Shanghai’s Western restaurants now came in two varieties. One was the authentic French and Italian cuisine that Rong Hong had taken Lin Yuchan to experience—employing European head chefs with very elegant décor, and prices that naturally aligned with international standards. Foreign residents of the concessions frequented these establishments, while Chinese people were generally barred from entry, not even allowed inside.
Lin Yuchan wasn’t interested in going there.
The other type was so-called “Shanghai-style Western cuisine”—since Shanghai’s opening as a port, some had combined Western food with local tastes in a fusion of East and West, evolving into a unique style of cuisine. Moreover, since Guangzhou had opened as a port earlier, these fashionable Western restaurants generally had Cantonese owners, with relatively light flavors that wouldn’t feature terrifying dishes like bloody steaks.
Prices were also relatively affordable, allowing middle-class families to occasionally “try foreign delicacies.”
“Yang’s Western Restaurant” was decorated and furnished entirely in Chinese style. The private rooms had small tea stoves and even shrines to the Kitchen God. Several oil paintings were hung on the walls, depicting the “Twelve Beauties of Jinling” classical ladies.
Sizzling fried pork cutlets were served on painted porcelain plates with crane motifs, accompanied by spicy soy sauce for dipping. The colorful potato salad was heated to scalding according to Chinese custom and served in blue and white porcelain bowls. Since the foreign wines on the menu were perpetually sold out, warm Shaoxing yellow wine was placed on the table, with a complimentary dish of fried peanuts alongside.
This was Lin Yuchan’s first time at such an eclectic restaurant since arriving in the Qing Dynasty.
However, the fried pork cutlet dipped in spicy soy sauce had a surprisingly unique flavor. After one bite, she couldn’t stop praising it, pushing the plate toward her companion.
“Come, come, Boss Su, don’t be polite. This is Shanghai-style Western cuisine, common people’s food—you never had this as a child.”
Su Minguan smiled with pursed lips, put down his chopsticks to use a knife and fork, and slowly cut away a small piece of fat from the edge of the pork cutlet.
“Such enthusiasm—I’m afraid you have ulterior motives. Speak up.”
He glanced at the spicy soy sauce, finding it rather suspicious, so he didn’t dip.
Lin Yuchan laughed: “I’m just giving you a welcome-back dinner, no ulterior motives.”
“How kind of you.” The brazier burned brightly, raising the room temperature. Su Minguan undid a button at his collar and looked at her tenderly. “Since that’s the case, finish telling me the ending of that last ghost story from before.”
Lin Yuchan: “…”
She’d never tell this guy ghost stories again, even if it killed her!
Su Minguan waited for her to blush, then leaned forward to pull over her small handbag, giving it a slight squeeze—a thick stack of papers inside.
He smiled without speaking.
Lin Yuchan was speechless and could only laugh awkwardly.
“Um, there is something… let’s finish eating first. Don’t spoil your appetite.”
“Say it now. It’ll go well with the meal.”
Seeing such a thick stack of manuscripts, it couldn’t have been prepared without three to five days of work.
Su Minguan couldn’t help but wonder—had she rested at all since returning to Shanghai?
Lin Yuchan felt embarrassed, picking up some potato salad with her chopsticks, slowly blowing it cool while looking into Su Minguan’s eyes.
“Boss Su… does Yixing have plans to buy more steamships?”
Yixing was steadily and methodically expanding. On this inland journey, Su Minguan had acquired many warehouses, storage facilities, and berths along the way. With so many supporting facilities serving just one steamship, wouldn’t that be overkill?
Su Minguan leaned forward slightly, taking quite a while before saying:
“Yes.”
Lin Yuchan was overjoyed: “The foreigners aren’t blocking you anymore?”
Su Minguan leaned back in his chair, looking at her with leisurely composure. When this girl faced him, she was just as clear and transparent as when she was fifteen, never hiding her emotions.
His heart, hardened by the journey, softened bit by bit again, and he had the impulse to touch her hair.
However, his face still maintained an air of feigned profundity as he shook his head and said softly: “I have my ways.”
Ever since he became the first Chinese to operate a crab of steamship and managed to run a foreign steamship prosperously, other ship owners were getting restless. Those with spare money began inquiring about prices from foreign trading companies, dreaming of upgrading their equipment.
Foreigners also needed to make money. Boycotting one person was easy. Boycotting a group of people, an entire industry—that kind of solidarity was harder to maintain.
Thus, although the major foreign trading houses still maintained their aloofness, gradually, some small foreign merchants began selling small-tonnage, obsolete, and old cargo ships to Chinese buyers. Machine parts removed from ships and broken vessels that foreigners didn’t bother repairing were also eagerly purchased by Chinese buyers, who then learned Su Minguan’s techniques—dismantling them to sell as scrap to recover costs while extracting a few intact parts to slowly “assemble” their own.
So now, on the Huangpu River, one could occasionally see small Chinese steamships desperately belching black smoke, sounding mournful whistles as they chased the elegant white sails of traditional Chinese junks.
Under these circumstances, any comprehensive boycott would seem rather childish. The foreigners had no choice but to let things be.
Su Minguan was confident that if Yixing now expressed interest in purchasing steamships, foreign merchants probably wouldn’t bar him from their doors anymore.
However, preparing a room full of clubs to extort him heavily was probably unavoidable.
Lost in thought, Su Minguan unconsciously imitated Lin Yuchan’s actions, and his last piece of fried pork cutlet finally lost its integrity, surrendering to the embrace of spicy soy sauce. He bit down without realizing—
He maintained his composure, frowning slightly.
It tasted quite good. He wondered who had thought up this combination.
“When I buy the second steamship,” Su Minguan asked, “what do you plan to do?”
Lin Yuchan was well prepared. She swallowed the last piece of fried pork cutlet on her plate, then pushed the plate away and pulled out a thick stack of notes from her bag.
“I want to charter this steamship.”
She smiled broadly, spreading her hands wide to illustrate her ambition.
Su Minguan was momentarily puzzled.
He didn’t like routines like “Did I hear wrong? Say that again.” Miss Lin always spoke precisely and never joked about serious matters. And his ears were probably still about half a century away from age-related hearing loss.
He also wouldn’t ask purely curiosity-driven questions like “What do you want to do?” A businessman’s basic principles: profit first, privacy second. Why ask too many business questions that came knocking?
So he said directly: “To charter a steamship—do you know how much silver that requires?”
Lin Yuchan was somewhat surprised that he accepted her outrageous proposal so quickly. She looked down—the potato salad had cooled, so she picked out the ham to eat.
She smiled and admitted frankly: “I don’t know. Give me a price range.”
“For example, a 300-ton small steamship would cost at least 30,000 taels from foreign merchants,” Su Minguan immediately rattled off figures like counting family treasures. “For Yangtze River routes, you’d need ten crew members and sailors—you’d have to pay wages; daily fuel, firewood, and coal, plus monthly inspections and maintenance. If it’s passenger service, you’d also need specialized…”
“No passenger service. Just calculate for cargo transport.”
Su Minguan looked at her cautious, step-by-step approach and smiled, rephrasing his explanation.
“Put it this way. If I purchased a small fast steamship for cargo express service only, each round trip on the Yangtze could earn 2,500 taels in transport fees. With a gross profit margin of twenty percent, that’s 500 taels profit. Twenty trips per year equals 10,000 taels. Add in steamship purchase price depreciation…”
“I can’t afford it,” Lin Yuchan said frankly.
Meanwhile, she was privately amazed—Boss Su was unassuming; Yixing had only restarted two years ago, yet when discussing prices, he was already talking in units of “ten thousand taels”…
In comparison, her cotton business of “two or three taels per load” seemed so pathetic.
Of course, his profits sounded high, but they operated at the cost of high debt. Buying a steamship required loans, and with the high interest rates foreigners charged, it would take several years to break even.
Those thousands and tens of thousands of taels in transport fees were mostly “accounts receivable”—clients delaying payment for a year or more was common. She reminded herself not to be intimidated by his big talk.
He had weaknesses, and she had countermeasures.
She patiently listened to Su Minguan finish, noted the key figures in her notebook, then smiled: “I can’t afford cash, but we can find ways to compensate with other things. For instance… You just said that foreign merchants still discriminate against you with pricing, and if Yixing wants to buy steamships, they’ll collectively inflate prices.”
Su Minguan nodded noncommittally.
There was no help for it—although Chinese craftsmen were researching steamship construction, they hadn’t yet produced vessels that could match foreign steamships for safe navigation.
Research burned money. Faced with such slow progress, many officials in the foreign affairs movement were beginning to retreat, thinking: We can’t catch up to Western shipbuilding technology in the short term—why don’t we just buy instead? Why waste our efforts?
So funding was cut again and again. Domestic steamships became even more difficult to produce. A vicious cycle.
As for ordinary trading companies wanting to purchase steamships, needless to say, they still had to bow to the foreigners.
With foreign merchants holding monopolistic advantages, naturally, they would demand exorbitant prices, not surprising at all.
When it came time to buy ships, Su Minguan would think of some unconventional methods.
“…Then let me point out an unconventional method,” Lin Yuchan said with a slight smile, as if she could see through his thoughts. “Your second steamship should be purchased in Boya’s name, managed under Yixing, with you responsible for operation, repair, and maintenance. Boya is a Western-style limited company with a very shy boss who rarely shows his face and has no immediate conflicts of interest with foreign merchants. When such a company wants to buy steamships, I think foreign merchants won’t extort too harshly, right?”
Su Minguan’s eyebrow twitched, then he still smiled and shook his head.
“Even if the ship price could be halved, Miss Lin, as far as I know, Boya’s current assets couldn’t support such a ship, could they?”
“Don’t rush, don’t rush, there’s still room for negotiation.”
Lin Yuchan remained unhurried, smiling as she poured him a cup of wine, then opened another notebook.
It was covered with circles, dots, and various colors—observations she had recorded along her Yangtze River journey.
Su Minguan recognized familiar details: how foreign merchants in Zhenjiang signed price-fixing agreements to maintain monopolistic competition; how foreign merchants in Jiujiang maliciously inflated opening prices and depressed purchase prices; how foreign merchants agreed on purchase quotas and collectively boycotted colleagues who broke the rules, while Chinese merchants remained scattered and fought separately; how cotton prices varied wildly at different ports, clearly indicating someone was deliberately spreading false information…
Su Minguan glanced over briefly, then looked up to listen attentively.
“I’ve discussed this with everyone several times these past few days, and thought it over carefully myself,” Lin Yuchan said slowly. “We can’t stop these competitive tactics by foreign merchants, but we needn’t let ourselves be slaughtered either. If we could implement some countermeasures, if nothing else, at least the cotton purchase prices at Shanghai port wouldn’t be manipulated so outrageously by them.”
Su Minguan listened intently, thinking of her earlier statement about “wanting to charter a fast ship,” and roughly guessed this girl’s ambitions.
He lowered his eyes, absently staring at the white tablecloth before him, restraining his gentle and relaxed demeanor. When he raised his eyelids again, only sharp, combative intensity remained in his eyes.
“Convince me,” he said, removing his pocket watch and placing it upside down in front of her. “You have half an hour.”