Along the way, Shi Jiang earned at least four to five thousand taels of silver just by buying and selling.
Privately, she also put tens of thousands of taels of silver into her purse.
After arriving in Jincheng, Shi Jiang and Fang Lei parted ways.
Fang Lei took the mountain goods collected from southern Shu to the north to inquire about the border town.
Then Shi Jiang took the goods collected along the way and went to Jiangnan.
In addition to exploring ways to do business, she was also planning to purchase a batch of grain.
In southern Sichuan, food is hard to come by.
But in Jiangnan, food is much cheaper. After all, it is a land of plenty. Comparing the two, the price difference is several times.
The same grain, which costs more than 20 cents per liter in southern Sichuan, can be purchased for only six or seven cents in Jiangnan.
Shi Jiang's items collected along the road were also sold at high prices in Jiangnan.
After all, these things are not considered good things locally, but they are hard-to-find items in Jiangnan.
If something is rare, it will naturally sell for a good price.
Then, Shi Jiang went around Jiangnan to inquire about the price of porcelain, and learned that the price was not cheap.
If it is a high-quality product, it may be sold for a sky-high price.
The main reason is that there are many literati in Jiangnan, and literati like this kind of porcelain items, and they often write poems about them.
After all, one of these high-priced porcelains is indeed a fine product, and the other is made through speculation.
Shi Jiangdao didn't want to take the boutique route. After all, although there are many rich people in Jiangnan, there are even more people who have no money.
If a rich person doesn't do it right, he will cause unnecessary trouble.
And for those who don't have money, there are always some items in their homes that must use porcelain.
It's better to earn ordinary people's money and make small profits but quick turnover.
After deciding on the direction of his business, Shi Jiang bought an inconspicuous shop in Jiangnan, so that if Hou Lei or Cao Jian came here with goods in the future, they would have a place to stay.
Then, he purchased a large amount of grain privately.
Of course, on the surface, it’s only enough for a few cars!
In fact, most of the food went into Shi Jiang's bag.
Even if Shi Jiang purchased such a large amount of grain, it was just a drop in the bucket for Jiangnan, and the price of grain on the market had not changed at all.
After the carriage was filled with food, Shi Jiang led the people back to Shunan.
Shi Jiang arrived in Shunan first, and it took almost half a month before Fang Lei could return.
This trip took Shi Jiang a full two months and Fang Lei almost three months because he often stopped to collect and sell goods along the way.
When he arrived at the border town, he encountered several groups of robbers on the road, but fortunately, there was not much loss of manpower and items.
However, it is obvious that the border city is very strict with people coming in from outside at this time.
Fang Lei inquired privately and found out that Marquis Xuanping and his soldiers had fought several battles during this period. Although the scale was not very large, he might have felt that the war was imminent.
After collecting the information, Fang Lei sold the goods in his hand and returned directly to Shunan without contacting Marquis Xuanping.
After all, his master is now Shi Jiang, not Marquis Xuan Ping.
Back in Shunan, Fang Lei's carriage was also full of things.
I took a lot of things to sell in Shunan City, and some other things were prepared to be exchanged for the mountain people.
Seeing that Fang Lei was already very proficient in this business, Shi Jiang asked Fang Lei to be responsible for selling goods in Jiangnan.
Shi Jiang had previously demonstrated how to collect and sell goods on the way, and Fang Lei also had a rough idea.
However, the focus is still on Cao Jian's side. The cave has been built and people have been sent to start making ceramics in the cave.
Mainly make things that are used daily at home, and they don’t need to be too elaborate.
Unexpectedly, the first batch of ceramics produced were favored by the mountain people, and they returned in exchange for large quantities of mountain products.
Some people even didn't buy it and ordered the next batch.
Unexpected, yet reasonable.
After all, it is difficult for mountain people to encounter people selling this kind of ceramics in the mountains.
Even if they are sold, most of them are in Shunan City.
Many mountain people were deceived by people down the mountain and were unwilling to enter Shunan City to buy anything except for some necessities.
Shi Jiang and the others were accepted by the mountain people because they didn't lower the price when they bought necessities in exchange for mountain goods.
After these two transactions, the mountain people felt a lot more relieved about the people Shi Jiang and others sent to exchange the goods, and they made more demands.
The farmers below Zhuangzi planted the sweet potato seedlings on poles, and after four months, they were finally able to harvest.
The farmers on the land below were very uneasy about what the new owner wanted to grow.
I feel like I don’t have much hope that anything can be grown with such a thin seedling.
However, the owner ordered me to break off the stems on the vines where the sweet potato sprouts were spreading, tear off the skin and fry them, which was very delicious.
Because there were too many sweet potato stalks on the vines, Shi Jiang also ordered them to cut off all the sweet potato vines and then pick the stalks and pickle them.
In this case, this can be eaten as a dish even in winter.
As for the vines and leaves, they were chopped into pieces and piled in large vats fired in the cave dwellings to feed the pigs raised in Zhuangzi.
After the sweet potato vines were cut clean and more than a dozen jars of sweet potato stems were pickled, Shi Jiang asked everyone to dig up the sweet potatoes in the ground.
In the rows of bare ground, under Shi Jiang's guidance, he went down with a hoe, and saw a large bunch of sweet potatoes bigger than a man's fist hanging under the pole.
Under each vine, dozens of sweet potatoes can be dug out.
By the time one acre of land was dug, I didn't know how many baskets had been used.
Even though the tenant farmers in Zhuangzi didn’t know what the mud tasted like, one acre of land could produce so much that everyone couldn’t help but smile.
The owner said before that they could keep 40% of these sweet potatoes.
As long as you don't put it out for sale, you can just eat it at home.
For them, whether it tastes good or not is another matter. As long as they can fill their stomachs, they have chewed the roots of bark and grass in the early years, let alone such muddy lumps.
There are also those muddy eggs called potatoes, which are also a big bunch at the bottom. Although they are a little smaller than sweet potatoes, they are suitable for both young and old.
Shi Jiang did not expect that the sweet potatoes and potatoes in the fields here could actually have a bumper harvest. It may also be related to the fact that the sweet potatoes and potatoes in her bag are seeds that have been improved by later generations.
One acre of sweet potato weighs three thousand jins, and one acre of potato weighs more than four thousand jins.
Each farmer in the tenement farm has planted about an acre of land, which means that they can get 1,200 kilograms of sweet potatoes and 1,600 kilograms of potatoes.
Shi Jiang was afraid that they wouldn't be able to do it, so he called the farmers over, cleaned the sweet potatoes and potatoes in front of everyone, and then threw them directly into the big pot on the dojo, filled them with water and boiled them.