Chapter 8: A Fateful Encounter

The dense forest of buildings, the large glass shop windows, and the dazzling array of goods… she was almost lost in all of this. Li Huamei wandered around Dongmen Market and the county town for a day in vain, asking people everywhere, but she had no clue. Although she knew that her sister was unlikely to still be called by her original name, she was still far off in her description of her sister’s appearance. After not seeing her for many years, her impression of her sister was completely distorted. She still habitually thought that her sister’s cheeks were still fair and her smile was like a spring breeze, and that she was a head taller than herself. If there really was such a tall woman, she would have become a topic of street talk without her having to look for her.

The most crucial thing was that Li Mo had always lived in seclusion, basically moving between the South China Sea Farm dormitory, which was off-limits to natives, and the general affairs department of the general hospital, which was also off-limits to idlers. Her daughter, Li Quan, lived at school and only came home once a week, around dusk. These two people were practically non-existent in the lives of most naturalized citizens and natives.

Her search in Dongmen Market was fruitless. It seemed that she still couldn’t do it without her mistress’s intelligence. Her mistress’s chains still invisibly bound her, and she couldn’t help but feel discouraged. She also vaguely felt that her mistress seemed to be hiding something from her.

Besides looking for her sister, Li Huamei also wanted to find a house. She was the first sea merchant to trade in Song-Song Australia and rent a house to set up a trading post. But the people at the Li family’s trading post were all Li Siya’s trusted followers. Whether it was to live with her sister after finding her, or to avoid her foster sister’s eyes and ears, she needed her own house. This was different from Macau. No matter how resourceful her mistress’s subordinates were, it was absolutely impossible for them to cause any trouble on Australian territory.

For many years, she had made the ship her home. Even the home in Macau, she rarely stayed there for a few days a year. The empty and cold mansion, if it weren’t for her mistress’s presence, she wouldn’t want to stay there for a minute longer.

Once a woman has the expectation of a home, she will become a miser overnight, and Li Huamei was no exception. After deducting the necessary expenses from the profits she earned this time, she handed over the rest to the trading post’s counter to be remitted back to Macau—this was also a way to compensate for the guilt of preparing to “go it alone.” However, she was not polite about the gold coins, gems, and jewelry she had found under Visby’s bed.

The housing prices in Lingao had risen a lot in the past two years. The influx of a large number of immigrants had made construction land very tight. And the arrival of more spontaneous immigrants who were not part of the Planning Institute’s plan had caused local housing and land prices to rise together.

Not only had a large number of local native landlords who “lived off rent” appeared, but there were also many people who speculated on land. Therefore, Li Huamei had to spend more money than she expected to buy a house. Fortunately, she had a heavy pocket of gold coins: most of them were Portuguese gold coins, and there were also many Indian and Persian gold coins. It was also a considerable fortune.

Li Huamei took a fancy to a small courtyard between Bopu and Lingao. This area had not yet been developed on a large scale, and the housing prices were relatively cheap. The owner was a local farmer. Because he could not bear the ten thousand taxes of the Song-Song government, he decided to sell his land to a state-owned farm and move to a newly built standard village. She took a fancy to this place mainly because it was relatively secluded, but not too desolate, which was convenient for hiding gold, silver, and treasures. Moreover, there was a tributary of the Wenlan River next to it. She prepared a small boat so that she could escape at any time if there was any trouble. This was a habit she had developed over many years as a pirate—as soon as she went ashore, she had to find a way out first.

Once she made up her mind, she immediately bought it. But the seller hoped to be paid in silver. Although Lingao currently promoted the use of circulation coupons for settlement and prohibited the direct circulation of silver, farmers, out of traditional habits, still trusted real gold and silver more. Therefore, the private use of silver was still quite common. Because the use of silver was “illegal,” the price of large transactions using silver would be significantly lower, more than 10% cheaper than using circulation coupons.

Li Huamei only had gold coins in her hand. It was just that gold was not valuable in East Asia. The gold-silver price ratio in the Ming and Qing dynasties fluctuated between 1:5 and 1:8. In Japan, which produced gold, it even reached 1:3 at one point. In Europe, the gold-silver price ratio was usually between 1:10 and 1:15, which was why Europeans had always used silver instead of gold to buy Chinese goods. Europeans also made a profitable trade of buying gold from China and Japan with silver and selling it in Europe.

Here in Lingao, gold had no monetary status and therefore could not be circulated. It could only be exchanged for silver or circulation coupons at the Delong Bank. However, in Li Huamei’s opinion, the exchange rate was not very favorable. The most favorable was to find the Italians at the Dutch trading post. Leib Trini had long discovered that the gold-silver price ratio in Asia was much lower than in Europe. He did not dare to interfere in this kind of company-monopolized business in Batavia, but he had no scruples in Lingao. There were often merchants here with scattered gold in their hands, and Trini would buy it at a price of 1:8-1:9. Van der Lans also got a share of the profits from this small business. The Senate turned a blind eye to this matter. Anyway, San Francisco was there, Siberia was there, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia were there. In a few years, all the gold in the world would belong to the Senate. What the Senate really needed to worry about was that if those gold were not in the hands of the natives of Eurasia and Africa, they would not be able to form a purchasing power for Song-Song industrial products at all.

The Dutch trading post was not far from her own trading post. In order to avoid being seen, Li Huamei did not take the small train, but walked around to the trading post area on foot. Nowadays, the trading post area was like a large construction site, with a dozen or so brick-and-wood European-style small buildings being built, mixed with Chinese, Japanese, and even Islamic styles, which were quite exquisite and scattered among the green trees. However, most of the houses here were empty.

The trading post area was a new income-generating project: it was used to rent to visiting merchant groups, large merchants, or future diplomatic missions. For example, the trading post rented by Quark was a Tudor-style building, which was not only a little taller than the Dutch temporary wooden house, but its foundation was also higher than the Dutch trading post that was under construction, making it look much more majestic. For this reason, Batavia had recently sent new instructions to Trini, asking him to modify the Dutch trading post that the Australians were building as soon as possible and add another floor on top of the original two floors.

In the old time and space, the story of the rivalry between the British and the Dutch would not fully unfold for another 20 years. Now the two sides were still allies, but the silent comparison had already begun. Li Huamei was dressed in an androgynous way. If you didn’t look carefully, she looked like a small foreman. No one would pay attention to her passing through these construction sites at noon.

She knocked on the door of the Dutch trading post. The Dutch servant went in to announce her with a strange look in his eyes. If Li Huamei hadn’t been able to speak a few words of Portuguese, she would probably have been treated as a passerby asking for directions or water. In a short while, Trini came out with a smile on his face. The two sides had met at various receptions and briefings held by the Colonial and Trade Department. Although they belonged to different camps, they were both strangers in a foreign land, and both had undercover missions, so they couldn’t help but talk to each other.

Trini had tried his best to hook up with her many times, including proposing to paint a portrait for her and make some jewelry for her. However, Li Huamei had no particular sexual interest in Italians. Regardless of whether the foreigner was big or small, the body odor was a headache. It was better not to use perfume. After being perfumed, sleeping with him was worse than hugging a bucket of dried herring.

However, Li Huamei could see that Trini’s smile was very forced, and his eyes were full of worries. I wonder what’s bothering this Italian?

There were about a dozen people sitting in Trini’s studio, drawing around a plaster statue. When they saw a guest coming, they all stood up and bowed. Li Huamei probably still had some impression of Trini’s naturalized citizen students—she had seen them a few times at the Bopu pier when they went out to sketch. However, one of the people who stood up startled Li Huamei. This person was a head taller than her, with a crew cut. From his skin and expression, he was obviously a “true kun.”

“This is…”

“Miss Li Huamei, right? It’s a pleasure to meet you. My surname is Qi, Qi Feng, the feng of mountain peak. From the General Construction Company.”

“You are… Chief… Hello, Chief.” Li Huamei was not yet used to this kind of address for naturalized citizens.

Li Huamei was used to being loud and boisterous. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she suddenly spoke in what the Australians called a cilantro accent.

Thanks to the largest urbanization process in human history in the early 21st century of the previous time and space, there were several elders who had studied and worked in urban planning, from Ma Qianzhu and Ji Runzhi at the top to the still very obscure Qi Feng at the bottom. However, according to Director Ma, the urban planning major in the previous time and space was purely misleading and harmful to the local area. According to the director’s mind, which had already evolved into a mechanical functional computer, all the work in the world could be broken down into n-ary n-degree equations or matrices. Urban planning was nothing more than a four-element matrix composed of industrial supporting radius, resource supply radius, local support capacity, and investment scale. And the urban planning major in the previous time and space only taught architecture students how to draw streets and sewers.

Qi Feng was precisely the urban planning graduate that Director Gong believed had been delayed. However, Qi Feng’s view was completely opposite. Born in the narrow streets and alleys of the old city of Hangzhou, he saw a calendar of foreign cityscapes in elementary school, and his heart, which had been suppressed by the narrow living environment, suddenly found a channel for release. From then on, he began to teach himself architectural drawing and frantically read everything related to Eastern and Western architecture. By the time he was in high school, his hometown had also entered an era of large-scale demolition and construction. He felt that he could no longer tolerate the narrow and old but at least full of unique historical traces of the streets and alleys being replaced by poorly designed concrete jungles. The belief in “beauty” supported him to be admitted to the urban planning major of a famous university, supported him to become a part-time architectural painter, and then supported him to change several jobs of drawing grids on the ground. Finally, it supported him to resolutely return to ancient times, just to leave a beautiful and character-filled urban cluster in the new world.