Zhuji City, Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces.
The sky was half clear and half overcast, and the drizzle was falling sparsely. It looked like it was about to stop.
After getting off the long-distance bus from Suhang South Station to Zhuji Passenger Terminal, Dong Xuebin walked quickly forward carrying a large cloth bag with the label of Meilianmei Supermarket on it. As he walked, he uncomfortably grabbed the clothes attached to his body and twisted. Extremely. The air in Zhuji is cold and humid. Dong Xuebin, who is used to the dry and cold temperatures in the north, will certainly not adapt. Looking left and right on the main road, he quickly found a small restaurant to take shelter from the rain, regardless of whether the shops around the bus station and the train station were robbing customers.
"Boss, menu." Dong Xuebin sat at an empty table.
"Here you go." A middle-aged aunt with a wide waist and a fat body came over holding a menu.
Dong Xuebin casually ordered two familiar home-cooked dishes and said: "If you have any local soup here, just serve it. It will be warm."
Ten minutes later, several dishes were served.
Coincidentally, what the boss lady served was actually clam soup. Clam is the local name of the people in Beijing. It is actually clam, pearl clam. There is nothing else in this steaming soup except a clam as big as the palm of your hand. Something. Dong Xuebin was curious. He picked up the chopsticks and peeled open the clam. Good guy, there were white pearls inside. When he tasted the clam meat again, Dong Xuebin let out a sigh and vomited. It's too old. Okay, how do you eat this thing
The proprietress behind the counter took a look at it and said with a smile: "Normally we don't eat mussel meat, we drink the soup."
Dong Xuebin blushed, "Ahem, what does this pearl mean?"
"Are you here for tourism? You can pay someone to string the pearls for you and take them back as jewelry."
"Oh, so this soup of yours is actually a bet on pearls?"
"It can be said that if you are lucky, you can get good beads. How about I give you another pot?"
"Goodbye, goodbye, this is enough to drink." Dong Xuebin said in his heart, just talk nonsense. He was not idle on the train for more than ten hours. He had studied pearl clams carefully and knew that pearl clams of this color and size were good. They are all defective. If you can dig out a pearl worth twenty yuan, you are just lucky. Generally speaking, they are all crooked and defective pearls, which are not worth much at all. "... Boss lady, I want to ask you something. , do you know where there is a place to gamble on pearls? How much does it cost?”
The landlady looked at him and said, "Go west two ways. There should be a cart selling it over there. What's the price? Two hundred and three hundred?"
Dong Xuebin said: "Are there any better products? For example, two thousand or three thousand clams per clam?"
"Hey, then you have to go to the breeding base to have a look. Their clams are good, but those people don't bet on pearls. They usually open the clams they catch themselves, and then sort them according to their quality before selling them to others. We here Most of the gambling shops are scattered stalls, and the quality is not very high.”
After chatting with her for a while, Dong Xuebin had a preliminary understanding of Zhuji's pearl industry.
The rain stopped outside. After dinner, Dong Xuebin went out and took a taxi.
The driver asked: "Where to go?"
Dong Xuebin said: "You can drive to the pearl breeding base closest to here."
The driver stepped on the accelerator and said while driving: "Are you from Beijing? Are you here for a trip?"
"Well, let's try our luck buying some pearl clams."
"Oh, let's buy clams." The driver thought for a moment, "Then we should drive west. The two farms closest to here may not be in season yet, so it's not the month for clams. The farm to the west is farther away. But I live nearby and I saw them fishing for clams these past two days.”
Dong Xuebin said: "Okay, let's go to the west. Thank you."
About twenty minutes later, the car stopped. Dong Xuebin paid and got out of the car. He looked around, grabbed the bag in his hand and walked eastward. This bag looks very inconspicuous, even a bit rustic, and has the leadership style to kill Dong Xuebin, but he did it deliberately. The bag contained a lockbox, which contained all of Dong Xuebin's savings of 440,000 yuan. This time he took the risk and prepared to make a million by playing a big game, so he took all his belongings with him.
In the distance, several white office buildings appear in the field of vision, and closer, there are about five or six pearl breeding ponds.
Dong Xuebin walked on the muddy dirt road to the iron gate. Seeing no one outside, he hesitantly walked in.
"What are you feeding for?" A middle-aged man wearing leather gloves with his hands and feet covered in mud stood up from a breeding pond and shouted to Dong Xuebin: "Who asked you to come in?"
"Pearl buyer" Dong Xuebin frowned and looked at him, "Where is your boss?"
"Buy pearls?" The middle-aged man looked him up and down. "I am the boss here. What pearls do you want to buy? Pearl powder?"
Are you the boss? Dong Xuebin was startled. He knew that the annual income of this kind of pearl farm was more than one million yuan, which was very impressive in the capital city. Even if he didn't wear a suit and tie, he should at least have a bit of boss temperament. ? But in Dong Xuebin's opinion, the man in front of him is very earthy. I am afraid that any small restaurant owner randomly picked up in the capital will have more temperament than him.
At this time, three men dressed as workers walked quickly from the lakeside on the northwest side, "Boss, everything is ready. Do you want to open the clams now?"
Only then did Dong Xuebin believe it and said to the boss: "Are you selling pearl mussels? At what price?"
The boss shook the mud off his leather gloves and said, "I won't sell the clams. If you want pearls, come back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. This batch hasn't been opened yet."
What you want is what you didn’t open. Dong Xuebin followed up and asked: "How do you like this batch of clams? What color are they?"
The boss said impatiently: "Didn't you say you won't sell it? Go back quickly."
"If the quality of these batches is good, money is not a problem." Dong Xuebin was a little disgusted with his bad attitude, and knew that the other party must think that he was too young to be a rich man, so that's why he was like this. If a middle-aged man comes here, I don’t believe he would have the same attitude. Dong Xuebin looked at him, then opened the bag to reveal the lockbox inside and raised it to him, "Even if you don't want to sell it, there's nothing to lose if I take a look, right? As for the price... let's talk about it later?"
The boss was stunned for a moment, frowned and thought for a moment, then turned and walked towards the lake, "... Come on."
Dong Xuebin followed up while avoiding the puddles in the turf.
The lake is sparkling blue, and from the shore to the distance there are rows of buoy-like objects, densely packed and neatly covering the entire area. There are two small wooden boats parked on the muddy shore, the kind of paddle boats. There are several clams wrapped in each arm-wide small net bag on the boat. Adding the number accumulated on the shore, there are hundreds of such net bags. The number of clams is estimated to be close to a thousand, and each clam is very fat. It was big and much better than the clam Dong Xuebin had eaten at the restaurant before. It looked like a high-grade freshwater pearl mussel.
As he approached, the boss said to a worker on the left: "Open one first and take a look."
As soon as the worker agreed, he opened the net bag and took out a slightly thinner clam. He squatted down, picked up a kitchen knife from the mud, held the clam and cut the blade of the kitchen knife along the gap with a click into the clam. With a twist, it was in Dong's hands. Under Xuebin's fiery gaze, the clam was split into two, revealing the clam meat and pearls with a slight golden light inside. The worker reached into the clam meat, turned it over, pulled out nine pearls, large or small, round or crooked, and put them into a plastic basin that had been prepared nearby. Freshwater pearls are different from seawater pearls. Each clam has a large yield, not just one or two.
This is Pearl Clam. Dong Xuebin thinks it is very exciting and fun.
The boss lowered his head and touched it, then picked up the largest one and measured it with an instrument, "Yes, not bad, 1.2cm." The instrument is specially used to measure the diameter of pearls. There is a watch at the bottom and a hand-held one at the top. Something that can clamp pearls with just one click. "A small half can be used as jewelry, and the rest is a little worse. Grind the crooked or bumpy beads into pearl powder. Xiao Erzi, let's open the clams and let Xiao Liu sort them." "
Full, round, shiny and large - these are the criteria for identifying a good pearl. Although gold-quality gold pearls are of the highest quality among pearls, gold pearls that are several millimeters large and crooked are worthless. Most of the nine gold pearls from this clam cannot be used as jewelry.
"By the way." The boss looked at Dong Xuebin and said, "How many clams do you want?"
Dong Xuebin smiled and said, "Let's take a look and then you can open it first." Although the 1.2CM pearl is very valuable, it is not enough to make Dong Xuebin's heart move. Counting the BACKs he has now, when he went back to Zhou Guoan's house to check the evidence, he didn't use up the ten BACKs, but kept two more. With the accumulation of these days, Dong Xuebin now has ten more BACKs.
The boss and the workers started cutting the clams with kitchen knives.
Click, a clam bigger than a palm was opened - there were eleven white pearls inside, the largest one was 0.8CM. The specific value of a clam does not depend on the number of pearls, but on the diameter of the largest pearl. Whether it is smooth or not, whether it is bright or not, this is the big one, so this clam does not bloom well.
Click, another one...
one more…
the fifth…
The eighth…
Ten minutes have passed. There are so many clams and not even a 1.4cm pearl has come out.
It’s not that this batch of clams is bad, it’s just that pearls above 1.4cm are too rare, just like the hairy crystals in crystal, or the ice and glass species in jade, they are not so easy to come out.
The ninth clam...the largest one is 1.3CM, which is pretty good.
The tenth clam...are all 0.7CM beads.
By the time I get to the eleventh clam...
"Hey, boss, this is so big," the black-faced worker yelled.
The attention of Dong Xuebin and the boss suddenly moved over, and they saw the worker pulling out a huge golden bead from the clam meat, "This one must be 1.5 centimeters, and the quality is also very good." I took the instrument and measured it. It showed exactly 1.5CM. It was flawless and the color was full and round. It was a top-grade gold pearl.
The boss smiled and said, "Well, not bad."
coming
The ones above 1.4CM are finally out
Dong Xuebin saw the opportunity and immediately shouted BACK
…
[Second update, asking for monthly tickets]
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