Return to Singapore 1995

Li Xiaofan looked closely and found that the girl on the bed was Guo Hanyue.

In the evening, the townhouse facing the beach was very cool because it was open from north to south.

Maybe it was because of the wind in the evening, the blinds and curtains facing south in her room were opened by the sea breeze, and the door that was not closed was also blown open.

The door gently knocked against the door frame with the gusts of sea breeze, making a gentle "clang clang" rhythmic sound.

Like a wind chime.

Guo Hanyue on the bed was sleeping soundly.

She didn't expect Li Xiaofan to come to clean today, and she didn't even lock the door.

Guo Hanyue's plump and white body was only wearing a small silk pajamas, which was very thin and transparent...

Li Xiaofan's blood was boiling, and he didn't dare to look at her any more. He gently closed her door and went up to his own small room on the third floor.

Although the old lady's row house is a bit old, the decoration inside is very distinctive, full of the combination of Eastern and Western cultures.

The European-style blinds, metal hollow pattern railings, patterned tiles, glass crystal chandeliers, stained glass windows, and Eastern-style wood-carved doors, carved screens, dragon and phoenix cabinets, mother-of-pearl tables and chairs in the row house are all in the same room, full of unique Nanyang artistic atmosphere. It can be seen that the old lady may have come from a wealthy family.

There are several old solid wood furniture in Li Xiaofan's room, especially the solid wood bed and the large cabinet are very conspicuous. These two old Nanyang-style furniture look like they should be a few years old. The shape, structure and decoration imitate the Western style. The shape is waisted, the legs of the furniture are beautifully carved, and the solid wood patina on the outside of the furniture is very deep, brown and black.

The last time Guo Hanyue took Li Xiaofan to see this room for the first time, when he just opened it, Li Xiaofan smelled a very nice wood fragrance inside, which should come from these solid wood furniture.

Li Xiaofan used a rag to carefully wipe the bed frame and felt that the smell was getting better and better. After wiping the wood, the texture became clearer and clearer, revealing the color inside from light yellow to purple-red, emitting bursts of long-lasting agarwood aroma, which made people feel relaxed and happy.

After wiping the bed, Li Xiaofan began to wipe the large cabinet against the wall.

The passionflower decorative pattern on the outside of this large cabinet is deeply carved, with mature knife skills and fine grinding.

Passionflower is a flower that looks like a Chinese peony. The characteristics are smooth lines and endless variations, which can be extended at will according to different shapes. It mostly extends branches and leaves around with one or several flowers as the center, and most of them are symmetrical up and down and left and right. If it is decorated on a round object, the branches and leaves are mostly circular, and the patterns on each side are cleverly connected, making it difficult to distinguish their beginning and end.

This is a typical feature of early Nanyang Cantonese furniture.

When Li Xiaofan opened the cabinet, the agarwood smell inside was stronger.

After gently wiping, the smell became stronger and stronger. Smelling the refreshing wood fragrance and looking at the reddish purple-brown wood, two words suddenly popped up in Li Xiaofan's mind: Hainan Huanghuali!

The full name of "Hainan Huanghuali" is Hainan Huanghuali, also known as: Dalbergia sinensis, Dalbergia mother, Dalbergia sinensis, originating from the low-altitude plains and hilly areas of Jianfengling, Diaoluo Mountain, Hainan Island, mainland China. It mostly grows in sunny places with an altitude of about 100 meters on Diaoluo Mountain. Because of its slow growth, solid wood and beautiful patterns, it has always been one of the five famous woods.

In his previous life, Li Xiaofan's understanding of Hainan Huang began with a junior high school classmate named Lin Zhiyong. At that time, Lin Zhiyong's sister married to Tianyuan Ancient Town in Cibei County, Donghai Province. After graduating from junior high school, Lin Zhiyong went to work in his sister's area and engaged in the old furniture business with his sister and brother-in-law's family. Later, his brother-in-law opened a large antique furniture factory in the local area, and the business was very hot.

Before Li Xiaofan was reborn, it was popular among the bosses in Shanghai to wear various bracelets, among which agarwood and sea yellow bracelets were the most expensive. The expensive agarwood bracelets cost millions of RMB. Sea yellow is second, but also costs thousands to hundreds of thousands. The ghost-eye sea yellow bracelets with good appearance are also quite expensive.

Later, Lin Zhiyong came to Shanghai to start a business and opened a small shop in Gubei area, specializing in selling various antique furniture and bracelets. When choosing a location to rent a store, Li Xiaofan helped a lot. As a thank you, Lin Zhiyong gave him a string of sea yellow bracelets and often invited him to the store for tea.

After a few visits, Li Xiaofan began to understand sea yellow and fell in love with this precious wood. He also bought several picture albums such as "Ming-style Furniture Research" and "Ming-style Furniture Appreciation" by Master Wang Shixiang, who was the most knowledgeable about sea yellow and Ming-style furniture in mainland history. Unfortunately, he was really short of money before his rebirth, so he only collected a few small sea yellow playthings.

Li Xiaofan remembered that before his rebirth, Lin Zhiyong had talked about the price of Hainan Huanghuali. The purchase price of Hainan Huanghuali rose from more than 20,000 yuan per ton in the early 2000s to 8 million to 10 million yuan per ton around 2018. Among them, the price of large materials rose from 60,000 yuan per ton to more than 30 million yuan per ton.

Later, as the bracelet craze became popular among the rich in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the price of good Hainan Huangli raw materials was calculated by kilograms, costing tens of thousands of yuan per kilogram.

According to Lin Zhiyong, the price of Hainan Huangli was even cheaper in the 1990s, only a few yuan or tens of yuan per catty.

Li Xiaofan calculated that even if it was calculated from the beginning of 2000, the price of Hainan Huangli had increased by at least 500 times in the past 20 years.

In the past 20 years, the increase in housing prices in Shanghai was nothing compared to that of Hainan Huangli!

As for why the price of Hainan Huanghuali has increased so dramatically, according to Lin Zhiyong, it takes a long time for wild Hainan Huanghuali to mature, generally at least 100 years.

At the beginning, the local people in Hainan did not cherish this wood that can be seen everywhere. In addition to being used by the people for cooking, boiling water, and using it as farm tools and building houses, it was cut down in large quantities for steelmaking during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, because Hainan Huanghuali has a high oil content and is resistant to burning and has a strong fire. Many of them were crushed into pieces to be exported to Southeast Asia as spices, and like strategic materials such as rubber, they could be exchanged for scarce foreign exchange. Later, it was also used as a Chinese medicinal material and was purchased by medicinal material companies and flowed to various Chinese medicinal material bases and medicinal material factories across the country.

After the reform and opening up in the 1980s, the country's doors were opened, and merchants and collectors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and abroad who were foresighted flocked to mainland China. Many foresighted people began to plunder the cheap old-style furniture on the mainland at that time, especially the precious furniture mainly made of Hainan Huanghuali and red sandalwood.

Later, the largest house demolition campaign in Hainan's history was launched. Merchants from all walks of life used all means to induce people who used sea yellow as building materials to demolish their houses. They also took away cattle rails, cattle yokes, cattle bolts, and cattle plows. Not a single firewood stick was left. There were also dragnet-style plundering in the mountains and villages, and the tree heads and roots left underground were uprooted with knives and axes. Various illegal logging continued despite repeated prohibitions...

These crazy actions made the sea yellow, which was already in small quantities, more and more precious and scarce, and the price skyrocketed every year.

If I remember correctly, Lin Zhiyong once told Li Xiaofan that the price of sea yellow in Hainan in the 1990s was only a few dozen yuan per catty. Compared with the thousand-fold increase more than 20 years later, "sea yellow" is definitely a good business worth investing in!

A good memory is not as good as a bad pen. Thinking of this, Li Xiaofan quickly took out a notebook from his waist bag to record this business.

While recording, he suddenly heard someone knocking on the door outside.