Chapter 51: The Ministry of Colonies and Trade

Figure 19 accompanying the report is a panoramic view of the harbor battery and the stone pier, drawn by Mr. Leib Trini. This is the best angle we could get from the ship. Figures 20-67 are various views of the harbor and the ships anchored within, drawn by Mr. Leib Trini. Among them, Figure 25 is of the Australians’ “Holy Ship.” The booklet provided by Your Excellency states that there is a giant cannon on the foredeck of this ship, but we could not confirm this from our perspective. Figures 26-28 are of the European-style ships owned by the Australians. Figures 29-33 are of other ships owned by the Australians.

I will send a second report after the Australians restore our freedom of movement.

Your master’s faithful servant,

Your Excellency’s most humble servant,

Junior Commercial Agent Van der Lants

February 9, 1631, aboard the “Magdeburg” at the port of Bopu, Lingao.

After putting down his quill, Van der Lants spread out the letter and took out a piece of cardboard from his briefcase. The cardboard had many irregularly punched holes. He covered the letter with the cardboard, compared it, and then began to copy it onto another piece of paper.

Gonzalez watched the young commercial agent working so diligently and couldn’t help but chuckle to himself. They weren’t even allowed to disembark, so who were they going to send back to Batavia with the letter? There was no company factory here, nor were there any other ships from Batavia. The Australians never went to Batavia either.

Leib Trini was holding a cup and drinking. Moored here with nothing to do while waiting to go ashore, the sailors and soldiers on the ship all took to drinking as a way to pass the time. The ship’s purser had bought a dozen barrels of rum and fifty cases of kvass. Everyone on the ship, except for the sentries who were explicitly forbidden to drink, was drunk all the time. On the deck, in the cargo hold, next to the cannons, “dregs” were lying everywhere, sleeping soundly. A tragic incident had even occurred the night before: a sailor, drunk, had fallen asleep on the deck and rolled into the water in the middle of the night. By the time the watchman found him and pulled him out, he was already dead. For this, the commercial agent had to pay eight reales for a “corpse disposal fee,” and the port authority transported the body to be dumped at sea.

Because he had nothing to do, Leib Trini, besides drinking, spent his time drawing. On the deck, using the projection method and simple instruments, he roughly drew a topographic map of the port. Then he made sketches of everything he could see from the deck of the “Magdeburg.” He was particularly careful in depicting the “Holy Ship.” This huge vessel was on the other side of the bay, its dark silhouette against the azure sea and sky exuded a beauty that intoxicated him, both in its lines and in the play of light and shadow. Trini was a draftsman, and in Europe, where science and art had not yet completely separated, he was also half an artist, with a natural sensitivity to beautiful things.

Blue smoke intermittently rose from the Holy Ship every day, and sometimes a puff of black smoke would suddenly erupt. Mr. Trini was eager to find out what was happening on the ship and what the Australians were doing—his interest in the “Holy Ship” grew daily.

Now, seeing the commercial agent wrapping his sketchbook and letters together, carefully wrapping them in layer after layer of oil paper, sealing them with wax, and finally putting them in a deerskin pouch, he felt a little lost. Although these drawings were just sketches, was it safe to send them with the letter like this? It was a journey of dozens of days from here to Batavia, and any accident could cause the letter to be lost at sea forever.

“How do you plan to send the letter?” Gonzalez finally couldn’t help but ask.

“I just saw a junk unloading deerskins from Formosa—these Chinese merchants are obviously from Tayouan. I plan to ask them to take it,” the commercial agent said confidently. “Give them some money, and they will do it properly.”

Although it would take a long time for the letter to reach Tayouan and then be sent back to Batavia, according to the time the ships were in port, the “Magdeburg” would not set sail on its return journey for at least one or two months. That was enough time for the letter to return to Batavia.

Even if the letter arrived in Batavia later than them, it would still be valuable—at least it would serve as a backup. In this era, not every ship that set sail was guaranteed to reach its destination.

In the building of the Ministry of Colonies and Trade, Si Kaide sat in his office, full of satisfaction and ambition. In the third plenary session of the Senate after the annual meeting, a by-election was held for the vacant positions on the Executive Committee. Si Kaide, due to his long-term responsibility for the daily work of the Ministry of Colonies and Trade, and his frequent advocacy of slogans such as “the Pacific is the Pacific of the Chinese,” was smoothly elected to the position of Minister of Colonies and Trade, a position on the Executive Committee.

The first thing Si Kaide did after being elected was to move. In his opinion, the original Ministry of Colonies and Trade was too small to accommodate his ambitions and the ever-expanding volume of business. Fortunately, since the construction of the “Anju Building” for the transmigrators, there was a lot of vacant land in Bairen City. He re-enclosed a piece of land and built the Ministry of Colonies and Trade building.

The so-called building was actually a repurposed dormitory made of prefabricated parts. Now that most of the transmigrators had moved into apartments, there were many spare parts for prefabricated houses. The sandwich panels with foam layers and colored steel plates did not have good thermal insulation. So it was decided to use them only as walls, with a layer of wooden frame walls added to the inside of the exterior walls, filled with the natural insulation material diatomaceous earth.

Because the sandwich panels of the prefabricated houses could be installed quickly, his construction plan was not rejected by the Planning Institute. The construction company took a week to build the house.

From the outside, the new Ministry of Colonies and Trade building looked very strange. It was a strange building composed of two three-story small buildings and an arched roof between them. The ground floor of the small buildings was brick, and the upper two floors were made of colored steel plates. An arched wooden roof supported by a wrought iron truss was added between the two roofs, with glass skylights installed. The front and back of the arch were sealed with brick walls, thus creating a building with offices on both sides and a high-ceilinged hall in the middle. The entire building was full of a “shanzhai” (imitation/bootleg) atmosphere.

Si Kaide was very fond of the full-height arched hall of the Lingao Construction General Company—it was so grand when combined with the sand table model on the planning display stand below! So he wanted to build one too. This way, he could stand on the balcony of his minister’s office on the third floor and look down at the sand table and the busy staff around him, fully satisfying his desire to overlook the world.

Under this arched roof were various sand tables. Si Kaide believed that the work of the Ministry of Colonies and Trade was often similar to that of a general staff, only it was an economic general staff. And the basic skill of staff work was to gesticulate on maps and sand tables.

Therefore, the hall was filled with various sand tables, the largest of which was a sand table of the entire East Asian sea area. All the merchant ships owned by the transmigrators, or contracted with them, and public commercial outlets were represented by small flags and models on this large sand table.

Huge maps and charts hung on the walls. One of the charts was a flow chart of trade goods. Various commercial data were filled in on cards of different colors and hung on the flow chart on the wall, making the wall look like a colorful chessboard. Once a day, the Ministry of Colonies and Trade, the Naval Shipping Department, the Port Authority, the Manufacturing Directorate, and all overseas stations with radios would exchange intelligence. Female clerks holding long poles would change the position of the cards according to the information received. Below the flow chart, a group of people called “calculators” sat in small office cubicles, constantly calculating the data handed to them with slide rules and dip pens.

They were selected from the naturalized citizens who had obtained the C-level diploma and were taught a certain mathematical calculation method in a cramming style. Each of them was only responsible for remembering one calculation formula. Their job was to fill the data handed to them into the formula and then deduce the result with pen and paper and a slide rule. The purpose and principle of the calculation were not important at all; as long as they could correctly calculate the result, they were qualified calculators. Because of the repeated mechanical practice, their calculation speed was very fast.

Every few months, they would learn another formula to ensure that they could be replaced with each other.

Through sophisticated management methods, it was possible to know at any time which ships had left port, which were in port loading and unloading cargo, and which were currently empty. What cargo each ship was carrying; the variety and quantity of import and export demand for the month could all be checked at any time. The Senate and all departments could get a forecast of when a certain type of material would arrive in a certain direction at any time—barring any accidents.

The Ministry of Colonies and Trade did not have its own ships—this was something that had always bothered Si Kaide. When the Great Wave Shipping Company was first established, he strongly demanded that the company be under the control of his department, but in the end, it fell into the hands of the Ministry of Communications and the Navy, which made him resentful. A Ministry of Colonies and Trade without ships was a huge joke!

Of course, he had no ability to resist the navy’s attempt to monopolize shipping. He had to swallow his anger for the time being and planned to talk about a directly controlled shipping company after the shipyard in Hong Kong began to produce ships on a large scale. Now, all tasks had to focus on the Ministry of Colonies and Trade’s actions in Hon Gai! If he could solve the coal supply problem that had been plaguing the Senate once and for all, his voice would be much louder when he spoke at meetings of the Executive Committee and the Senate, and the demands he made would be more “reasonable.”

“Whether a demand is ‘reasonable’ depends on how important you are in the group,” Si Kaide often said this.

He looked down from the large glass window of his desk: in the hall, several transmigrators and naturalized clerks from the Ministry of Colonies were busy around a newly built sand table. This sand table represented the situation around Hon Gai in Vietnam and was made by enlarging a map from the old timeline and correcting it with survey data sent back from the front.