To put it bluntly, the free trade of the Tang Dynasty means that the merchants of the Tang Dynasty can do business wherever they like, and you natives cannot stop it.
If the officials of the indigenous country dare to block the merchant ships of the Tang Dynasty and want to play some kind of seclusion, the warships of the Tang Dynasty will come directly to the door in minutes!
But merchants from other countries were not allowed to trade freely in the territory of Datang!
At the same time, these restrictions are only limited to the indigenous merchant ships transporting goods directly to the empire. However, if the Tang merchant ships purchased the goods from the indigenous people and used the Tang ships to transport them back to the mainland, then nothing would happen, and most of the goods
It's still tax-free.
The Tang Dynasty banned foreign merchant ships from trading in the Tang Dynasty and important overseas territories. This was purely for localization considerations and also took into account factors such as technological blockade.
It's not because of trade considerations.
If we only discuss trade itself, except that foreign merchants cannot go directly to Datang for trade, there are basically no restrictions on the export of goods to Datang. Anyway, the goods they export to Datang are basically agricultural products and agricultural raw materials.
Datang didn't even charge much customs duties.
Datang's tariffs on imported goods were actually very loose. There were basically no taxes on agricultural products and industrial raw materials. Only some specialty products, luxury jewelry and the like were subject to tariffs.
On the other hand, Datang levied relatively high tariffs on exported goods. Most exported goods were subject to tariffs, and the export tariffs on some products, especially industrial raw materials and agricultural products, were very high.
Generally speaking, Datang basically has no restrictions on imports, but it does have restrictions on exports.
Many high-tech products are not allowed to be exported, and the export of some strategic materials, such as agricultural products, is even more restricted.
However, there are basically no restrictions on ordinary industrial products, such as textiles, smoothbore guns, cold weapons and other backward ordnance.
This also led to the fact that textiles and other general industrial products accounted for a large proportion of Datang's export goods, and the large export of these goods would have a great impact on the traditional handicraft industries of the indigenous people.
There are many examples of companies being squeezed out of business by Datang Machinery Fabrics, which eventually led to the disappearance of the entire country's textile processing industry.
For example, the woolen industry in Europe is basically finished now.
Because wool from Datang floods the entire European market, Datang's wool is cheaper than those produced by local handmade workshops in Europe, even with shipping costs, and is of better quality.
This situation will naturally cause dissatisfaction among local cloth merchants and even local officials.
But the Navy of the Tang Dynasty is not just for food. Why spend so much money to support the navy? Isn’t it just to protect the freedom of trade of the merchants of the Tang Dynasty!
Many trade disputes are also the reason why Datang's warships are busy doing business around the world and playing naval gun diplomacy everywhere.
As for another major export commodity of the Tang Dynasty, it was a variety of military strategic products, including matchlocks, flintlock guns, smoothbore cannons, plate armor, swords and other ordnance and ammunition, as well as various military supplies.
From military uniforms and shoes to military instruments and all kinds of messy things.
In short, the Tang Dynasty can basically provide the military products that the indigenous people of various countries need these days, but it only provides backward weapons.
But even these backward weapons have a large sales volume and are very profitable.
In Europe, an iron-cast Suifa gun can basically cost fifteen Tang Yuan. If it is made of steel barrel, the price will be even higher... It's a good gun, but steel barrels cannot be exported.
It doesn't matter whether you make it into a flintlock gun or a matchlock gun, or even just export the barrel, because this thing is a first-level export prohibited material.
Now, both Tatars and Europeans know about Minie rifles and even the principles of breech-loading rifled guns, and there are probably many examples of them.
But they still can't imitate it, why? Because they don't have qualified high-precision steel barrels.
Whether it is a Minnie rifle or a Lee Fu rifle, they are essentially rifled rifles. Because rifled rifles require rifling, they have very high requirements for the barrel, and the processing accuracy is also very high.
If the Tatars can produce large quantities of high-precision steel barrels from the Tang Dynasty, they also have a few machines and equipment smuggled from the Tang Dynasty. Even though the number is not large, they can barely be modified and processed.
A batch of Mini rifles will be modified in a matter of minutes.
People in the Tang Dynasty did not want to see this kind of thing, so not only did Datang not sell rifled guns, they also did not sell high-precision steel barrels that could be converted into rifled guns. Not to mention gun barrels, any steel pipes were not exported.
Avoid having rifled guns modified by other natives.
So no matter how many years have passed, the guns exported by the Tang Dynasty were basically iron guns, iron cannons or bronze cannons.
However, steel guns, steel cannons and any materials that may be converted into rifled guns are not exported.
However, even so, the weapons of the Tang Dynasty were easy to sell, and even matchlock guns were still exported in large quantities.
Datang had many models of guns available for export, including five models of matchlocks, with calibers ranging from ten millimeters to twenty millimeters, and barrel quality ranging from poor to bad.
There are also more than a dozen models of flintlock guns, with different calibers, different qualities, and different barrel lengths.
The same goes for artillery. Not only are there relatively new bronze field cannons with a range of up to 300 meters, but even small-caliber shotguns modified from old bowl-mouth cannons are still on sale.
Not only guns and cannons, but also cold weapons.
After all, the arms trade of the Tang Dynasty was aimed at the whole world, and the indigenous people in different places had different requirements for weapons. The indigenous people in some places still used cold weapons to fight, so the Tang Dynasty mainly sold cold weapons, while some places, such as Europe, had
We have fully entered the era of Suifa guns, so we mainly export Suifa guns.
For different customers in different places, Datang can provide different goods, even at different prices, to ensure more profits.
The most common operation used by the arms dealers of the Tang Dynasty was to sell a batch of swords, swords and plate armor to Aboriginal A, who were still using cold weapons, and then sell the same weapons and equipment to Aboriginal B. When the two sides were evenly matched,
The arms dealers of the Tang Dynasty will provide some matchlock guns and small-caliber shotguns to one of the parties.
After breaking the balance, the same thing is sold to the other party.
When the balance appears, then buy Suifa guns.
In this process, each generation of products often involves buying products of poor quality first, and then buying products of good quality.
This routine allows arms dealers to sell weapons and equipment to the same indigenous country for several generations, ranging from cold weapons to the best bronze field guns for export.
In order to make the arms business more profitable and last longer, the empire's three major arms companies have already formed an alliance for export.