Salt in Chinese History

Salt, salt production, and salt taxes played key roles in Chinese history, economic development, and relations between state and society. 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 tax on it (often called the salt gabelle) 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 because monopoly salt was more expensive and of lower quality, while local bandits and rebel leaders thrived on salt smuggling. Over time, however, this basic system of bureaucratic oversight and private management yielded revenue second only to the land tax, and, with considerable regional variation and periodic reworking, 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:

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:

As in other ancient centers of civilization, when agriculture replaced hunting, farmers, who ate little meat, needed salt for themselves and for their draft animals. 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. In the same region, the late Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046) produced salt on a large scale and moved it inland in "helmet shaped-vessels" (kuixingqi 盔形器). These pottery jars may have served as "standard units of measurement in the trade and distribution of salt".Oracle bones mention "petty officers for salt" (lu xiaochen 鹵小臣), suggesting that the Shang had officials who oversaw salt production and provisioning. The earliest surviving record of salt production in what is now China is a text from roughly 800 BCE which reports that the much earlier (and perhaps mythical) Xia dynasty reduced sea water for salt. There are reliable reports of the use of iron salt pans in the 5th century BCE. Early states often located their capital cities near ready sources of salt, a consideration which also affected locations in later times.

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