliant.

Although the Mulan boat is very large, it also has many shortcomings, for example, there is no tail rudder, no watertight cabin, and a hard sail is used, and secondly, the Mulan boat has no navigation compass, only a very simple compass, which is very inaccurate, so at sea, the need for experienced old captains is extremely high.

Without these experienced captains, even if there are nautical charts, it is useless.

In Li Chao's view, the navigation of this era is simply a joke with life. It's so insecure, these people actually dare to sail along the coast, which is really admirable.

If the South China Sea Commercial Bank is to be established and the scale is to be raised, Li Chao believes that it is first necessary to build a number of new types of sea vessels.

New seagoing vessels must have a seafaring compass for more accurate navigation, stern rudders, watertight cabins, and soft sails.

Of course, it would be better if the sextant was made and taught to use this positioning to navigate.

To build a new type of sea ship and adopt these new technologies, Li Chao felt that it would be good to directly use the European galleon in the Age of Discovery, and install the eight-bull crossbow and Xiangyang cannon to cross the sea, and the safety performance was greatly improved.

It is better to open another nautical school, invite those experienced veteran sailors to take classes, recruit young cadets, let them systematically learn nautical knowledge, and almost send what they have learned to the ship for internship, and after accumulating a few years of experience, they can really take on the big responsibility.

At that time, there were ships and people, and that was the era of real great navigation.

Cheng Qian looked at Li Chao's drawings and was surprised.

"This ship has a lot of masts."

"Well, it's a three-masted schooner, with a spinnaker on the last mast and a crosssail on the rest. Our ship was made of oak for the keel, pine for the mast, and hardwood for the hull and deck. Such a sailing ship was one hundred feet long, twenty-five feet wide, had a draft of one foot and one foot, and had a load of three thousand stones. ”

"The ship is designed to have a crew of twenty-five and can carry about a hundred passengers."

This ship is actually a light ship in the Age of Discovery, just a sail and three masts, compared to those four-masted and five-masted schooners that are much smaller, only two-deck three-masted schooners, and the displacement is less than about 200 tons.

But in this era, the small sailboat that Li Chao took out seems to be very advanced.

The low bow and long length of the boat give him greater stability when sailing at sea, and reduce wind resistance on the port side, making it faster and easier to steer.

Li Chao also added watertight rudder technology to him, which can be safer and will not easily leak and sink the ship. If one compartment is broken, the watertight compartment is isolated, and it will not affect the whole ship, and it can be repaired in time.

Soft sails are also easier to harness the power of the wind, especially for ocean voyages.

This three-masted ship is only the first test ship that Li Chao has come up with, and if it succeeds, it will definitely build four-masted and five-masted sailing ships on this basis in the future.

"Can such a ship really cross the ocean?"

"When I'm done with the design, I'll recruit craftsmen and start construction. Such a ship would take at least dozens of shipwrights and several months to build. ”

"I really thought that when the time came, I could personally sail to the South China Sea with him!" Cheng Qian looked at the drawings and said. (To be continued.) )