Jingcheng Nanju Xianfang is located in the south of Dongzhimen Street, because Dongzhimen is close to the canal, so there are not only the old and new Taicang and maritime warehouses built by the imperial court, but also the large and small warehouses built by merchants from all over the world.

Although the city of Beijing has undergone the development of the Jin and Yuan dynasties, it gradually reached its heyday in the Ming Dynasty. But this metropolis, located at the foot of Yanshan Mountain, on the North China Plain, has always been a pure consumption city.

In order to meet the needs of the population of this huge capital, all kinds of materials need to be transported from the southern provinces, and the capital has always been known as the place where the world's merchants and goods gather.

There are a total of 132 commercial businesses in Beijing, including 100 in the Benduo and 32 small businesses close to the people's livelihood, and countless street vendors roaming the inner and outer cities. However, with such a developed commodity economy, there are not many locals doing business, and most of the shops in the capital are from other provinces. In particular, the number of businessmen from Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Nanjing, Huguang and Shandong is the majority.

Before Chongzhen, in order to attract foreign businessmen to Beijing to do business and meet the needs of the residents of the capital, the government built a large number of corridors in the four gates of the capital, the bell and drum tower, and the outer city to attract foreign businessmen.

In addition to these fixed Langfang shops, there are also many markets with fixed dates and venues in the inner and outer cities of Beijing. Among them, the most famous are Chaoqian City in front of Daming Gate, the lamp market outside Donghua Gate, the City God Temple Market, and the Land Temple Market. These bazaars are set up along the street every day of opening, and the length can be up to 3 li, and the short ones can be up to 2 li.

On the day of the opening of the market, overseas curiosities, goods from various provinces, antiques from three generations and eight dynasties, and items of the fifth class and four people can be found in these markets one by one. And the flow of people on this day was so large that it even reached the point where the car could not turn back and the family could not take care of each other. But the prices of goods in these inner city markets are very expensive, and most people dare not ask about them.

In addition to these bazaars that supplied the goods needed by the common people, there were also market buildings for the consumption of the families of the Xun family, the Qi family, the eunuch family, and the Haoyou family, which were not only beautifully decorated and spacious inside, but also specially set up curtains to ensure that the families of these dignitaries and nobles were not bumpered by foreign men.

However, in the second year of Chongzhen, the old business pattern of these capitals changed. The supermarket built by Sihai Trading Company in the capital has greatly impacted all kinds of markets in the city. In addition to those shops that specialized in selling high-end goods to dignitaries, those who specialized in selling local products were faced with a formidable rival.

Although Beijing is a consumer city, but in the past, the city's main consumption force was still dominated by dignitaries and local tyrants, although the number of civilians is large, but the consumption capacity and consumption are not strong.

After all, although Beijing may seem like a metropolis, it does not have a strong handicraft economy like Suzhou, Songjiang, Hangzhou, and Ningbo. Although there are more than 100,000 craftsmen in Beijing, most of them are coolies who serve for the imperial court and the palace, and do not create goods for the capital.

Therefore, in this era, the city of Beijing is more like a large village disguised as a city, except that the large landowners scattered all over the country live in Beijing, so it looks like a city.

Although the consumption power of dignitaries and local tycoons is strong, it is limited to the size of their own numbers, so there is an upper limit to this kind of consumption after all. Although many ordinary people in the capital wanted to consume, the self-sufficient small-scale peasant economy in the agricultural era made them have little surplus products available for exchange.

What's more, most of the commoners living in the inner and outer cities have long since lost their land, and can only rely on the imperial court or serve the dignitaries to get paid, which has always been quite cheap. Except for a few who became the slave class because they were honored by nobles and got a lucrative position, most of them were just ordinary servants who could barely make ends meet.

However, this situation suddenly changed greatly with the reform of the first year of Chongzhen, the imperial court and the inner government released the personal imprisonment of the craftsman class, invested in the construction of cities on a large scale, and established various workshops.

Originally, the monthly income of a civilian man in the capital was roughly 1 tael to 15 taels, and he could buy about 2 to 3 stone of rice during the Wanli period, barely able to feed a family of five. As for the women, they take on some sewing and laundry work, and can have an unstable income of about 02-05 taels a month.

Therefore, the patriarchal style of civilian homes prevailed. However, the capital is not as good as other places, because there are many high-ranking officials and nobles, so the demand for slaves and maids has always been great. As the capital of the Ming Dynasty, whether it is officials, sons, and merchants from other places, they are far more than other cities.

Therefore, the proportion of single men among the foreign population in Beijing has always been very high, which of course has contributed to the great development of the entertainment industry in Beijing. A small half of the women in the Qinlou Chu Pavilion in the capital come from other places, and more than half come from the homes of the people in the capital.

The daughters of the ordinary people in the capital, when they were about 7 or 8 years old, according to their different appearances, were either pawned and sold to large families as slaves and maids, or sent to the Qinlou Chu Pavilion, and the people in the market did not take this as a strange. On the contrary, those daughters who are unable to exchange money for their families because they are not outstanding are often ridiculed by their neighbors as losing money.

However, even so, the woman born in the capital is still much luckier than the women in other regions. Because at this time, in Songjiang Prefecture, which is more economically developed, the trend of drowning girls has always been very popular. This kind of thing happens from time to time, not only among the common people, but also in the homes of poor scholars.

Because of the marriage between ordinary people, in the market in the Jiangnan area, it costs about 40 taels for a man to marry a wife, while it takes about 30 taels for a woman to marry. In the Ming Dynasty, where there was no birth control system, there were as few as 5 or 6 children in civilian homes, and as many as more than 10 children.

The money spent on marrying a son's wife can not only be subsidized from the dowry, but also get an extra laborer. But marrying off a daughter is a net loss. Even the people of Jiangnan, who claim to be wealthy, can't afford too much of the burden of their daughters, so it is conceivable that other economically backward areas in the Ming Dynasty can be imagined.

However, when Chongzhen ordered the Wensi Institute to study the spinning machine and the technology of spinning in the north, the cotton yarn and cotton cloth workshop opened by the inner government recruited a large number of female workers, most of whom were paid 3 yuan per month, and a very small number of them reached 4 yuan per month.

Such an income is almost double or more than the monthly income of an average man in the past. For skilled craftsmen, the monthly income level will not be less than 45 yuan per month. Although the price of rice in Beijing continued to rise, it remained stable at 15 yuan per stone, while the price of wheat flour dropped from 26 yuan per stone to 25 yuan, and the price of corn remained at 1 yuan per stone.

In other words, the monthly salary of an adult woman alone is enough to support a family of five. And an adult man without skills earns less than an adult woman per month. But even so, the income of the people's homes in Beijing has basically doubled.

Because of the opening of various workshops in the capital, daily necessities other than food in the capital began to decline continuously. For example, cheap and high-quality glassware began to replace part of the market for ceramic ware; Ironwood products began to replace bamboo and wood products from the south; The most important thing is that the market, which was originally flooded with all kinds of southern fabrics, is now basically invisible to inferior cotton cloths except for Songjiang fine cloth and Beijing standard cloth.

The reason why Songjiang fine cloth still occupies a part of the market is entirely because of the excellent dyeing technology in Suzhou, so it is more colorful than the Beijing standard cloth, and it is more loved by the wealthier people.

However, as long as the people in charge of the cloth trade in the inner government knew that this advantage of Songjiang fine cloth would soon disappear, and the bleaching developed by the Academy of Sciences not only greatly shortened the cost and time of dyeing, but also the effect of bleaching was even more incomparable than that of the old bleaching method.

In the process of continuously promoting scientific research and actively transforming the research results into productivity, the current industries in Beijing are about to exceed 200, and the number of emerging industries added in this year has reached almost half of the original industries in Beijing.

With the continuous development of these industries, the original pattern of the capital centered on the inner city. To be precise, the city of Beijing, which originally revolved around the imperial city, has gradually become an industrial zone centered on Liulichang and Zuo'anmen in the outer city, a commercial area centered on Nanjuxianfang and Sichengfang, and a coal and building materials market centered on Fuchengmen Street.

The inner city market, which was originally open on a fixed date, began to quietly decline. Those old businessmen who held the idea of seeking profit and hoarding Juqi also had to re-cope with the great changes in the business pattern of the capital.

The merchants in the capital attached importance to old customers and the families of officials and eunuchs, while despising new customers and local people, which was quickly changed.

The shops have also changed from purchasing and selling goods to selling to the common people in the capital.

Silk, antiques, spices, and high-end Soviet-style furniture began to give way to low-end daily necessities that fit the consumption of citizens.

As the consumption habit of the public is to pursue good quality and low price, shops have to lower the price of goods and reduce profits.

However, these businessmen soon discovered that although the profits of low-end daily necessities were not as large as the profits of high-end goods sold to high-end officials and nobles, the sales volume of low-end daily necessities was not comparable to those high-end goods.

Selling a beaded flower may make a store earn a profit of tens of taels, but the time spent to sell this beaded flower is enough to sell hundreds, thousands of ordinary headdresses.

Perhaps the profit obtained by the shop from these ordinary headwear is not higher than this beaded flower, but the ordinary headwear can be continuously produced with reference to a style, and the cost can be very low, and the ordinary people who buy the headdress do not mind using the same style of headwear with others.

But if you want to make a work that will make the eyes of those eunuchs and family members shine, you need to invest a lot of time, and you can't make too much. In addition, there are servants around these eunuchs, which consumes far more effort than the sale of ordinary headdresses.

The nature of businessmen to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages made them begin to face up to the consumer market of ordinary people in the capital. In order to reduce costs as much as possible and occupy a favorable position in the market, large-scale purchase and transportation to share the cost has become the most basic pursuit of businessmen.

The sea transport between the north and the south soon came into the sight of these merchants. The Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau and the Inner Government jointly invested and established the Daming Shipping Company, which immediately became the object of pursuit by businessmen.

Compared with the often clogged north-south canals and many unscrupulous canal locks, low-cost sea transportation is risky, but it still can't stop the enthusiasm of merchants.

Several directors of the company, who were originally worried that after the opening of the shipping company, they would fall into no goods to transport, and they were shocked to find that what they need to worry about now should be the shortage of ships and the shortage of capacity.

Moreover, because of the booming business of shipping companies, some businessmen began to inquire whether the private sector could set up maritime transportation companies.