Shen Liang thought his friend was calling him and laughed, "Boss Shen, I'm right here! Who are you calling Boss Shen to?"
Boss Lu pointed at Shen Qing and said, "I'm talking about this Boss Shen!"
As soon as he finished speaking, he remembered that Shen Liang also had the surname Shen. He looked at Shen Qing, then at Shen Liang, and asked, "Who are you two?"
Shen Liang laughed: "This is my youngest daughter. Old Lu, are you sure you haven't mistaken her for someone else?"
Boss Lu looked back at Shen Qing, his gaze settling on the pink cloak she was wearing.
Shen Qing also wore this cloak on the boat.
"There's no mistake!" he exclaimed excitedly, "You're Boss Shen!"
Shen Qing didn't remember ever seeing this person before, so he just stood there without saying a word.
Outside the door, Jiang Shen was ready to make a move at any moment.
Mr. Lu asked excitedly, "Mr. Shen, did your business deal with Clark go through?"
Shen Qing then remembered that when she went to the banquet hall to promote her product to Clark, there were also many Chinese business owners in the banquet hall.
The person in front of me must have been in the banquet hall at the time, and was probably a first-class passenger.
Thinking of this, Shen Qing smiled and said, "The deal didn't go through. Mr. Clark was very satisfied with my goods, but due to some minor issues, we ultimately didn't cooperate."
Boss Lu immediately understood and cursed, "These British people are so difficult to please!"
Shen Qing simply smiled and said nothing more.
There were many people around, and some of them were eager to see her fail, such as the Shen sisters, Shen Yu and Shen Lan. She couldn't let these people seize any opportunity to frame her.
But Boss Lu didn't intend to stop talking to Shen Qingpan, and asked again, "So, when you went to London, did you manage to secure the order?"
"The deal is done. The first batch of one million garments has been sold, and half a million were delivered just before Christmas."
"Sell it to the British?"
"Yes, it was sold to a philanthropist in London. Merchants from Guangzhou and Fujian also wanted some goods."
Mr. Lu immediately asked, "I heard that you mainly wanted to do exports, so why did you sell to merchants from Guangzhou and Fujian later?"
"Initially, we planned to only export, but after going to London, we found that it wasn't easy, so we changed our plans."
Boss Lu understood and gave Shen Liang a thumbs up: "Old Shen, your daughter is amazing! A young woman, running a factory in Shanghai and doing business with the British in London! I was on the ship and saw her talking to British traders in English. Even I, a grown man, am impressed!"
Shen Liang stared at Shen Qing in astonishment, and asked incredulously, "Qing'er, you own a factory in Shanghai?"
Shen Qing nodded calmly: "Yes, I have factories in Shanghai and Jiangzhou."
His tone was ordinary, without a trace of boasting or pride, as if it were just a trivial matter.
"Qing'er, you..."
Shen Liang looked at Shen Qing and felt that she was a stranger.
In the past, if she stood in front of so many sisters, she would have been trembling with fear, not to mention being given the cold shoulder by the old lady, she would have cried.
But right now, her eyes reveal a ruthless edge like a man's, and she exudes a calm and confident aura.
Thinking about it carefully, she was a completely different person from the moment she returned to the Shen family yesterday.
He just didn't notice.
She opened a factory in Jiangzhou, Shanghai, and even went to England to do business... She is no longer the obedient and virtuous daughter who only knew needlework and traditional female virtues.
While Shen Liang was still in a daze, Shen Qing and Boss Lu had already walked to the side.
Boss Lu whispered to Shen Qing, "Boss Shen, I heard that your factory in Shanghai has generators. I wonder how much you paid for them?"
Speaking of generators, Shen Qingcai realized that he hadn't settled the cost of the equipment with Cheng Zhiwen yet.
She kept the banknotes carefully, waiting for the day when she could settle the accounts with him and give them to him. But she never saw him again after the Mid-Autumn Festival.
"Mr. Shen?"
Shen Qing snapped out of her daze and looked at Boss Lu: "To be honest, I really can't remember the price of the generator. There were other machines we bought at the same time."
Mr. Lu said regretfully, "To be honest, I'd also like to buy some machines to try it out; the manual labor is just too inefficient!"
Shen Qing then asked, "What do you intend to produce with the machine?"
Boss Lu said, "Those burlap sacks are for storing rice. Nowadays, burlap sacks are all woven and sewn by workers stitch by stitch, it's so hard work! I heard that the machine can make tens of thousands of burlap sacks a day!"
Shen Liang was a major grain merchant; almost all the rice from the Jiangzhe region went through him, so he had many distributors under him.
This Mr. Lu appears to be one of his distributors. Every year, he has to prepare sacks himself to repackage the rice he takes from Shenliang into individual bags before selling it to various grain and oil merchants.
Therefore, he has a long-term need to purchase burlap sacks for packing rice. Not only him, but all distributors who need rice from Shenliang also need to solve the problem of burlap sacks.
Shen Qing had an idea. He looked at Boss Lu and smiled, "If you want to make a burlap sack using machines, you'll need a generator, a loom, and a sewing machine—a total of three machines. You can't just buy one type and it won't be done, and..."
Boss Lu asked anxiously, "And what?"
"Moreover, all these machines are in foreign languages, so even if you manage to buy them, installation and use will be another problem."
Boss Lu sighed and shook his head, saying, "It seems unlikely that things will succeed!"
Shen Qing complained to him about how he had bought the machine but couldn't install it successfully, which made him feel even more that making burlap sacks with a machine was a distant dream.
Shen Qing seized the opportunity and said, "My sewing machine is from Singer in the United States. The material it produces has no gaps at all. I think if this kind of material were used to make sacks for packing rice, not a single grain of rice would fall out."
Boss Lu's eyes lit up, and he immediately said, "Then Boss Shen, why don't you help me process the burlap sacks?"
Shen Qing feigned difficulty: "But I'm already too busy making my own products..."
Mr. Lu understood and immediately offered a very attractive price.
While Shen Qing was still hesitating, he asked Shen Liang for pen, ink and paper, wanting to place the order on the spot.
Shen Liang casually ordered Shen Yu, "Yu'er, go to my study and get some paper and ink!"
Shen Yu quickly burrowed into the snow and hurriedly ran to Shen Liang's study to fetch a pen and ink.
His head and shoulders were covered in snow. After the snow melted, his bangs were wet and stuck to his scalp. He looked extremely disheveled.
When Shen Lan saw her like this, she immediately laughed and pointed at her, saying, "Third Sister, you look like a drowned dog, so ugly!"
The other cousins also covered their mouths and chuckled.
Shen Yu stared in astonishment at everyone in the room.
Everyone was chatting and talking quietly in the room, but the most conspicuous one was Shen Qing.
She stood there, looking refreshed and speaking gently with her father's friend.
Her father snatched the writing brush and ink she had worked so hard to obtain and handed them to Shen Qing: "Qing'er, here you go."
Shen Qing took the paper, walked to the round table, and spread out two copies of the Xuan paper.
Raise your right arm, gently tuck your left hand under the sleeve hanging down on the right side, and pick up the calligraphy brush with your right hand.
Shen Liang immediately looked over and called out, "Yu'er, come and grind the ink!"
Shen Yu snapped out of her daze, walked over to Shen Qing with a disheveled look on her face, picked up the ink stick, and began grinding ink for her.
She looked at Shen Qing defiantly.
She quickly wrote a whole page of beautiful regular script on the rice paper.
While writing, she spoke to Boss Lu in ways she couldn't understand.
The more she looked at it, the more indignant she became!
She was the third son, born to the first wife. As a daughter born out of wedlock and already married, why should she be able to do business with her father's friend while she was only fit to grind ink for him in a sorry state?
Shen Yu grew angrier the more she thought about it. She ground the ink a little harder, deliberately spilling a few drops of ink onto Shen Qing's sleeve, hoping to take the opportunity to argue with her and humiliate her.
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