In the evening, Fang Bingsheng took Shan Ji and four candidates from the Longchuan Opium Party to the yamen to invite Liu Guojian to dinner.

Only then did I realize that Liu Guojian really made money.

When it was time for dinner, Liu Guojian smiled and asked everyone to follow him, and did not go out from the main entrance. He led everyone into the backyard of the yamen. There was a small door on the backyard wall. When he pushed it open, he saw that it was a very narrow alley, with the east wall of the yamen and the three-story teahouse wall on the other side.

The group seemed to have entered a pansi hole, followed Liu Guojian and his gang into a small yard. When they looked closely, they found that it was part of the backyard of the teahouse next to the yamen.

There are only two main houses in the small yard, and one side house. The old house with tiles and wooden pillars and beams is in the style of an old house, but it is neatly repaired, painted with festive red paint, and a row of palace lanterns are hung under the eaves. When you walk into the main house, you will find a large round table. The wall facing the door is facing the door, and the wooden shelves with copper washbasins are placed on the side wall. There are screens and clothes for changing clothes. Flower pots are piled by the wall. It turns out to be a standard hotel private room, and the decoration is very high-end.

"I don't know if there is another world here?" Fang Bingsheng walked into the room and turned around, turned his head and exclaimed.

"What kind of restaurant is this? I don't know about it." Li Meng stared at the glass lamp above his head and was dumbfounded.

Liu Guojian laughed and handed the hat and civilized stick to the servant at the door, saying, "Of course you don't know. I have just been renovating here for two months."

"This is also what your fellow villager has done?" When Shan Ji handed the hat and cane to the servant, the accent of the child was in Fujian dialect.

"Yes, we are all fellow villagers, so don't worry about eating." Liu Guojian smiled and pointed to the teahouse that was like the wall in front of him and said, "I originally borrowed some money for my third uncle to take over this teahouse. He told me a few days ago that our family often eats in the teahouse. It's better to make a small side yard in the backyard into a restaurant, just leaning against the yamen. It's convenient to eat in and out, and it's also convenient to bring guests to play."

Lin Liuming turned his head and looked around and asked, "What is the name of this restaurant, Lord Liu? I didn't see the sign."

"I haven't gotten up yet. Recently, people from our village and friends came here to have dinner with me. Ordinary people don't know where to go, so they don't let them in." Liu Guojian smiled, and after saying that, he added with an even more obvious sentence: "The store is too small, and there are too many people to resist."

After saying that, he asked everyone to sit around the table and smiled and said, "This is our Fujian specialty taste, delicious and very cheap."

When Liu Guojian talked about the word "cheap", Fang Bingsheng sat there and sneered, thinking: "Okay, you have opened such a hidden restaurant, but it's just your town party canteen! You're still fucking collecting money? You see this penny."

After thinking about it, Fang Bingsheng smiled and said, "Okay, I'm just about to eat some Fujian cuisine to change my taste. What kind of dishes are there?"

"I have a recipe here, it's the same as a Western restaurant! It's so convenient!" Liu Guojian snapped his fingers, and immediately the servant took a big notebook wrapped in cowhide and handed it to Fang Bingsheng. Looking at the appearance and binding, it was indeed as gorgeous as the recipes in Western restaurants.

Fang Bingsheng flipped over and started to curse because the recipe was clearly marked. Don’t talk about weird Fujian dishes. Just talking about it, any dish is ridiculously expensive than the outside. At least you can’t charge a fried peanut for twenty times the price outside!

As you can imagine, this is also part of the tribute to Liu Guojian.

But there was nothing we could do. Fang Bingsheng rubbed his teeth and ordered the dishes. Several other people also ordered the dishes. Fang Bingsheng had a good memory and thought that the price of the dishes everyone ordered was 100 yuan.

Shan Ji was a little dissatisfied with Liu Guojian's style of plucking feathers, and he spoke a little thorny. He smiled and asked Liu Guojian: "Sir Liu, this teahouse and restaurant are all yours. You can also have many fellow villagers here? Why are there so many Fujianese in the yamen?"

Liu Guojian said excitedly, raised his finger and said, "Your brother may not know that the officials in our Song Dynasty have a membership, so they cannot be over-provided. If they exceed the membership, the court will come down to investigate. Therefore, although I have so many village party members in the yamen, there are actually ones, that is, there are only two people who are formal minor officials. Speaking of which, it is still the ones who are guardians and sweeping floors are formal."

"Then so many of your fellow villagers are in the yamen. Are you not afraid of newspapers?" Shan Ji laughed and asked.

"I also have a headache, so they are all scattered in various places, such as me, my secretary," Liu Guojian pointed to the young man sitting next to the guest and said, "Actually, he is nominally the deputy director of the teahouse, my eldest nephew is in the name of the Longchuan road construction team, and a distant cousin is attached to the contractor Qi Yunlu. That's it, hanging people in other places first. In this way, even if someone chews his mouth, I will say that my township party is here to assist me in doing things. After all, your road construction team has to go out to discuss projects and plans with me in the yamen?"

Everyone said oh, Liu Guojian patted his general's belly, sighed and said, "So although I devoted myself to Longchuan, Longchuan is a glorious, but I am under a lot of pressure. So many people rely on my salary to support me, and I have lost weight in the past two years."

Everyone said again, expressing their admiration for Liu Guojian.

After dinner, Secretary Liu Guojian immediately rushed out, holding a lantern in his hand waiting at the door. Fang Bingsheng smiled and said, "It's time to finish dinner, how many cards will we play with Brother Liu?"

"Okay, okay, since you are my distinguished guests, how can you not let the guests come back with great pleasure? Xiaoyao, take the lanterns and lead the way!" Liu Guojian smiled so much that his eyes could not see. With a wave of his hand, the secretary immediately walked towards the teahouse in front with the lantern.

Here is just a few steps away from the teahouse in front. As soon as everyone left Liu Guojian's "restaurant", they saw the second floor of the teahouse was brightly lit, and the "wavering" sound of mahjong rubbing was as clear as the sound of rain.

The secretary carried the lantern and led everyone to turn around a bamboo bush, which was the entrance of a staircase. This was the second small staircase behind the teahouse.

The group of mermaids went up one after another and arrived at the second floor of the teahouse. It turned out to be a back door on the second floor, with a lock on it. After the secretary opened the lock, he pushed open the small door and entered. He saw a large screen, which separated the originally integrated hall from a smaller piece, with an Eight Immortals table in the middle, and a long sofa and a coffee table not far away. It looked like Liu Guojian was playing cards.

As soon as I walked into the second floor of the teahouse, I found that it was like the sound of rain on the bamboo forest outside the night rain immediately turned into a storm. I heard the noise of water droplets outside the screen smashing into jade plates. The air was filled with the violent smell of cigarettes, cigars and hookahs, so that Lin Liuming, who was quitting smoking, was stunned and almost fell to the ground.

Fang Bingsheng walked past the secretary who was lit up the candle, walked to the screen, and looked outside through the gap: he saw that the place outside was four or five times larger than the small compartment, and another large staircase came up from the first floor of the teahouse, with seven or eight small square tables placed in the lobby outside. The villagers of Liu Guojian who I saw yesterday were full of sitting, all of whom were vigorously casting the "Great Wall" here, and there were a few people speaking Cantonese local dialect inside, which seemed to have joined in to play.

"Well, after our work, we came here to digest food and reduce work fatigue. After all, our Majesty is so smart, not only labor but also hard work, but also exhausting people from working for the court." Liu Guojian generously introduced the big gambling game outside to a group of people, and smiled: "Everyone is good friends. When you have nothing to do, come and play."

Li Meng, Zhuang Fei and others naturally praised him repeatedly, but said in his stomach: "Can you still beat your people here? Who can I do if I have nothing to do? Who can I come here to send you money to play?"

At this time, the landlord Liu Guojian took off his suit jacket and hung it on the clothes hanger. He sat casually on the table and said, "Then the beginning?" Then he winked at his secretary and said, "Xiaoyao, take Mahjong."

The secretary nodded to get mahjong, but gave Fang Bingsheng and Shan Ji a wink.

Fang Bingsheng smiled bitterly in his stomach, and took a step to sit opposite Liu Guojian, and said with a smile: "The seven of us are there? Are you still two tables playing mahjong? Forget it, stop playing mahjong. We're tired of it. Let's play this."

After saying that, he took out the cardboard box that Shan Ji had taken back from his secretary Xiaoyao last night from his suit pocket and patted it on the table.

The people from the Foreign Medicine Guild had already known it, but they still pretended to be shocked and looked around and said:

"Oh, what is this piece of paper?"

"Look, there is a foreign code printed on it. What is this?"

"With a foreigner printed, why is his nose red? What kind of clothes are you wearing?"

In fact, what Secretary Liu Guojian gave Fang Bingsheng was a box of Western poker.

Liu Guojian looked at Fang Bingsheng and the people in the foreign medicine guild, smiled with a guess-stopping expression, and then turned into a hypocritical laugh, clapping his hands and saying, "Oh, Xiao Fang is worthy of being a railway company. This is really fashionable. You can even use foreign poker?"

Fang Bingsheng laughed with him, but he was helpless: Although Liu Guojian was just a local, he was staggering to pass the primary school diploma exam, he was still a parent in a remote small place like Longchuan, but his familiarity with foreign things is really not comparable to ordinary people. He even learned foreign things even by gambling! Of course, it was not his own. In fact, no matter how nice it sounds to say, the officials of the Song Dynasty and even the Qing Dynasty said, let alone the nonsense of the foreign things that deceived his masters and destroyed their ancestors. From glass, foreign wine to pocket watches, diamond rings to Western decorations, villas, swimming pools and even pianos, and even poker now, they are the first people to play.

"This group of people is probably the fastest, most understandable, and most enjoyable foreign things on this continent. It's better to be an official. Even a magistrate is so fashionable. I really don't know who told him?" Fang Bingsheng thought helplessly and resentful.

Soon, the people from the foreign medicine guild stopped acting, and everyone was doing it around the table, four opium parties, two railway black/gang, plus the landlord and county magistrate, seven people just sat on the table, with a stack of foreign poker in the middle.

Liu Guojian wants to play "Texas Hold'em", which means that he has five public cards in three times on the table. Each person draws two cards. He takes three cards in his hand and three cards on the table. He forms five cards, and arranges them according to the flush, four, gourd, flush, straight, three, pairs, and whoever wins.

Seeing Fang Bingsheng and others pulling out a stack of ten yuan banknotes from their arms, Liu Guojian shouted: "Xiaoyao, change the chips!" Immediately, piles of foreign chips were taken from the box where the mahjong was played and placed in front of everyone.

The secretary gathered the banknotes in front of everyone and sent out the bargaining chips. Seeing Fang Bingsheng and others staring at poker a little at a loss, Liu Guojianke shouted again: "Xiaoyao, shuffle the cards! Distribute the cards!"

Liu Guojian's secretary responded, quickly pulled out two cards and threw them aside, and washed the foreign poker. The action of washing the poker was so dazzling that it was dazzling. It washed in the blink of an eye, and in the blink of an eye, each of them had two trump cards in their hands.

Shan Ji Du shouted: "Mr. Liu, your secretary's skills are fine as a dealer in a casino, right?"

Liu Guojian took a sip of the cigar and burst into laughter.

It is very simple to bet. When playing mahjong with Liu Guojian in the past, Fang Bingsheng had to stare at his confidant standing behind Liu Guojian. Touching his nose with two fingers means that Liu Guojian lacked two pieces; pulling his ears with two fingers means that Liu Guojian lacked two cakes; putting it on his lips, it means that this kid lacked two pieces.

It would be easy to use Western gambling methods now: Texas Hold'em can cheat people, for example, if you have bad cards in one hand, but the opponent probably does not have the top big cards on the table. Just a deck of second-strong cards, you can raise the bet repeatedly, which scares the opponent to automatically give up; if he gives up, the chips that have already been put into the table are still yours.

If you play mahjong, everyone would give Liu Guojian a card together. Now it’s simple: everyone should follow Liu Guojian to raise the bet first. When Liu Guojian pretends to have a “I have a big card” expression to make a big bet, everyone will pretend to have a “Oh, I’m a little card, I dare not touch” expression, and they all deduct the cards one after another, so that the chips will automatically become Liu Guojian’s.

In just one hour, the pile of chips in front of Fang Bingsheng disappeared. This was about 70 or 80 yuan lost, and a pile of chips was piled up in front of Liu Guojian.

Liu Guojian's face was flushed with joy. He estimated that he could make 4 or 500 silver dollars to account for this night. He shouted repeatedly: "Mahjong is too rustic and savage, so it's better to learn Western medicine!"

"Yes! You must have learned well in Western learning! You can't lose so quickly even if you play mahjong!" Fang Bingsheng cursed in his stomach, but smiled on his face. Seeing that the bribes he had booked tonight were almost the same, he pretended to be a little tired, left the gambling table, walked to the sofa, sat down, picked up a fruit on it and started eating it.

Liu Guojian came over and sat down to chat with the financial owner. It seemed that he knew that he was not a god of gambling.

"Brother Liu, when will you start building this voting site? Who will be selected as the supervisor?" Fang Bingsheng asked.

Liu Guojian was stunned, put down the teacup in his hand, turned his head and said, "What voting point? The court did not let me do this."

"No, there were dozens of voting sites, thousands of benches, hundreds of votes, hundreds of votes, hundreds of people used as supervisors, and colorful flags, notices, banners, etc. must be prepared. This is an important project of the election." Fang Bingsheng was also stunned.

"I have never set up my position." Liu Guojian said firmly: "I dare not worry about the affairs of the court. I hate me most! When encountering important events such as the emperor's request, I dare not be negligent. I will do whatever I can to break my legs, but I really don't."

"It's probably because your city is small? Or did your subordinates miss the order?" Fang Bingsheng frowned and said as he heard the yelling Fujian dialect outside the screen.

"I think the court is really concerned about the election. On this day, I gave me a lot of documents and orders. So as long as it is about elections, I immediately pushed everything out of the way for the election! I smelled the smell. This is a super big thing that goes straight to the heavens! Do I dare to slack off such a big thing?" Liu Guojian now showed his determination to be an official.

"What new instructions have you given to you? Brother?" Fang Bingsheng was shocked when he heard this and straightened his waist from the backrest of the sofa.

Fang Bingsheng and the others had asked about it while eating, but Liu Guojian did not confirm his own benefits at that time, so he covered it up. Now he has collected four or five hundred silver dollars from the other party, so he naturally knows everything. Liu Guojian said: "This morning, I received an order from the court to free up the classroom of the Trinity Central School, place a bed, and temporarily use the Christian Union Primary School as a barracks, which means that the court will send troops here."

"Send the army here?" Fang Bingsheng was shocked: "What are you doing?"

"Don't worry, it's not that someone has rebelled. I have managed Longchuan in an orderly manner, and the people have educated them very well!" Liu Guojian smiled proudly and said, "The number of soldiers is only a few dozen, and the court has thought about it for me. Now that the children are on summer vacation, the empty school is just for military camps."

After saying that, he looked at Fang Bingsheng who was a little stupid, Liu Guojian said with a smirk, "I didn't know what they were going to do, but when I heard you just now, I guess that the court will use the army as the supervisor this time."

"Damn it!" Fang Bingsheng was stunned and shocked, and then cursed fiercely.

If a local person is a supervisor, he can definitely buy it, but it is a bit difficult to buy the army. It is a Christian army with the "Kintian spirit". If the people from the navy come, if they know the details and with the momentum of their quarrel with the railway, they will not catch themselves and throw them into prison.

It's so easy to spend some money to buy supervisors to fake it, but now it seems that although it is not impossible, it is very likely that it won't work.

Sighing, Fang Bingsheng continued to ask Liu Guojian: "What else is there?"

Liu Guojian replied: "I also asked me to book a hotel near Sany Center, which also required 100 people to live in."

"What's this for?" Fang Bingsheng spread his hands and shouted in horror and helplessness.

"The superiors may come to monitor the election situation, but I am also puzzled," Liu Guojian scratched his scalp and said, "The biggest official we have visited in the inspection is the mayor of Huizhou Prefecture. He only brought twenty followers, who will get a hundred people to live there? Is the crown prince coming?"

After saying that, seeing Fang Bingsheng's expression of seeing a ghost, his face was so shocked that his face frozen. Liu Guojian put down the teacup, laughed and patted Fang Bingsheng on the shoulder and said, "I'm scaring you! The court said that there is no need to be a good hotel, there is no need to be in the same building, a few small hotels, and short-term rental of private houses can be enough for 100 people."

Fang Bingsheng pulled out the white handkerchief on his chest and wiped his head with cold sweat, but then he thought: "I'm not afraid of the prince coming. What's wrong with me in the election!"

"In addition, I will tell you in advance the election cycle schedule. Anyway, I will post it all over the city tomorrow," said Liu Guojian: "After this week and next week, the seven-week election publicity cycle will begin. The voting will be completed in the eighth week!"

"What? Seven weeks? Other cities are only three weeks, why are you doing this for such a long time?" Fang Bingsheng was really a little out of control. He shouted: "I want to go back to the capital as soon as possible. My son is going to be the imperial examination this fall!"

"I don't know either. Maybe Your Majesty thinks that our small place deserves more time to learn what elections are." Liu Guojian shrugged, with standard foreign movements and foreign expressions.
Chapter completed!