Children and women can make mistakes, but mature men are not qualified to make mistakes. Powerful as the giant merchant Hu Xueyan in the late Qing Dynasty, in the face of real power, only supported for three years, and then he lost his family. Sponsoring Zuo Zongtang to recover Xinjiang, wearing the yellow horse coat given by Cixi, the official title of the best, and being known as a red-top businessman, these have also become a mouthful of old blood when he was depressed at the age of 62. Throughout his life, Hu Xueyan made these three major mistakes: doing one wrong thing, following the wrong person, and offending one person.
The first big mistake: doing something wrong
。 Hu Xueyan is involved in many industries, and like Li Ka-shing today, he makes almost any money and can succeed. As long as it is a project that he values, he basically makes a steady profit. But only in the matter of silk, Hu Xueyan lost his mind. The essence of a businessman is to make money, and to say that it is better to say that he is "talking about business in business", but Hu Xueyan has violated this iron law. In 1840, the Western powers opened the gates of the late Qing Dynasty with their ships and guns, sending opium while also taking away a large amount of silk.
China's silk has always been loved by the European nobility, so there are foreign businessmen who want to monopolize the silk trade in order to seek huge profits. Hu Xueyan was furious when he saw this, and immediately bought silk at a high price. As a result, affected by the abundant harvest of raw silk in Italy, Hu Xueyan had to sell the 15,000 bags of raw silk he had hoarded to Jardine Matheson & Co. and Intertek at a discount. In this business war, Hu Xueyan's credibility suffered huge losses, and at the same time, many of his money banks also went bankrupt due to poor capital turnover. This is because Li Hongzhang wants to do it.
The second big mistake: following the wrong person.
Hu Xueyan thought that politics and business were the same, so he turned to Zuo Zongtang. As Hu Xueyan wished, by investing in Zuo Zongtang, the return he received was also huge. After Zuo Zongtang regained Xinjiang, the first thing he did was to recommend Hu Xueyan to Cixi, after which Hu Xueyan's business career reached its peak and he was awarded the title of envoy. Unfortunately, he did not imagine that after the reconquest of Xinjiang, the imperial court would no longer have an official title to give to the Han chancellor Zuo Zongtang. That is to say, Hu Xueyan found a person with no future and became a patron.
The third big mistake: offending one person.
As Zuo Zongtang's political opponent, Hu Xueyan was close to Zuo Zongtang, and naturally wanted to offend Li Hongzhang. And Li Hongzhang also knew that if he wanted to bring down Zuo Zongtang, he would have to take his cash machine, Hu Xueyan, to open the knife. First of all, he used the relationship to let Hu Xueyan, the middleman, repay a Qing court loan of 800,000 taels, and then used various means to spread the news that Hu Xueyan was running out of money due to raw silk, so that many of the money houses under his name went bankrupt due to poor capital turnover. In addition, Li Hongzhang also played a fold to Cixi, saying that Hu Xueyan had taken kickbacks from foreigners when he was trying to recover loans in Xinjiang.
As a result, Hu Xueyan was stopped from investigating, and the money for the kickback was also doubled and spit out. In fact, Hu Xueyan did eat kickbacks, he wanted to earn money from the imperial court, and the means were not very clever. He thought that he could not just advance money, so he took a kickback from a foreigner, but unfortunately the money of the imperial court was not so easy to earn. In the end, under the layers of blows from Li Hongzhang, Hu Xueyan fell from the richest man in the Qing Dynasty to the "down payment" of the Qing Dynasty step by step. In 1885, Hu Xueyan, a red-topped businessman involved in politics, was finally depressed and failed to earn a penny from the Shangqing government at the age of 62.
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