Smuggling was widespread. Dane was informed that half the salt consumed in China at the time was smuggled. The Yuen Shang took advantage of the lack of a standard unit of measure to carry more salt than they reported and sell the surplus on the black market. Boatmen and cart drivers were able to bribe inspectors and make profits from smuggling. Dane estimated that 40,000 people were engaged in mostly illegal salt traffic on the Yangtze River alone, involving many thousands of square-sailed salt junks. He organized the Salt Preventive Service with salt police stations at strategic points, but this failed to stop the smuggling.
In Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Herbert A. Giles described the smuggling he observed on a trip from Swatow to Canton in 1877:
Apropos of salt, we came across a good sized bunker of it when stowing away our things in the space below the deck. The boatman could not resist the temptation of doing a little smuggling on the way up. At a secluded point in a bamboo shaded bend of the river, they ran the boat alongside the bank, and were instantly met by a number of suspicious-looking gentlemen with baskets, who soon relieved them of the smuggled salt and separated in different directions.
DANE ASSERTED THAT “it is the salt revenue that has been safeguarding the credit of China. . . . Salt has always formed one of the principal sources of government revenue but since June 1913, when the reform administration was inaugurated, it has leaped into first place.” Until 1915, maritime custom was the leading government revenue source. But Dane claimed that once he had reestablished a centralized salt administration in 1915, salt revenue increased over the previous year by 100 percent.
Dane found the Chinese to be heavy salt consumers, notably higher than in India. He asserted that the Japanese were the heaviest salt consumers in the world and that the Chinese consumed at about the same rate, which he estimated to be about twenty pounds per capita.
It is probable that neither Chinese nor Japanese consumption was as high as American, but the fact that Japan would even have such a reputation was remarkable considering its unsuitability for salt production. Japan has a long and meandering coastline that would otherwise provide ideal tidal ponds and inlets for sea salt production, but its humid climate with regular storms and periodic flooding renders it a salt region of high cost and low production.
Historically, the Japanese depended on imported salt, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a modernization plan under Emperor Meiji built a strong centralized economy and a modernized military. Newly empowered Japan thought it was unwise to be dependent on foreign salt. In January 1905, the Salt Monopoly Law came into force, establishing twenty-two salt offices around the country to regulate production, which became a state monopoly. The Japan Monopoly Office set prices and ended imports.
Salt production was concentrated on the Seto Inland Sea, which, though far from ideal, was deemed the best sea salt climate in Japan because it is sheltered between two islands in a relatively southern climate. The main area, from Osaka to Hiroshima, was devastated in World War II, but the beds were restored in the 1950s. Industrialized Japan has remained self-sufficient in edible salt for products including pickles, salted fish, soy sauce, and miso. Miso is a Japanese offshoot of the Chinese import soy sauce, and like soy sauce, it is made from salt-fermented beans.
Traditionally, though less so today, a Japanese meal ended with pickles, and in the north pickles are served with afternoon tea. Japanese homes almost always had a smell of pickling, which is one reason most Japanese now prefer to buy their pickles. Among their favorite pickles are eggplant, Chinese cabbage, radish greens, and mustard greens, which are added to rice. Daikon, a root that is curiously known as either a Japanese radish or a Chinese turnip, is a staple of Buddhist monastaries, pickled in alternate layers of salt and rice bran.
Dane found that the Chinese also “use a great deal of salt for soaking and preserving vegetables, salting fish, pickling and preserving meat.” This was why the Chinese and Japanese were heavy consumers of salt.
AT THE TIME Dane went to China, as throughout history, most Chinese salt was sea salt, pumped into evaporation ponds by windmills. However, Dane said, “The best salt in China is that produced from the salt wells of Sichuan.” Sichuan produced about one-fifth of China’s salt.
Dane had arrived at the end of a golden age of Sichuan salt, that had begun in the eighteenth century. The salt wells were mostly located around what became the city of Zigong. Between 1850 and 1877, there were 1,700 salt merchants in Zigong, and 20 percent of salt production was held by four families that had accumulated fabled wealth.
Zigong grew along a curve of the Fuxi River, a gracefully winding tributary of the Yangtze, clogged with shallow, flat-bottomed, oar-powered boats that carried salt to much of central China.
The Yangtze, the 3,700-mile waterway from the Tibetan mountains to the port of Shanghai, the third-longest river in the world, divides China into its north and south, and yet, until the 1949 Communist victory, China had so little transportation infrastructure that there was not a single bridge crossing it. The Yangtze was the key transportation artery through China and its tributaries, the only connection between north and south China.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, salt merchants were traveling regularly to the little provincial town of Zigong. In 1736, merchants from Shaanxi Province began construction of a guild hall in Zigong for out-of-province salt traders. It took sixteen years to complete this palace with roofs fanning out like wings in all directions, nimble stone dragons leaping from the edges. The courtyards were lined with red pillars, not the usual wooden pillars, but stone ones painted red.
Long before the red star and red flag of Communism found their chromatically perfect home in China, red was the Chinese color. The symbol of happiness, it was the color worn by a bride at her wedding. And so the salt merchants built a red palace with gilded carvings depicting Daoist legends. The guild hall, like many Chinese houses of the period, used no nails but was held together by fitted joints. It combined the four-sided courtyard of northern architecture with the upward curved roof tips of the south. As local Chinese opera was performed on a stage on the balcony, a distinguished audience watched from the courtyard that was gardened with tall trees and elegant dwarf bonsais.
Jealous of the out-of-town merchants’ showy guild hall, the local salt merchants in Zigong built their own red-pillared, wing-roofed mansion, a temple with a commanding view of commerce on a high bank over the curving Fuxi, from where they could view the congested traffic of flat-bedded boats rowing cargoes of salt to the Yangtze.
The well technology that had been ahead of the world in the Middle Ages continued to improve. One advance was the addition of four oxen driven in a circle, attached to a pole, which wound and released tough rope braided from bamboo leaves. The rope system was counterweighted with huge rock slabs and ran to a large wheel that served as a pulley and then to the top of the derrick to control the bamboo tube that was dropped down for brine. The longer the tube, the higher the wooden derrick that raised and lowered it.
The brine was piped to gas-heated pans in the boiling house. Then a ladle of ground yellow bean, soya, and water would be added. After about ten minutes a yellow scum would form on the surface and be skimmed off, ridding the salt of impurities with a simpler formula than Europeans ever found. After the brine had been boiled five or six hours to pure crystal, the salt was shoveled into a barrel and hardened.
In 1835, a new well, the Shen Hai well, was drilled in Zigong. At 2,700 feet, it struck natural gas. At 2,970 feet, the well reached natural brine, but the drilling continued down to 3,300 feet, making it at the time the deepest drilled well in the world. Twenty-four years later, an American would be cheered for the achievement of having drilled 69.5 feet in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
The Chinese used oxen until 1902, shortly before Dane’s arrival, when coal-fired steam engines were introduced. In the nineteenth century, the Zigong ox herd was usually about 100,000 head. Because of the ox
en, in Zigong, unlike most of China, beef, albeit very tough beef, was part of the working-class diet. At the rig where they labored, salt workers would boil the tough old ox meat until it was tender, and then they would add the most common Sichuan seasoning, ma-la.
Unique to Sichuan, ma is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called huajiao—with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties grow in Sichuan, clay red peppercorns and the more perfumey brown ones. La means “hot spice” and is accomplished with small burning red peppers. The combined seasoning, ma-la, defines the taste of Sichuan food.
Another specialty of Zigong salt workers was huobianzi. The tough thigh of an old salt well ox was cut by hand in a continuous paper-thin slice by slowly turning the leg. Some pieces could be two yards long. Zhang Jianxin, managing director of Sichuan Zigong Tongxin Food Corporation in Zigong, where huobianzi is still made today, complained that it is difficult to get a leg as tough as the legs from the old working oxen, but some farm animals too old to work are satisfactory.
The strips were seasoned with soy sauce and salt, then air dried and grilled over a low heat from burning ox dung. Today, a gas heater is used, but it is said that huobianzi that is cured over ox dung has “a special fragrance.” It is served with a vegetable oil containing hot peppers.
Meanwhile, the wealthy salt merchants went for more exotic fare. In China, the more obscure the ingredients and the more arcane the method, the more status the dish has. “Soaked frog” was a specialty for Zigong salt merchants. A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large jar of brine. Live frogs would be put in the jar, and they would desperately perch on the pieces of wood. The jar was closed and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened, and the frogs would be dead and dried on the wood but preserved because they had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed.
The salt merchants were also fond of stir-fried frog stomachs. Unfortunately, a frog’s stomach, however tasty it might be, does not go a long way. It is said in Zigong that to get one serving of fried stomachs, a cook would kill 1,000 frogs.
THE CHINESE CONTINUED percussion drilling in Zigong even after the American oil industry had developed much faster techniques. Their homegrown technology was slow but reached depths that, even in the age of petroleum, were astounding. In the 1920s, the Chinese drilled a well to 4,125 feet, and in 1966, the Shen Hai well, a record breaker in 1835, was drilled even deeper to 4,400 feet, about four-fifths of a mile.
The Chinese character for jing, meaning “well,” is a depiction of a Zigong derrick. The derricks, towers of gray, weather-beaten tree trunks lashed together high in the air, rigged with bamboo leaf ropes, dotted the Zigong landscape the way oil wells do in petroleum cities.
In 1892, Sichuan salt makers discovered the layer of rock salt that feeds the groundwater under Zigong. Today, Zigong produces more rock salt than brine salt. But in the first few decades of the twentieth century, between 300 and 400 brine wells were operating in Zigong.
The beginning of the end for the ancient Sichuan salt industry came belatedly in 1943, when for the first time a rotary drill, bore a well in Sichuan. It took another twenty years for the change to become apparent. In 1960, Zigong was still a backward provincial town of a third of a million people living among medieval brine derricks. That year, the last percussion-drilled shaft in Sichuan was completed. Along with modern rotary drills and rock salt mining, Sichuan salt producers were soon using vacuum evaporators, making modern white salt with crystals of a uniform size.
It was in the 1960s that Zigong got its first “modern” public transportation. As brine boiling was fading, Sichuan engineers found a new use for the natural gas at the wells. Buses were built with giant gray bladders on the roofs, filled with the local natural gas. They started out on their routes with the huge rectangular bladder on top almost as big as the bus. The big bladder swayed and jiggled like Jell-O as the bus rounded corners, and then it gradually deflated, the gray bag sagging from the roof, as the gas was used up. Locals call the buses da qi bao, which means “big bag of gas.” The buses need frequent refueling. Today, with Zigong tripled in population, the old buses are considered an embarrassing eyesore, and the remaining ones are left with the undesirable rural routes.
The character jing, on Derrick brand soy sauce labels.
Brine well derricks in Zigong in the early 1960s. Photo by Yu Minyuan.
Zigong Salt History Museum
ZIGONG IS NOW a sprawling city of 1 million people, including residents of the suburbs. Stone-edged holes in the ground are all that remains of many wells. Only a few derricks are left standing in the hilly municipality, though many were not torn down until the 1990s, some as recently as 1998. Scholars struggle quixotically to save them, but these are not good times for landmark preservation in a China passionate about modernization. In 1993, two twin derricks, the symbol of Zigong, one 290 feet high and the other 284 feet high, were torn down. They were dangerously decrepit, and the government would not spend the money to repair them. “They didn’t understand the value, that these things are only in Zigong,” said Song Liangxi, a Zigong historian.
The Shen Hai well, the rugged old contraption of tree trunks and rocks, still operates. As with hundreds of wells that once pumped in Zigong, the threshold to the front gate is two feet high—to symbolically keep the wealth inside. The well has ten workers, who keep it operating twenty-four hours a day. A cable slowly lowers into the earth for several minutes and then emerges with a long wet bamboo tube that is held over a tub by a worker who pokes the leather valve at the bottom of the tube, releasing several bucket-loads of brine. The brine is still evaporated in pans heated by the gas from the well. In 1835, when the well was drilled, it had an estimated 8,500 cubic meters of gas. In the year 2000, the operators believed it had 1,000 cubic meters left.
The Shaanxi guild hall remained a guild hall until the fall of the last emperor. Then it became a local headquarters for the Chinese nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek. After the Communists came to power, Deng Xiaoping, a native of Sichuan who became secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, decided to make it a salt museum.
Today in Zigong, there are still some crumbling tile-roofed Chinese houses with the roof tips turned up in the southern style, but most of them are in disrepair, seemingly awaiting demolition. The new buildings seem kitschy spoofs on urban high-rise architecture. As in Beijing, historic monuments were torn down to make way for buildings that will never be completed, that remain concrete and exposed steel rods because the companies building them went bankrupt. But the guild hall is preserved as a national monument.
Of greater interest to the locals than the guild hall is the small amount of salt still made at the Shen Hai well. They call it flat pan salt and believe it is better for pickling than the industrial salt made in vacuum evaporators. Paocai and zhacai makers want flat pan salt for their pickled vegetables. It is sold in the Zigong market, but outside of Zigong, this medium-grained, untreated salt is becoming difficult to find. Zhang Jianxin at the Sichuan Zigong Tongxin Food Corporation wants flat pan salt for his huobianzi and other products such as larou, a traditional Sichuan cured pork. Zhang Jianxin’s recipe for larou is as follows:
Cut pork into pieces any size. Cover with salt and spices including huajiao, leave it a week, wash off the salt, hang it four feet above a charcoal fire and smoke it slowly for two days. Add peanut shells and sugarcane trimmings to the charcoal. People at home add cypress leaves.
But Zhang Jianxin has trouble finding a salt that he wants to use. “Vacuum salt is too fine-grained and also they add chemical things I don’t like,” he said. The added chemical to which he referred is iodine, which he said has a taste that “is bad for our product.”
SICHUAN PROVINCE IS the size of France with twice the population. In the mid–twentieth century, when the Chinese population expanded at an unprecedented rate, the number of inhabitants in Sichuan grew to its current
100 million people, most of them crowded into the eastern half of the province. The west is a desert leading to Tibet. Sichuan also has a bamboo mountain forest that is home to the earth’s only remaining wild panda population. But most of the province is subtropical, like the American South.
The Sichuan landscape is a tribute to the water management skills of the heirs of Li Bing, the third century B.C. governor, with dikes and sluices breaking up waterways into a lush green quilt of flooded rice paddies, dark-soiled vegetable patches, cypress groves, and bamboo stands. Soil erosion is rare and wasted space even rarer. But despite this rich agriculture, the farmers seem poor. They produce an enormous quantity of food, but in their villages built along the dirt trails that connect paddies and fields, there are too many people. They live in patched and crumbling mud-and-straw houses, a few still decorated with huge posters of Mao.
Children hike miles to school along the dikes between rice paddies and up into the green mountains. Women with brightly colored parasols carry children on their backs in wicker strap-on seats that are made only in Sichuan. A frequent sight in the Sichuan countryside, one seen in Marco Polo’s China, is noodles more than seven feet long, hung out to dry like laundry on a line.
Although most of the big derricks have been torn down, a few small brine wells remain. One in Dayin, west of the Sichuan capital, Chengdu, had a single post the height of a telephone pole. The well was only 1,000 feet deep, a considerable depth by any but Chinese standards, but at that relatively shallow depth the brine was weak, only 10 percent salt. That was why the Chinese learned deep drilling.
A farmer in a worn blue Mao jacket who grew grains, vegetables, and sweet potatoes on the land said that in the 1960s salt had been his most profitable crop. Asked who built the well, he shrugged and said, “Oh, that well has been there forever.”
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