"What's this?"
Xu Xie looked curious.
Gu Chi smiled and invited him inside to take a look.
As they walked, he explained, "This is a shop run by the administrative office."
"A shop run by the administrative office? Was this Lord Shen's idea?"
"It was."
"That's quite unusual."
Xu Xie hadn't expected this young Lord Shen to understand commerce. After all, both in the past and now, policies across the land had mostly suppressed merchants. Merchants didn't engage in production, yet controlled vast sums of money, and had always been feared by those in power.
Small merchants were one thing; they merely did a bit of business to support their families. But behind the major merchants, there was always a powerful clan or great family. They usually kept a private force of soldiers, and when they traveled to trade, they set out in formation with a grand procession of carts and horses.
Otherwise, how could they protect their valuable goods?
The bigger the merchant, the stronger his private forces. That in itself was an unsettling factor to be wary of.
That was why merchants had always been kept in a low social position and burdened with high market taxes. Such measures also helped maintain stability among the people under the government's rule.
Merchants were considered lowly, at the very bottom of the social order. Even the Xu Family, which stood behind Xu Xie, rarely handled business directly. They left it all to servants, relatives, or more distant branches of the family. It was exceedingly rare for a local governor to run a business himself.
It would be rather beneath his dignity, after all.
But as the head of the Xu Family, Xu Xie naturally didn't see it that way. The Xu Family wouldn't be where it was today without the