Chapter 161: Worth a Thousand Gold
The Gu Family’s mule cart had been traveling for a while when Gu Fei spotted a silver building by the side of the road. She quickly called out to Gu Qing, "Big Brother, stop for a moment! I want to go take a look at the silver building."
Mrs. Chen poked her head out to look at the silver building and nodded. "You’re right, we should buy a few pieces of jewelry. You’re a grown girl now, and it doesn’t look good to have nothing in your hair."
Gu Fei turned her head. "Mother, I’m not going to buy jewelry. I just want to take a look."
’With so little silver on hand, how could I dare to buy jewelry?’ She had other reasons for going into the silver building.
The women all got out of the cart and entered the silver building.
The clerk inside saw them enter and quickly sized them up. They were all wearing brand-new clothes. The outfits weren’t the best, but they weren’t bad either.
They were at the level of the average commoner in Ping’an City.
This kind of family usually liked to buy things like silver hairpins, silver bracelets, or jewelry made from low-grade jade.
The clerk smiled and approached them. "Mesdames, young miss, this way, please. The shop just received a new batch of freshly crafted silver hairpins. The styles are novel—perfect for wearing when visiting friends and relatives during the New Year. They’ll make you look both lavish and beautiful."
Gu Fei smiled. "I don’t want a silver hairpin. Do you have any pearls in the shop? I’d like to see some pearls."
The clerk kept his smile. "Are you looking to buy a pearl flower, miss? Or are you buying loose pearls to have set into jewelry yourself?"
"I want to look at pearls," Gu Fei said directly.
"This way, then." The clerk led Gu Fei and the others through a small side door. Inside, there were several wooden counters divided into many small compartments. Each compartment displayed a pearl flower or a single pearl.
When the clerk saw Mrs. Chen and Lian’er staring wide-eyed at the pearls, he understood. ’They’ve definitely never seen anything like this before.’
Gu Fei saw a strand of white pearls. Each pearl was about a centimeter in diameter, with a fine luster. They were all roughly the same size and fairly round. The marked price was four thousand five hundred taels of silver.
Seeing Gu Fei looking at the strand, the clerk explained, "This strand has one hundred and eight pearls in total. It’s not easy to gather so many of a similar size and consistent color, so the price is a bit higher."
He chuckled. "That’s how it is with pearls. A valuable one can be worth a fortune."
"Of course, those of poor quality and small size aren’t worth much. Those are sold by the tael. The smallest seed pearls are only a few taels of silver per tael of weight—not valuable at all."
"When choosing pearls, it comes down to four words: luster, roundness, size, and color."
He pointed to a white pearl. "This one is almost perfectly round and not small. What’s rare is its exceptional luster. But it hasn’t reached eight fen in size. As the saying goes, ’A seven-fen pearl is a gem, an eight-fen pearl is a treasure.’ If this pearl were just a bit larger, it wouldn’t be this price. It would be worth at least one thousand taels."
Gu Fei looked and saw that the white pearl was priced at five hundred taels.
She then looked at another pearl nearby. It was over a centimeter in diameter, quite large—slightly bigger than a lotus seed—and had a faint pinkish hue. The price tag on it read two thousand taels.
Her heart raced with excitement as she watched. She asked the clerk, "Do you also buy pearls here?"
The clerk nodded. "Of course, we do. But the buying price is different from the selling price."
Gu Fei understood. ’Naturally, they buy for less than the marked price. Otherwise, there’d be no profit, so why would they sell them?’
After looking around, Gu Fei now had a good sense of pearl prices.
Unaware of Gu Fei’s intentions and seeing her daughter’s bare hair, Mrs. Chen waited until Gu Fei had walked a little farther away. She called over the clerk and, swallowing the pain of the expense, quietly spent ten taels of silver on a pair of pearl flowers made of small, strung-together pearls.
Mrs. Chen thought, ’The silver was all earned by my daughter. The family now has a house to live in and land to farm. Our lives are stable. It’s time my daughter had something to make herself pretty.’