"From this point forward, each party shall maintain permanent representatives here, for the purpose of jointly pursuing interests overseas and resolving disputes among ourselves through peaceful negotiation."
"The agenda is as follows…"
Mingwu opened the proceedings, after which a designated speaker took over to read aloud the contents.
First came the rules: domestic disputes were to be resolved through negotiation whenever possible.
If negotiation failed, then by all means go to war.
But skipping negotiation and going straight to war would invite sanctions.
The Ming Emperor very much wanted to ask whether this applied to Longcheng as well, but in the end he held his tongue.
As for overseas interests, every party was free to seize what they could by their own abilities.
However, it was hoped that all parties would look out for one another abroad and offer mutual aid.
After all, at the end of the day, they were all Han people of the same blood and origin.
Oh—and since the steppe people had come to the Central Plains, they were family too.
The speaker broke into a cold sweat, stealing a furtive glance at the young emperor Manggultai, only to find him staring off into space.
He exhaled in relief. That was nearly a diplomatic incident—who on earth wrote this script, and did they have a brain in their head?
Then, finally, in a grand gesture for everyone's security, Longcheng announced it would magnanimously supply all manner of goods at cost price.
"Cost price," of course, was just a figure of speech—how would anyone know what their costs actually were?
Still, the prices offered were genuinely reasonable. Longcheng was not so petty as to gouge everyone or hold them by the throat at a moment like this.
Once the Five-Party Conference's founding principles had been read aloud, the meeting proper began.
Each party first raised their respective grievances and disputes, to see what could be resolved.
Grievances there certainly were. Longcheng had gone ahead without so much as a word and built all manner of things on other people's territory—clearing land, farming it, and carrying off their people left and right.
Deeply aggrieved. But suffering in silence.
Very well—disputes with Longcheng were clearly unresolvable. So the parties turned to settling disputes among themselves.
These several factions had been at a standoff for years. Large-scale conflicts had been rare, but minor skirmishes were constant.
The accumulated grievances were considerable.
Among them, the Southwest Court and the Southeast Court were originally one family, yet their mutual resentments ran the deepest of all.
With no great river or mountain range between them, they faced each other directly, and clashes came naturally.
Longcheng declared it a trivial matter, easily solved.
With a broad wave of the hand: we'll pick a spot in between, build some towns and small cities as a dividing line—simple as that.
Nobody crosses the line.
The Southeast Court's faces went green. Once you've built those towns, who exactly does the surrounding land belong to?
What a wonderful solution indeed.
With the disputes settled, the discussion moved on to the various goods on offer.
A page filled top to bottom: from assistance constructing power stations—with the caveat that, to prevent leaks, all power plant personnel must be managed by Longcheng staff—to steel beams and steel plate, Longcheng Series Two automobiles, and bicycles.
In short, nearly everything Longcheng produced was available—for a price.
For goods this fine, people would gladly pay.
Two of the emperors' eyes went red as they stared at the list before them, wanting everything on it.
But their purses, alas, were bare.
Not entirely bare—though Li Xuanzong was genuinely stretched thin, the Ming Emperor was flush with wealth; after all, he had once squeezed seventy million taels from his officials by torture.
The Ming Emperor: *Damn it, you had to bring that up—are we never going to let that go?*
Never, not in a lifetime—because those men had belonged to the Southern Court.
That money had rightfully belonged to the court.
The two emperors very nearly came to blows right there in the conference hall.
The matter was one they could never move past, but it amounted to nothing more than a war of words.
Over the past few years, every faction had grown considerably wealthier, each bringing in somewhere around ten million taels in tax revenue the previous year.
They could not match Longcheng's iron grip on its economy, but with a bit of study and careful management, revenues had climbed steadily.
The four courts combined collected forty million taels—ten times the revenue of the unified empire at its height.
Li Xuanji, present at the scene, felt a quiet pang of frustration.
At the close of the conference, all parties agreed on a timetable for overseas expeditions, unanimously settling on the period after the autumn harvest.
By then everyone would be flush again; in the meantime they could strengthen and expand their fleets, and following Longcheng's methods, put in another half year of military training.
Once the harvest was in and there was little else pressing, they would send their forces abroad to claim territory.
The Five-Party Conference would not require the emperors to attend in person. Barring matters of exceptional gravity, the permanent representatives each party left here could handle deliberations on their own.
The founding of the Five-Party Conference meant that all the peoples of the Central Plains had been, however reluctantly, bound into a single cord and drawn into the contest for a share of the world's great bounty.
The Central Plains—home to well over a hundred million, approaching two hundred million souls—had bared its claws to the world. What would come of it?
Jinyi was eager to find out.