Chapter 1230 - A Fateful Encounter

Dense buildings like a forest, large glass display windows, dazzling merchandise... amid all this, she almost lost her bearings. Li Huamei spent a futile day wandering around Dongmen Market and the county town, asking everywhere. But there was no lead at all. Though she knew her sister probably wouldn't be using her original name anymore, when describing her sister's appearance, she was far off the mark—after so many years apart, her mental image had completely diverged from reality. She still habitually thought of her sister as fair-cheeked with a spring-breeze smile, standing a full head taller than herself. If there really were such a tall woman, she wouldn't need to search—it would already be the talk of the town.

Most crucially, Li Mo had always kept a low profile, living essentially a two-point existence between the South Sea Farm dormitory—which natives couldn't enter without permission—and the General Hospital's General Affairs Department, which was off-limits to the public. Her daughter Li Quan boarded at school and only came home once a week around dusk. For the vast majority of naturalized citizens and natives, these two people might as well not exist.

The search in Dongmen Market yielded nothing. It seemed that without the young miss's intelligence, she still couldn't manage—the young miss's chains still invisibly bound her. She couldn't help feeling discouraged. And faintly she sensed that the young miss seemed to be hiding something from her.

Besides looking for her sister, Li Huamei also wanted to find a house. She'd been the first maritime merchant to trade with the Australians and rent space to establish a trading house. But all the staff at the Li family trading house were Li Siya's trusted people. Whether she eventually found her sister to live with, or needed to escape her milk-sister's surveillance, she would need her own house. This place was different from Macau—no matter how capable the young miss's people were, they certainly couldn't cause any trouble on Australian territory.

For many years she'd made the ship her home. Even the Macau mansion—she rarely stayed there more than a few days a year. If not for the young miss's presence, she wouldn't have wanted to spend a single minute in that empty, cold mansion.

Once a woman started longing for a home, she'd turn into a miser overnight—Li Huamei was no different. From this voyage's profits, after necessary expenses, she'd remitted the rest to the trading house to be sent back to Macau—that could count as compensation for the guilt of planning to "go solo." But the gold coins, gems, and jewelry she'd scavenged from under Weisheuey's bunk—she kept without qualms.

Lingao's housing prices had risen considerably compared to two years ago. The flood of immigrants had made building land extremely tight. Even more unplanned spontaneous immigrants, beyond the Planning Commission's purview, had driven up both housing and land prices.

Not only were there now plenty of local natives "living off their walls" as landlords, but many were speculating on land. So buying a house would cost Li Huamei more than expected. Fortunately, she had a heavy pouch of gold coins—mostly Portuguese, along with quite a few Indian and Persian gold coins. A tidy little fortune.

Li Huamei had her eye on a small courtyard compound between Bopu and Lingao. This area hadn't yet seen large-scale development, so prices were relatively cheap. The seller was a local farmer who couldn't stomach the Australian government's myriad taxes and had decided to sell his land to a state farm and move to a newly-built standard village. She liked this place mainly because it was secluded but not completely desolate—convenient for hiding gold and silver treasure. Moreover, there was a tributary of the Wenlan River right beside it. With a small boat ready, she could escape at the first sign of trouble. This was a habit from years of piracy—once ashore, always scout the escape route first.

Having decided, she moved to purchase immediately, but the seller wanted payment in silver. Although Lingao was promoting circulation notes and prohibiting direct silver circulation, farmers from old habits still trusted real gold and silver more. Private silver transactions were still quite common. Since using silver was "illegal," large transactions in silver typically got considerable discounts—over ten percent cheaper than circulation note prices.

Li Huamei only had gold coins. But gold was cheap in East Asia. The Ming-Qing gold-silver ratio fluctuated between one-to-five and one-to-eight; gold-producing Japan had even hit one-to-three. In Europe, the ratio usually stood at one-to-ten or one-to-fifteen—which was why Europeans always used silver rather than gold to buy Chinese goods. Europeans also profitably bought Japanese and Chinese gold with silver to sell in Europe.

In Lingao, gold had no monetary status and couldn't circulate. It could only be exchanged for silver or circulation notes at the Delong Bank. But in Li Huamei's view, the exchange rate wasn't very favorable. The best deal was with the Italian at the Dutch trading house. Leib Trini had long noticed that Asia's gold-silver ratio was much lower than Europe's. He hadn't dared touch this Company-monopolized trade in Batavia, but in Lingao he had no such qualms. Merchants here often had odd amounts of gold, and Trini would buy it at one-to-eight or one-to-nine. Van der Lantlong also got a cut of this little business. The Senate turned a blind eye—after all, San Francisco was right there, Siberia was right there, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia were right there. In a few years, all the world's gold would belong to the Senate. What the Senate really needed to worry about was that if that gold wasn't in the hands of Eurasian and African natives, there'd be no purchasing power for Australian-made goods.

The Dutch trading house wasn't far from her own trading house. To avoid being noticed, Li Huamei didn't take the little train but walked a circuitous route to the trading house district. The district now looked like a massive construction site, with a dozen or so European-style brick-and-wood buildings going up, interspersed with Chinese, Japanese, and even Islamic-style architecture—quite beautiful, set amid green trees in an irregular layout. But most of the buildings were still empty.

The trading house district was a new revenue-generating project: for renting to trade delegations and major merchants visiting Lingao, or future diplomatic missions. For example, Quark's trading house was a mock-Tudor building—not only taller than the Dutch temporary wooden house, but its foundation was higher than the Dutch trading house under construction, making it look considerably more imposing. Because of this, Batavia had recently sent Trini new instructions to modify the Dutch trading house the Australians were building—adding a third story above the original two.

In the old timeline, the Anglo-Dutch rivalry wouldn't fully unfold for another twenty years; for now they were still allies. But silent competition had already begun. Li Huamei was dressed ambiguously, almost like a foreman at a glance, so walking through these construction sites at midday attracted no attention.

She knocked on the Dutch trading house door. The Dutch servant looked at her oddly and went to announce her. If Li Huamei hadn't spoken a few words of Portuguese, she'd probably have been taken for someone asking directions or begging for water. Before long, Trini came out to greet her with a beaming smile. They'd met at various receptions and briefings hosted by the Colonial Trade Department. Though they were in different camps, both were fellow strangers in a foreign land—and both bore undercover missions. They'd naturally become able to talk together.

Trini had made multiple attempts to seduce her, including offering to paint her portrait and make her some jewelry. But Li Huamei had no particular interest in Italian men. The body odor of foreign men, large or small, was headache-inducing. Without perfume it was bad enough; with perfume, sleeping with one was worse than sleeping next to a barrel of dried herring.

Still, Li Huamei could tell Trini's smile was quite forced, his eyes full of worries. What was troubling this Italian?

Trini's studio-workshop had about a dozen people sitting around drawing from a plaster cast. Seeing a guest arrive, they all rose to bow. Li Huamei vaguely remembered Trini's naturalized students—she'd seen them a few times at Bopu dock when they went out sketching. But among those rising was one who startled her—this person was a full head taller than her, with a buzz cut, and from the skin and expression, clearly a "true transmigrator."

"This is...?"

"Miss Li Huamei, I presume? Pleasure to meet you. My surname is Qi, Qi Feng—'Feng' as in 'mountain peak.' I'm with the General Construction Company."

"You're... Chief... greetings, Chief." Li Huamei wasn't yet used to this naturalized citizen mode of address.

Li Huamei was used to speaking loudly and roughly. She didn't even know what came over her—suddenly she sounded like what the Australians called a "cilantro accent."

Thanks to the largest urbanization process in human history during the early 21st century of the old timeline, there were several transmigrators in city planning and urban development—from Ma Qianzhu and Ji Runzhi down to the currently rather marginal Qi Feng. But according to Commissioner Ma's words, the old timeline's urban planning profession was purely "misleading students and cursing localities." In the Commissioner's mind—now evolved into a mechanical function calculator—all work in the world could be broken down into N-element N-order equations or matrices. Urban planning was simply a four-element matrix consisting of industrial support radius, resource supply radius, local support capacity, and investment scale. The old-timeline urban planning profession only taught architecture students how to draw streets and sewers.

Qi Feng was precisely the kind of "ruined" urban planning graduate the Commissioner had in mind. But Qi Feng's view was the complete opposite. Born in the narrow alleys of Hangzhou's old city, as a child he'd seen a foreign scenery calendar and his heart—repressed by cramped living conditions—had suddenly found release. From then on, he'd taught himself architectural drawing, frantically reading everything related to Eastern and Western architecture. By high school, his hometown had entered its era of massive demolition and construction. He couldn't bear to see the narrow, old—but at least uniquely historical—alleys replaced by clumsily designed concrete jungles. The concept of "aesthetic beauty" drove him into a famous university's urban planning program, supported him in becoming a part-time architectural artist, then supported him through several jobs drawing grids on the ground, and finally supported him in resolutely traveling back to antiquity—all to leave behind beautiful, characterful cities in the new world.

(End of Chapter)