Salt in Chinese history

The basic system of bureaucratic oversight and private management provided state revenue second only to the land tax, and, with considerable regional variation and periodic reworking, it remained in place until the mid-20th century.

More than a dozen sites on the southwest coast of the Bohai Bay show that the Dawenkou culture was already producing salt from underground brine more than 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic.

The Guanzi, a Han dynasty compilation of texts attributed to the 4th century BCE, includes a perhaps apocryphal discussion between the philosopher Guan Zhong and Duke Huan of the State of Qi on a proposed salt monopoly.

In 119 BCE, Emperor Wu of Han cast about for ways to finance his expansionist policies, and at the urging of his Legalist advisors, decreed salt and iron to be state monopolies.

[11] After the fall of the Han in the 2nd century CE, the smaller successor states could not enforce the monopoly reliably and the Sui and early Tang dynasties relied instead on land taxes.

Chancellor Liu Yan had already proved his worth by using impressed labor to dredge the long silted-over canal connecting the Huai and Yellow rivers; this project lowered transport costs, relieved food shortages, and increased tax revenues with little government investment.

[16] Merchants who helped to provision troops on the frontier were compensated with certificates which entitled them to buy salt and sell it in areas where they were given exclusive rights.

A combination of government officials and merchant entrepreneurs eagerly invented and deployed new technologies and new ways of organizing salt production, distribution, and taxation.

Salt wells were found primarily in what is now Sichuan, but it was not until the Song dynasty that advances in technology brought increases in production and created tax revenues of consequence (the combination of gas and brine had been exploited from early times, but did not reach volumes useful for transporting any distance for sale until even later, in the 19th century).

[24] The Venetian traveler described the Changlu salt region in present-day Hebei province in terms which probably come from direct observation: Polo did not entirely understand what he saw, however.

As explained in the Aobo Tu, workers actually sprinkled sea water on the fields which then filtered through sand or fine ash into pits, or perhaps he could have seen “earth salt” derived from soil.

To begin with, the Ming government inherited from the preceding Yuan dynasty not a unified national system but a dozen or more regional monopolies, each of which had a different production center, none of which was allowed to distribute salt to the others.

Officials tried to control production by continuing the Yuan system of registering hereditary salt producing households (竈戶 zàohù).

A series of crises followed in which inland prices dropped too low for merchants to make a profit, armies on the frontier went without grain, and small mountains of salt might sit unused because officials impounded them for taxes then could not sell them.

Household that boiled brine also had to obtain fuel, in the form of natural gas or burning firewood and straw, in order to heat up their furnaces.

After Jiajing’s reign (1522–1566), the salt ministry became financially unable to provide iron plates due to the great cost of manufacture and replacement.

[33][31] The methods of payment from the government differed throughout the Ming period, but included grain, money, subsidies, and decreased or voided land tax.

[31] Writers turned to poetry and fiction to continue a debate which had been started centuries earlier by Guanzi and the Han dynasty Discourses on Salt and Iron: practical men argued that monopoly revenues helped the state in its mission while Confucian critics argued that government monopolies enriched some groups and left others poor and exploited.

"[39] Pu's short story, "The Salt Smuggler" told of the Judge of Purgatory who needed help cleaning out newly arrived sinners who were choking the rivers and eighteen hells.

When the Qing dynasty was founded in the middle of the 17th century, the court immediately seized the saltern areas in order to cut off supplies to their enemies and gain the revenues for themselves.

The rights to salt produced along the coast were controlled by some 200 Yangzhou merchants who were supervised by the Commissioner but operated privately, making them richer and more powerful than those in other regions.

Like Yangzhou, Tianjin had little natural wealth, but used its location on the Grand Canal to become a transshipment center and developed the nearby Changlu salterns as a source of capital.

In 1705, as a mark of favor, the emperor ordered Cao, an accomplished scholar, to compile all shi (lyric poems) surviving from the Tang dynasty.

[45] Without competent and honest supervision, merchants once again speculated in salt certificates and officials were incapable of raising their assigned levels of revenue.

By the early 19th century, merchant families could not deliver the massive amounts of salt they had contracted but instead raised prices to yield steady profits.

The salt trade in one province, Hunan, was estimated to involve some 1,000 traders, six to nine thousand junkmen, and about 1,000 state employees and officials, including police.

In 1913, the president of the young new republic, Yuan Shikai, negotiated with foreign banks a series of Reorganization Loans which were intended to shore up the central government in relation to the provinces.

[49] The Sino-Foreign Salt Administration, which lasted until 1949, became, in the words of one historian, a "veritable model of a successful, well-institutionalized, high prestige organization that elicited the loyalty and commitment of its Chinese and foreign staff even as it operated in an extremely turbulent, often hostile environment.” Moreover, it provided a series of central governments in this period with their second most important source of tax revenues.

Dane was, in the words of one writer, a “colonial cliché,” complete with a bushy moustache and walking stick, who might have provoked nationalist opposition.

The company eventually manipulated its political networks so that by 1936 it had challenged the monopoly of the salt gabelle in order to take advantage of its more efficient technology but still did not gain a major share of the market.