After Cao Tong gathered the staff, a rough headcount revealed that only seven or eight people remained.
Shao Shuyi wore his "designer" robe worth fifty guan, its hem slightly soiled.
"How is it that only these few are left?" he asked in surprise.
As he spoke, he still had the bronze hand cannon propped on his shoulder. When he stepped in front of Cao Tong, the man dropped to his knees with a thud and stammered, "Accountant, I never gave you a hard time!"
Shao Shuyi was speechless.
"Get up." He hauled Cao Tong to his feet in one pull.
Cao Tong swallowed nervously and said, "I only took five guan from Wang Sheng and one guan from Wu Youcai to keep an eye on you and see what you were up to, but I truly never meant you any harm."
"Oh?" Shao Shuyi asked, mildly surprised. "Zhang Neng didn't give you any coin?"
"No, he was vicious and stingy," Cao Tong mumbled, hanging his head.
Shao Shuyi nodded. "Since the elder Officer Zheng didn't hold it against you, I certainly won't either. Tend to your work properly from now on, and don't try any tricks or slack off."
As if granted a royal pardon, Cao Tong nodded repeatedly.
Shao Shuyi then glanced at the next person.
"Xiaohu, don't you go wronging an innocent person!" The cook took fright and said hurriedly, "Before daybreak today, I got up to stew fish broth for you. Weren't those flatbreads crisp and fragrant? You ate seven or eight of them just now! What do you fancy for lunch? I originally set some tofu and pig's blood to stew, but if you don't like it, I'll swap it out right now, you—"
"Enough, enough. I love it, no need to change it." Shao Shuyi smiled. "You'll keep on cooking. The one helping you out is your nephew, isn't he? Have him work hard; the shop won't short him on wages."
"Oh, understood!" The cook's face broke into a broad beam at once.
"Brother Liu—" Shao Shuyi turned his gaze toward the third man.
"Accountant." Brother Liu bowed in greeting. "I've been at this shop for three years. I only ever took twenty guan from Wang Sheng and five guan from Wu Youcai. Zhang Neng might have tossed me a few dozen wen once, but I can't say for sure. Most of it was casual tips so they could order us about to do chores. The ones who took large sums aren't in the shop anymore; those of us left had little to do with them."
Shao Shuyi was rather taken aback. This man spoke with remarkable clarity and logic; he would keep an eye on him going forward.
Next, he spoke with the remaining five workers one by one. There was nothing of real substance discussed; the point was simply to deepen their impression of him and bolster his authority and sway over them.
In any case, Third Young Master had granted him authority, and Zheng Fan only cared about the big picture. He would be a fool not to seize the opportunity.
Once he had finished giving his instructions, Shao Shuyi gave a wave of his hand and picked two of the eight—Cao Tong and Brother Liu—to lead the others and follow him in taking inventory of the stock, starting with Storeroom Bing.
Of course, they handled the manual labor, carrying, moving, and stacking the goods, while Shao Shuyi personally took down the records. He had brought along a bound, blank ledger, on whose cover he inscribed seven large characters: Internal Ledger of the Zheng Celadon Shop.
Having been hired as temporary help, Wang Huadu would stay here for a few days to lend a hand, earning eight hundred wen of paper money a day with room and board provided.
His primary duty was to assist Shao Shuyi. Right now, he had just brought over a low table, set down a rush mat, and begun grinding ink, looking quite at ease.
"Since there's an internal ledger, I take it there will be an external ledger as well?" Wang Huadu asked out of curiosity.
"Of course there will," Shao Shuyi replied, sitting cross-legged on the rush mat. "The internal ledger records the intake, outflow, and breakage of goods and silver, while the external ledger logs procurement, sales, and hiring."
"In that case, wouldn't you need two accountants?" Wang Huadu marveled.
"Precisely." Shao Shuyi nodded.
"Then what use is the warehouse keeper?"
"How could he be useless?" Shao Shuyi chuckled. "Even the Sea Transport Granary has granary officers and kuzi hands."
"Those officers and hands are completely illiterate—they're precisely the useless ones," Wang Huadu remarked, curling his lip.
"For warding off petty pilferers and deterring inside thieves, I'd say they still have their use," Shao Shuyi said. "Go out tomorrow and see if there are suitable large padlocks, and hire a locksmith to come over."
"What do you want that for?"
"Every storeroom will have two locks. The internal accountant and the warehouse keeper will each hold one key, and neither may enter alone."
Wang Huadu had no words for that. To make such a grand fuss over a small shop—anyone who didn't know better would think this was some imperial treasury of the inner palace.
"Will you be the internal accountant or the external accountant from now on?" he asked.
"That depends on how Third Young Master arranges it," Shao Shuyi replied nonchalantly. "To tell the truth, I originally wanted to set up a sales accountant specifically to handle the porcelain trade. But hiring another person is too much trouble, and I was worried Third Young Master might be annoyed."
At that, he couldn't help but chuckle. "A celadon shop doesn't actually need to be this complicated because it doesn't run a kiln. But for a boatyard, it's best to have three accountants—internal, external, and sales—with each doing an inventory, reconciliation, and settlement on the fifth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth of every month. Kept up as a fixed rule, fraud might not vanish entirely, but it would certainly be curtailed on a massive scale."
Wang Huadu listened in complete bewilderment. All he knew was that in the Zheng family's celadon shop, the manager had previously run everything alone, with the warehouse keeper acting as accountant, holding the whole enterprise together on personal ties alone. And the day those personal ties proved untrustworthy, self-dealing and fraud set in, making suspicion between superiors and subordinates inevitable.
This framework of Shao Shuyi's seemed to slap shackles on everyone, including the manager. While it couldn't root out graft and fraud entirely, it curbed them drastically.
"Strictly speaking—" As Wang Huadu pondered, Shao Shuyi had already picked up his brush to record the ledger, saying, "I'd still prefer to be the external accountant. No other reason than getting to deal with more people."
"Are you hoping to bring Brother Yu over as an accountant?" Wang Huadu asked in an undertone.
"I'd like to, but I'm afraid Third Young Master won't agree," Shao Shuyi said. "Still, it's no big deal either way."
Wang Huadu nodded. "That lad would land himself a decent living, at least."
***
On the fifteenth, Yu Yuan arrived.
Shao Shuyi recommended him as internal accountant. Zheng Fan, who was temporarily in charge of affairs here, gave it a moment's thought and agreed.
The entire inventory audit lasted until the twentieth, when the internal ledger was completed, listing a total of 29,450 pieces of various celadon wares.
The audit of cash and paper money had finished earlier.
Zheng Fan had taken part in the reconciliation in person, ultimately leaving five hundred ding of Zhongtong chao for the celadon shop while taking away the remaining treasure notes, gold, silver, and copper cash.
With the inventory complete, Shao Shuyi's main task was teaching Yu Yuan how to keep the books.
He jotted down Arabic numerals, assuming Yu Yuan wouldn't recognize them, but Yu Yuan said he had seen Semu people write them. His elder brother, Yu Chu, had mentioned that the Semu officials collecting taxes at the Maritime Trade Supervisorate and the prefectural and county offices favored them above all else. The script differed slightly from Shao Shuyi's, but it was broadly legible.
Yu Yuan had some grasp of reckoning and, on the spot, wrote out some rod-numeral accounting tallies for Shao Shuyi.
This was a system of financial calculation symbols from ancient China that Shao Shuyi had learned from Wu Youcai a few months earlier. It had been agonizing to use; he would far rather write standard Chinese characters like one, two, three, and four than fiddle with those cipher-like marks.
In the end, he had Yu Yuan use Arabic numerals to standardize their records.
Because the Semu people used this system, it had been inadvertently popularized and was more widespread than in previous eras, so it did not look out of place—though it was still far from ubiquitous. Most accountants from traditional scholarly backgrounds still preferred Chinese characters, while a minority used rod numerals.
"Brother Shao, I'll study hard," Yu Yuan said with a shy smile after hearing all the instructions. "Actually, this work is quite light. I'll even have time to read."
"Oh? What do you usually read?" Shao Shuyi asked.
Yu Yuan's face fell. "My elder brother makes me read the Four Books and Five Classics, and tests me on them from time to time. But I prefer miscellanies—plays, medicine, jurisprudence, essays, geography, even farming treatises, anything at all."
"A good habit," Shao Shuyi praised. "Read the classics, but read the miscellanies too. As long as you don't neglect either, you're fine—after all, you don't plan on taking the imperial examinations, do you?"
"Brother Shao, our dynasty only held its first imperial examinations twenty-odd years ago, and there have only been eight sittings to this day," Yu Yuan said.
Shao Shuyi was caught off guard. This touched upon a blind spot in his knowledge; it turned out the Yuan dynasty rarely held civil service examinations.
"If they don't take the examinations, what do scholars do?" he asked.
"They either enter government service as clerks, or end up like me," Yu Yuan said. "In our dynasty, officials and clerks belong to the same continuum. Many scholars start out as clerks and can rise as high as the fourth rank."
Shao Shuyi nodded slightly. So starting as an unranked petty clerk offered a path straight up the ladder without systemic barriers; the Mongols truly carried no historical baggage. Other dynasties had petty clerks who rose, but those were mostly extraordinary flukes, not the norm.
"Then study hard," Shao Shuyi said, clapping Yu Yuan on the shoulder out of habit. "You're provided three meals a day here, which isn't any worse than a registered Confucian household keeping up their studies."
"Yes, I certainly won't let you down, Brother Shao!" Yu Yuan replied earnestly.
Shao Shuyi chuckled helplessly and said nothing more.
This little follower of his was truly endearing. On the night the Lake Tai bandits attacked, terrified as he had been, he had held his ground and refused to flee. For that alone, he was worthy of Shao Shuyi's care.
After all, they had shared a bond forged through life and death.
Chapter 33