c_t; It was not the first time that Su Keyi had been a guest in Cheng Dapeng's study, but every time he came here, he was inevitably shocked by the gorgeous furnishings in his study. Read the full text of the latest chapter

Su Keyi is already the third generation of the Su family to move to Nanyang, but its cultural inheritance and living habits are still based on the traditions of the Han people, so it is not difficult for him to recognize the calligraphy, paintings, ornaments, books, furniture and even pen, ink, paper and inkstone in Cheng Dapeng's study, all of which are valuable high-end goods. But Cheng Dapeng himself was very indifferent to this, when Su Keyi came to visit for the first time, he casually praised the glass paperweight on the desk for its good looks, and Cheng Dapeng even gave it to him as a gift.

Su Keyi was surprised at the time, you must know that the glass inkstone is the colorful commemorative edition of the first year of Chongzhen from Haihan, a total of eighty-eight sets were produced, and when it was released, it was once fried in the city of nearly 1,000 taels of silver. Su Minggang, the leader of the Su family, asked people to buy a set in Guangzhou, but he couldn't buy it at all, and it was already a priceless collection in the market for a long time. Cheng Dapeng is young, not only can he collect this thing, but he is also so generous, which really makes Su Keyi feel that this person's background and bearing are quite extraordinary, and he has the intention of making friends at the moment.

Later, Cheng Dapeng revealed intentionally or unintentionally that his family not only had business in Liangguang, Fujian, Annam, and Zhancheng, but also had an excellent relationship with the bigwigs in the officialdom of Daming, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou. In addition, the Haihan people, who have risen rapidly on Qiongzhou Island in recent years, also have business dealings with his family - the limited edition paperweight given to Su Keyi was obtained from this channel.

Of course, since there are so many ways, Cheng Dapeng's family's business is naturally not limited to the grain business. He told Su Keyi very frankly that he had come to Batavia to open this rice shop, in fact, it was only to open a trade window in the South Seas. When the time is right, the family may slowly increase the number of business projects on the Nanyang side.

Cheng Dapeng's conversation is funny, knowledgeable, elegant, and generous, showing his unusual identity everywhere. In addition, Su Keyi also met more than once that there were maritime merchants from Daming to visit Cheng Dapeng in the "Dacheng Rice Shop", and after inquiring, these maritime merchants said that the family had taken care of their business elsewhere, and they naturally came to visit the people who became a family when they arrived here. After going back and forth, Su Keyi slowly dispelled his already small vigilance.

But Cheng Dapeng's true identity is, of course, not the manager sent by a big family to fight the front station in Nanyang, but the special commissioner of the Nanyang Affairs Office of the Haihan Security Department, and he is also one of the few intelligence personnel who is classified as a first-class secret by the Ministry of Security. Although the identity is fake, but the name Cheng Dapeng is genuine and not false, he is originally from Qingyuan, Guangdong, and is indeed from a merchant family, well-educated, at the age of sixteen, he was selected for Xiucai, and he is also a well-known young talent in the local area.

If it weren't for the natural disasters that began to break out in various parts of Guangdong in 1628**, Cheng Dapeng might have taken the local examination smoothly, and then used the family's financial resources to donate an official position and go in the direction of official career and politics. But it's a pity that his hometown Qingyuan happens to be one of the main sources of the banditry, and a wealthy family like Chengjia has naturally become the first target of bandits in the troubled times. ()

During the Qingyuan Bandits, Chengjiazhuang was one of the first Zhuangzi to be attacked by bandits, and after the bandits looted Zhuangzi, they set a fire to burn Zhuangzi into ruins. Cheng Dapeng was also one of the few victims who escaped from Chengjiazhuang alive, and fled to Guangzhou first, but because there were too many displaced people in Guangzhou, the Guangzhou government was worried about gathering people and chaos, so it had banned the displaced people from entering the city. And with Cheng Dapeng's body as a scholar, he can't grab the limited relief food at all. So he continued south, and when he arrived in Panyu, he happened to meet Haihan recruiting immigrants. At that time, Cheng Dapeng had not eaten for several days, and he couldn't take care of much in order to survive, so he signed up for immigration immediately.

After arriving at Shengli Port, Cheng Dapeng was quickly selected separately because of his outstanding background and cultural attainment, and then several units wrestled with each other, and the Ministry of Security grabbed the place. After a short period of training, Cheng Da Guishun passed the entry assessment and became a regular employee of the security department. After the Ministry of Security set up the Nanyang Affairs Office, to send people south to Batavia to establish an intelligence agency, Cheng Dapeng, a fresh face, had very little time to appear in Shengli Port, and he had received good professional training before, so he was selected as the head of one of the groups, and as the senior steward of "Dacheng Xing", he opened a rice shop in Batavia City.

With his own cultural accomplishment and the support provided by Haihan's strong backing, Cheng Dapeng soon gained a foothold in Batavia, and began to slowly build his own social intelligence network according to the lessons he learned during his time in the Ministry of Security. A child like Su Keyi, who was born in a local Haoqiang family, is naturally in the scope of Cheng Dapeng's goal.

Last year, Su Keyi received an errand to go to Sanya to negotiate with the Haihan, and before leaving, he specially came to Cheng Dapeng to learn from him, hoping to gain some experience in dealing with the Haihan people from him. Although Cheng Dapeng did not know what kind of attitude the Executive Committee had towards the peace talks between the two sides, he was not optimistic about Su Keyi's errand at all, because many of the intelligence directions he had collected before that were related to the Ambuna Islands, which was enough to see the determination of the Executive Committee to seize this place. Since Haihan had already taken this place with time and effort, how could he spit out the fat that had been eaten in his mouth.

Sure enough, after Su Keyi, Van Longen and Van de Wegen arrived in Sanya, it can be said that they did not take advantage of it at all, and the negotiations reached an impasse from the beginning, and it was not until two months later that an armistice agreement was reached that later made the Batavian Council gnash its teeth. The Dutch suffered this big loss, but the council could not accuse the three men in charge of the negotiations for failing to achieve the predetermined negotiation objectives - after all, the military strength was not as tough as the other side, and what could not be obtained on the battlefield could not be expected to be obtained by lip service.

After Su Keyi returned to Batavia, he was further reused by the family, because the Su family believed that after the armistice was signed, the trade relations between Haihan and the Netherlands would gradually normalize. The Su family, despite the fact that it was located in the South Seas, had heard of the scale of trade carried out by the Haihan in Daming and Annam in recent years, and the head of the family, Su Minggang, believed that the size of the Haihan could be compared with that of the East India Company, and perhaps there were some aspects where it could win - such as military strength.

If the two sides can carry out trade after this, Su Minggang hopes that the Su family can grab the top position, after all, the businessmen who have been attached to Haihan in recent years have really gained a lot of benefits. Maritime merchants who came to Batavia for trade also increasingly included the proportion of Haihan goods in their shipments. How much profit can be made in order to prompt the maritime businessmen to make changes, and Su Minggang, as a representative of the Chinese businessmen in Batavia, naturally has a number.

Among the direct children of the Su family, there are not many people who have dealt with Haihan people face-to-face, and Su Keyi's two-month experience in Sanya naturally makes him a leader among the candidates. Soon after his return from Sanya, Su Keyi was entrusted with the task of preparing for the establishment of trade relations with Haihan.

Su Keyi is indeed considered a "Haihan Tong" in the family, but he has been to Sanya in person, and he also knows that the true situation of Haihan is not something that can be grasped by a casual glance, not to mention that most of the time during his time in Sanya was actually under house arrest in a hotel and could not go out. So even if he was reused by the family, it was difficult for him to get started with this work. However, he is very glad that he knows Cheng Dapeng, because this young master of the Cheng family had the experience of living in Sanya for a short time because of the family business two years earlier, and if you want to talk about the experience of dealing with Haihan people, this person should have more experience than himself.

Of course, Cheng Dapeng would not refuse this kind of good thing sent to the door, while pretending to give advice to Su Keyi, while taking the opportunity to collect all kinds of relevant intelligence information, especially the various business projects and business conditions of the East India Company in the Nanyang region, Cheng Dapeng gave Su Keyi a lot of dry goods in the name of reference.

And Su Keyi obviously didn't realize the importance of this information, let alone Cheng Dapeng's ulterior motives, and unknowingly confided a lot of inside information to him. In his opinion, Cheng Dapeng is just a friend in the grain business, and has nothing to do with the projects run by the Dutch, even if he knows how many nutmeg the Dutch buy and sell every year, how many ships are sent to Dayuan and Japan, how much raw silk is purchased from Daming, etc., what does it matter?

Of course, Cheng Dapeng didn't just ask questions and didn't have ideas, in fact, using the special location of the port of Ambuna to carry out the slave trade was one of the proposals that Cheng Dapeng proposed to Su Keyi.

In the past two years, the rate of introduction of immigrants by the Haihan began to decline, and the Executive Committee was also seeking to import labor in the form of slave trade from the Nanyang overseas, and the location of the Ambuna Islands was destined to make it difficult to attract mainland immigrants to settle there.

The slave trade was not uncommon in Batavia and throughout the South Seas, and there were more than one large slave market outside Batavia. Every month, a large number of slaves from all over the South Seas, the Indian Peninsula, the Middle East, and even Africa are transported here for sale, and at least seventy percent of the Su family's plantation labor force on the island of Java is kept as slaves. However, if you want to sell these slaves to Haihan, you must not be able to bypass the Dutch - the Su family, as the number one Chinese comprador under the East India Company, wants to bypass the Dutch and deal directly with Haihan, which is undoubtedly an act of betrayal, if it is detected by the council, the Su family will suffer from all sides.

Therefore, although Cheng Dapeng's idea sounded good, Su Keyi handled it very cautiously. He was well aware of the seriousness of the matter, and after consulting with the management of the family, he finally came up with a compromise to implement the matter.

The Su family organized the supply of goods in the slave market in Batavia, and then hired Dutch merchant ships to transport the slaves to the port of Ambuna for trading. In this way, the council had already received taxes from the slave market transactions, and the participation of the Dutch merchant ships also allowed it to grasp the whereabouts of these slaves, so as not to have unnecessary suspicions about the Su family's behavior. Janssen, a Dutch slave trader whom Roger met after returning to the port of Ambuna, was actually the Su family's partner in the business. Eighty percent of the slaves transported by Janssen's fleet to the port of Ambuna were purchased by the Su family in the Batavia market.

Due to the fact that they had to let a third party intervene to guide the profit sharing, coupled with the risk of loss in the process of transporting slaves, the income obtained by the Su family in this business was actually not high, and a boatload of slaves could only earn a few hundred taels of silver, which was far less than the return on selling some other high-profit goods. However, the Su family not only valued the economic benefits of this business, but also hoped to gradually build a broader and deeper trade relationship with Haihan.

It has not been a day or two since the high-profit Haihan goods entered Batavia, but almost all of these goods were transported by Ming merchants, leaving little profit margin for the Dutch. Therefore, the council also adopted a tacit attitude of not supporting, opposing, encouraging, or stopping the Su family's approach, hoping that the Su family could partially replace the market share of Daming maritime merchants and reduce the arrival price of some Haihan goods. If the Su family did not do well in this process, or if there were any illegal actions, it would be too late for the council to come forward to stop it.

As for the humiliation of losing the Ambuna Islands, it was not so important to some people in the council, as long as the route from Batavia to Northeast Asia could be kept, the truce was not an unacceptable solution, after all, before the Haihan people took that place, the East India Company only used it as a supply depot on this route. And if we can gradually establish trade relations with the Haihans, on the one hand, we can ease the tension with this fierce enemy, and on the other hand, we can also suppress the position of Portugal, a competitor, in the Haihan trade system.

Of course, the most important thing is to make sure that the council and the business groups behind it can reap the real benefits of the emerging trade relationship. The East India Company had already suffered huge losses from the two wars that had broken out in the Ambuna Islands and Fujian, and many people were reluctant to continue fighting against a rival like Haihan. Doing business happily and making money is the real reason why everyone has traveled thousands of miles to the Far East, isn't it?