Salt in Chinese history
Salt in Chinese history including salt production and salt taxes played key roles in economic development, and relations between state and society in China. The lure of salt profits led to technological innovation and new ways to organize capital. Debate over government salt policies brought forth conflicting attitudes toward the nature of government, private wealth, the relation between the rich and the poor, while the administration of these salt policies was a practical test of a government's competence.
Because salt is a necessity of life, the salt tax had a broad base and could be set at a low rate and still be one of the most important sources of government revenue. In early times, governments gathered salt revenues by managing production and sales directly. After innovations in the mid-8th century, imperial bureaucracies reaped these revenues safely and indirectly by selling salt rights to merchants who then sold the salt in retail markets. Private salt trafficking persisted, however, because monopoly salt was more expensive and of lower quality. Local bandits thrived on salt smuggling and rebels supported themselves with it. 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.
Salt also played a role in Chinese society and culture. Salt is one of the "seven necessities of life" mentioned in proverbs and "salty" is one of the "five flavors" which form the cosmological basis of Chinese cuisine. Song Yingxing, author of the 17th century treatise, The Exploitation of the Works of Nature explained the essential role of salt:
Types and geographical distribution
Traditional Chinese writers and modern scholars agree that there are at least five types of salt found in different regions of what is now China:- Sea salt : The most important source. In earliest times, coastal and island salterns used earthen and then iron boiling pans to reduce sea water to salt. By the 3rd century BCE, workers filtered sea water through flat beds of ashes or sand into pits to produce a brine which could be boiled or evaporated by the sun. By the Ming dynasty, salterns in the salt marshes of northern Jiangsu and the eastern seaboard at Changlu, Bohai Bay, near present-day Tianjin, became the largest salt producers and by the late 19th century supplied some 80% of China's salt. Over the course of the 20th century, industrial evaporators replaced these coastal salterns.
- Well salt : produced primarily in Sichuan, most famously at Zigong, but also to some extent in Yunnan. Deep borehole drilling technology tapped subterranean salt pools, sometimes to the depth of half a mile, which also produced the natural gas used to boil it. However, even by the end of the 19th century, Sichuan produced only 8% of China's salt.
- Lake salt : produced from salt water lakes in Western China and Central Asia using the same evaporative techniques as for sea water.
- Earth salt : found in sand from the dried beds of ancient inland seas in Western areas and extracted by rinsing it to produce brine.
- Rock salt : found in caves in Shaanxi and Gansu. Song Yingxing, the Ming dynasty technology writer, explains that in the prefectures where there is no sea salt or salt wells, people find “rocky caves which produce salt by themselves, its color being like that of red earth. People can freely obtain it by scraping it off without refining it.”
Ancient China, Qin and Han dynasties
In the 3rd century BCE, the expansionist and innovative Qin dynasty, in addition to organizing the Sichuan basin water control system at Dujiangyan, discovered that the salt pools which had been used for many centuries were actually fed from deep under the ground, the remnants of an ancient inland sea. The governor of Shu, Li Bing, ordered first that the pools be made deeper, then that wells be dug, and eventually that narrower and more efficient shafts be sunk. By the end of the 2nd century CE, workers had devised a system of leather valves and bamboo pipes which drew up both brine and natural gas, which they burned to boil the brine.
Before the Qin's wars of unification in 221 BCE, salt was produced and traded widely and presented as tribute to the courts of the regional states. 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. The dialogue raised both practical questions about the effectiveness of taxes and moral questions about the nature of government. Guan Zhong argued that direct taxes created resentment among the people, but extolled indirect taxes, such as those on salt and iron:
The Qin dynasty and the succeeding Han dynasty still left salt production and distribution to merchants and local rulers. However, their profits rivaled the central government's own treasury in size and also took salt workers off the tax rolls. The central government took notice. 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. Fifty or so foundries were established, each using hundreds or even thousands of convict or conscript laborers.
After Emperor Wu's death, his successor convened a court debate in 81 BCE, called the “Discourses on Salt and Iron.” These debates again revealed a sharp disagreement over the purpose of government. The Legalists, or the Reformists, argued that the state rather than private merchants should organize trade and realize the profits. Confucian moralists replied that a minimalist government was best and argued that for the state to make a profit was to steal from the people and to undermine morality: “trade promotes dishonesty.” The Legalists won the debate; salt provided a major part of government revenue for the remainder of Han rule.
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.
Tang, Liao and Song dynasties
The principles of official supervision and merchant transportation formed during the Tang, Liao, and Song dynasties.In the 6th and 7th centuries, the Tang government attempted to control markets and the economy directly, but after a period of success, the expense of suppressing the Anshi Rebellion in the 750s drained the treasury at just the time as the government's loss of local control made it difficult to collect the land tax and other direct taxes. Officials looked for ways to raise revenues which did not depend on direct control of production and retail sales.
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. The Huai river ran through Northern Jiangsu, the location of coastal salt marshes which were the major source of salt. Liu realized that if the government could control these areas, it could sell the salt at a monopoly price to merchants, who would pass the price difference on to their customers. This monopoly price was an indirect tax which was reliably collected in advance without having to control the areas where the salt was consumed. Liu created a Salt and Iron Commission whose revenues were particularly important since the central government had lost control of the provinces. Even better, the revenue originated in the south, where it could be safely used to buy grain to ship to the capital, Chang'an, by river and canal. In the last century of Tang rule, salt provided more than half of the government's annual revenue and prolonged its life, for a government which managed to control the salt production areas, the canal, and the capital was hard to dislodge. The basic principles of "official supervision, merchant transportation" established at this time lasted fundamentally unchanged until the 20th century. The high price of salt enforced by the monopoly, however, also created an opening for local bandits and rebels who could finance their activities by smuggling salt. Huang Chao, for instance, the late Tang rebel, was a failed exam candidate who became a salt merchant.
In the Song dynasty, the 11th century minister Wang Anshi used state policies to expand the rural economy with crop loans and to reduce social inequality by bringing farmers into the commercial economy. In order to finance these goals, Wang relied on methods like expanding the state's monopoly on salt. Wang's allies had his rival, the poet and official Su Shi, arrested for "defaming the emperor." Su confessed to having written this poem:
The poet admitted that to write of an old man who had no salt was to point to the harshness of the imperial salt monopoly.
The profitable monopoly again survived criticism and was refined for new uses. In the salt marshes of the Huai valley, some 280,000 families worked for the state and were required to sell fixed quotas of salt at low prices. Workers who were forced into debt fled or joined the army.
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. Yet the benefit to the central government was limited by regional administrators who intercepted salt revenues for their own purposes. The Khitan-led Liao dynasty adopted many traditional institutions of Han-ruled dynasties, had a Salt Monopoly Office which supervised salt production and distribution, though it is not clear how effective it was.