Chapter 2927: Tianjin Wei (6)

He had supposed that with the court mopping up the roving bandits since the year began, things would mend greatly — Hong Chengchou and Sun Chuanting had won several battles in Shaanxi and Henan, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong had been sent scurrying east and hiding west, and the tide of the rovers looked, at last, ready to pass. He had counted on it: peace once restored, business would right itself of its own accord, and the Liaohai Trading House's deficits of these years could be slowly filled in.

Who could have known that before the business showed the first sign of mending, a bond levy would land on him first — ten thousand taels of it. No: add the thirty thousand subscribed in the capital, and it was forty thousand taels entire. Forty thousand taels — in the old days, no more than half a year's interest money for the Liaohai Trading House; you gritted your teeth and it passed. In the present state of things, forty thousand taels meant pouring in, at one draught, the whole year's surplus of every branch put together.

It would not quite cut the Trading House at the root — but it was a heavy club across the skull for all of that.

Li Luoyou leaned back in the chair, eyes shut, one finger tapping lightly on the armrest. The kerosene lamp's light lay on his face — a face nearing sixty now, the seams in it deeper than they were a few years since, the white at the temples far thicker. Only the eyes, when they opened, were as keen as ever.

"Master." Saoye came over with a bowl of hot tea and set it down, gingerly, on the table. "It's late. Take a little tea first, and rest."

Li Luoyou opened his eyes and took up the bowl; lifting the lid, he watched the steam rise in slow coils, blurring his brows and eyes. He blew the froth aside and sipped, shallowly — fine Longjing, from the canister he had himself brought from Hangzhou.

"Shopkeeper Qiao." He set the bowl down. "How has business run these last few days?"

"The old lines of trade go on well enough. Only there are a few dealings that by rule must have ready silver..." Shopkeeper Qiao's voice showed the difficulty plain.

Trade can run on credit, settling accounts at the three great festivals — but not every bargain will bear it. Tight goods and season-bound goods want cash on the nail. In the old days the Liaohai Trading House, flush and lordly, had first pick whenever a ship came in, buying its fill before any other merchant was suffered to choose; now, the silver gone, those dealings simply could not be made. The lost profit was one thing; the blow to the house's credit cut far deeper.

"...The tea trade, Master — that one went undone. Truly there was not one tael to be raised..." The sweat was standing out on Shopkeeper Qiao's face as he said it. The tea trade into Mongolia and the Northeast was Li Luoyou's largest and most moneyed line of all, and Tianjin was his chief buying point for it.

Li Luoyou was silent a space. "The fault is not yours. An affair of the government's — you could never have borne its weight. The silver I shall arrange forthwith. Go and fetch the Delong checkbook."

Shopkeeper Qiao hurried to the cabinet and brought it. Li Luoyou drew a check on the spot for three thousand taels, and sealed it with the little personal chop that served as his countersign.

"Draw three thousand taels on that. In a few days I will have silver remitted to the account at Delong's. Make good your shop's silver reserve first of all."

"Yes — yes, yes." Seeing no temper of blame in him, Shopkeeper Qiao's heart came down out of his throat at last.

"Only, these bonds—"

"No hurry yet. Enter them under receivables, and keep the notes safe," he said. "After I have seen Grand Secretary Xu, we shall deliberate."

Seeing the Grand Secretary would not call the silver back either — but at least he could sound out what was to follow upon these bonds, and weigh what countermoves there might be.

He rose, straightened his robes, and started for the rear hall. Two steps on, he stopped and looked back once at the kerosene lamp on the square table. The wick had burnt down some; the flame trembled faintly, and a thin film of soot shadowed the glass chimney.

"Put out the lamp," he said. "All of you — go and rest early."

Early the next morning, Li Luoyou had the shopkeeper send a capable clerk round with the prepared present-list of Liaodong goods and his visiting cards, delivered together to the governor's yamen and the intendant's residence. By the time he had finished a breakfast of thin congee and small dishes, the clerk was back, reporting what he had gleaned from the other side's doorkeepers — and it matched Chen Yujie's account exactly: Governor Xu and Intendant Jiang were away on the roads; no one could say what day they would return.

"No matter. We shall go out of the city ourselves and look over the wharves and the market." Li Luoyou turned to the clerk who had come back. "You're a Tianjin man born? You shall lead the way."

All Tianjin's prosperity lay outside the walls. Out the West Gate and north along the city, then down the South Canal all the way to the river junction at Sanchahe outside the East Gate, the beckoning banners of winehouses and teahouses, cloth shops and silk houses, grain dealers and inns and houses of pleasure rustled without number in the early-summer sea wind. On the South Canal the grain boats lay stratum on stratum as far as the eye would reach, and along both banks the warehouses stood shoulder to shoulder in ranks. East of the junction, down the line of the Hai River, the sea ships lay moored to the very horizon — none of them a match in size for the Shorn-hairs' ships, but their numbers made good the difference: stern touched bow, and their masts put half the daylight behind shadow. The porter-guild men, bent double under crushing bundles, ran light-footed along the springing gangplanks — while the merchants who supervised them, for the most part, wore long faces, and no gladness anywhere.

"That row is the Shen family's great sand boats — Director Shen's people of Nanzhili. The white tribute rice from Nanzhili that His Majesty eats, the canal rice that the Guanning and Dongjiang armies eat — better than half of it rides on Shen family bottoms."

Li Luoyou knew, however, that the Shen family had lately taken a fall in the carrying trade as well: Zhu Dadian had cut two-thirds of the canal-transport business out from under them. The Merchants Bureau had lost heavily, and its board of directors was "enraged." Zhu Dadian's mishandling of the canal transport this round had, in all likelihood, those grandees' fingers in it — the word from inside the palace already ran that not only would Zhu Dadian's post not hold, but the man would probably be "taken up for questioning" into the bargain.

Li Luoyou had never had any liking for Zhu. Greedy to the bone — that alone was nothing; officialdom swam with such — the trouble was that he was incompetent as well. During the Deng-Lai chaos this "White Lotus Governor" had hidden in his yamen chanting sutras, seeing no caller and issuing no order. Had Sun Yuanhua not escaped by a miracle and turned the whole tide at the last, Deng-Lai might have festered far past what it did.

With Zhu Dadian's fall, court and country over — the Merchants Bureau's "directors" were no doubt at this moment maneuvering to scrap the canal for the sea all over again. Another round of that struggle could not be avoided.

Canal or sea was a question that held little charm for Li Luoyou. Since the Merchants Bureau's founding and its new routes, freight between north and south had fallen enormously, and his goods, with a few exceptions, had gone by sea. More than that: it was the Merchants Bureau's sand boats that carried the Liaodong goods smuggled onto Pidao down to Tianjin. His entanglement with the Merchants Bureau ran far past the lot of mere "directors."

The local clerk, seeing his master take an interest, warmed to the telling: "Master, look at those great bird boats yonder, cocked up at bow and stern — every one of them Ningbo and Yuyao boat families. That Zhejiang crew, green-eyed at the Merchants Bureau's carrying trade in north-and-south goods, went and formed a shipping house of their own, the Huifeng by name, to stand in the ring against it. Little do they know the Merchants Bureau rose out of Songjiang Prefecture — with Grand Secretary Xu of that same county to back it, and Intendant Jiang, a Nanzhili man likewise, to shelter it — and they still dare come courting death under those two noses." The clerk was just getting up a full head of steam, spittle flying, about to point out the Merchants Bureau's own merchantmen for Master Li — when a glance showed the Master had wheeled about, and was walking straight for the official salt wharf.

The Qingzhou subcommission of the Changlu Salt Administration stood in Tianjin. Along the wharf, the reed-mat shelters built to cover the salt sacks ran out more than a li, and at this moment every foot of them was packed black with people, every eye fixed on the door of the Certifying Office. A man sat a horse before it, draped in a python robe, a ridged cap on his head — the rig neither one thing nor another — while a dozen-odd soldiers before him, in high fury, hauled four or five men out of the office by main strength; at the first stumble, scabbards and staves came down together and beat them to the ground. The mounted gentleman rubbed his smooth, hairless chin, and a shrill voice suddenly split the choking air: "A fine loyal merchant! The hundred packs of Shorn-hair salt hidden aboard your ship — and all those privately forged salt certificates besides — from where did they come?"

A middle-aged man of the salt-merchant stamp, kneeling in the open ground, shuffled two steps on his knees toward the mounted army supervisor — and had his arms seized by the swarming soldiers; his Ding Niangzi cotton straight-robe was torn open, the skirts all over mud. Then came another beating, head and face covered, until the blood ran down the salt merchant's face and his hair-net snapped, letting fall a few streaks of grizzled hair. "Your Reverence, wronged! Your small one never hid so much as—" The rest of the seized men took up the crying and wailing after him, the whole scene in an uproar.

Li Luoyou shook his head. "That eunuch holds no post as salt-inspecting censor. Where does he get the warrant to police the salt trade?"

"Master!" The clerk dropped his voice to a thread. "That is a man from the palace! If he says he has the power to search, then the power to search he has — who would dare contend with him? And pay no mind to his talk of Shorn-hair salt and forged certificates; that is all smoke. Ever since Eunuch Deng planted himself on this official salt wharf, he has pasted a ten-tael Pinglu bond onto every salt certificate issued. Think on it, Master: one certificate, tax and freight together, comes to barely six taels and a fraction — what salt merchant alive would say yes to that? But let a man demur the least bit, and the charge of smuggling Shorn-hair salt is clapped on him that instant. And there, Master — look—"

Another soldier came running from the wharf and laid before Deng Xizhao, the army-supervising eunuch, two objects like short staves: "Reporting to Your Reverence — this salt ship was found concealing firearms as well." Deng Xizhao took them up as if he had been waiting for them: two three-barreled hand cannons. "So! You salt chieftains not only plot with the Shorn-hair thieves — you hide away military arms. Planning to resist arrest, I suppose." He gave two dry chuckles, then suddenly tore his voice up into the shrill registers: "By the Great Ming Code — convicted of private salt, bearing arms, and resisting arrest: the sentence is BEHEADING!"

At that it was not the salt merchant alone: the four or five clerks and sailors taken with him went down on their knees together, howling "Wronged!" — "We are honest men, all of us!" — "There were never any guns aboard, never—"

"Insolence!" Deng Xizhao's horsewhip rose, and the thin voice bored deeper into the ear. "You paltry dog-thieves! By the law, even the men who carry the loads and lead the mules for a salt chieftain take a hundred strokes and army exile! What courage is this, that you dare bawl?" The whip cracked out, pointing at the merchant collapsed on the ground. "Throw this salt chieftain into a death cell. Ship and cargo are confiscated to the crown this instant. As for the rest — one hundred strokes apiece, and administer them here, where they stand."

Amid the onlookers' carefully smothered sighs and murmurings, Li Luoyou suddenly heard a voice shouting close against his ear: "Shopkeeper Li! How comes your honor to be here?" Then two pairs of hands had him by the arms and were hauling him outward through the press. By the time Saoye and the shop clerk had squeezed out of the crowd after them, they found a young man, with a page boy in train, bowing to Li Luoyou.

"This is no place for talk, and no place to linger." Gu Baocheng sent his own page running to hire a cool-chair, handed his uncle up into it, and led the whole party away from the official salt wharf at speed.

(End of chapter)