Salt (3 page)

Around 8000
B.C.
, women in the Near East began planting seeds of wild grains in cleared fields. This is usually thought to have been the beginning of agriculture. But in 1970, a University of Hawaii expedition to Burma, now known as Myanmar, reported finding in a place called Spirit Cave the remnants of what seemed to be cultivated vegetables—peas, water chestnuts, and cucumbers—carbon-dated to the year 9750
B.C.

Pigs came later, about 7000
B.C.
, because they would not simply graze on grass, and it took time to see the benefit of keeping animals for whom food had to be gathered. It was not until about 6000
B.C.
in Turkey or the Balkans that people successfully carried out the daunting task of domesticating the large, fast, and powerful aurochs. Through controlling their diet, castrating males, and corralling the animals into constricted spaces, people eventually turned the wild aurochs into cattle. Cattle became a mainstay food, consuming huge quantities of both grain and salt. The aurochs, fast-footed and ferocious, were hunted into extinction by the mid–seventeenth century.

Where people ate a diet consisting largely of grains and vegetables, supplemented by the meat of slaughtered domestic farm animals, procuring salt became a necessity of life, giving it great symbolic importance and economic value. Salt became one of the first international commodities of trade; its production was one of the first industries and, inevitably, the first state monopoly.

T
HE SEARCH FOR
salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines. A number of the greatest public works ever conceived were motivated by the need to move salt. Salt has been in the forefront of the development of both chemistry and geology. Trade routes that have remained major thoroughfares were established, alliances built, empires secured, and revolutions provoked—all for something that fills the ocean, bubbles up from springs, forms crusts in lake beds, and thickly veins a large part of the earth’s rock fairly close to the surface.

Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over. For millennia, salt represented wealth. Caribbean salt merchants stockpiled it in the basements of their homes. The Chinese, the Romans, the French, the Venetians, the Hapsburgs, and numerous other governments taxed it to raise money for wars. Soldiers and sometimes workers were paid in salt. It was often used as money.

In his 1776 treatise on capitalism,
The Wealth of Nations
, Adam Smith pointed out that almost anything of value could be used for money. He cited as examples tobacco, sugar, dried cod, and cattle and stated that “salt is said to be a common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia.” But he offered the opinion that the best currency was made of metal because it was physically durable, even if its value was as ephemeral as other commodities.

Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish. The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence on foreign oil. In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.

The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

PART ONE

A Discourse on Salt, Cadavers, and Pungent Sauces

A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches.

—Laozi quoted in the
Yan tie lun,
A Discourse on Salt and Iron, 81 B.C.

CHAPTER ONE

A Mandate of Salt

O
NCE I STOOD
on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, “We Chinese invented many things!”

The Chinese are proud of their inventions. All Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong, sooner or later give a speech listing the many Chinese firsts. Though rural China these days seems in need of a new round of inventions, it is irrefutably true that the Chinese originated many of the pivotal creations of history, including papermaking, printing, gunpowder, and the compass.

China is the oldest literate society still in existence, and its 4,000 years of written history begin as a history of inventions. It is no longer clear when legends were made into men and when living historic figures were turned into legends. Chinese history starts in the same manner as Old Testament history. In the Book of Genesis, first come the legends, the story of the Creation, mythical figures such as Adam and Eve and Noah, generations of people who may or may not have lived, and gradually the generations are followed to Abraham, the beginning of documented Hebrew history.

In Chinese history, first was Pangu, the creator, who made humans from parasites on his body. He died but was followed by wise rulers, who invented the things that made China the first civilization. Fuxi was first to domesticate animals. Apparently an enthusiast for domesticity, he is also credited with inventing marriage. Next came Shennong, who invented medicine, agriculture, and trade. He is credited with the plow and the hoe. Then came Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, who invented writing, the bow and arrow, the cart, and ceramics. Several centuries after Huangdi came Emperor Yao, a wise ruler who passed over his unqualified son and named a modest sage, Shun, his successor. Shun chose his minister, Yu, to succeed him. In 2205
B.C.
, according to tradition, Yu founded the Xia dynasty, and this dynasty, which lasted until 1766
B.C.
, enters into documented history.

C
HINESE SALT HISTORY
begins with the mythical Huangdi, who invented writing, weaponry, and transportation. According to the legends, he also had the distinction of presiding over the first war ever fought over salt.

One of the earliest verifiable saltworks in prehistoric China was in the northern province of Shanxi. In this arid region of dry yellow earth and desert mountains is a lake of salty water, Lake Yuncheng. This area was known for constant warfare, and all of the wars were over control of the lake. Chinese historians are certain that by 6000
B.C.
, each year, when the lake’s waters evaporated in the summer sun, people harvested the square crystals on the surface of the water, a system the Chinese referred to as “dragging and gathering.” Human bones found around the lake have been dated much earlier, and some historians speculate that these inhabitants may also have gathered salt from the lake.

The earliest written record of salt production in China dates to around 800
B.C.
and tells of production and trade of sea salt a millennium before, during the Xia dynasty. It is not known if the techniques described in this account were actually used during the Xia dynasty, but they were considered old ways by the time of this account, which describes putting ocean water in clay vessels and boiling it until reduced to pots of salt crystals. This was the technique that was spread through southern Europe by the Roman Empire, 1,000 years after the Chinese account was written.

About 1000
B.C.
, iron first came into use in China, though the first evidence of it being used in salt making is not until 450
B.C.
by a man named Yi Dun. According to a passage written in 129
B.C.
, “Yi Dun rose to prominence by producing salt in pans.” Yi Dun is believed to have made salt by boiling brine in iron pans, an innovation which would become one of the leading techniques for salt making for the next 2,000 years. The legend says that he worked with an ironmaster named Guo Zong and was also friendly with an enterprising wealthy bureaucrat named Fan Li. Fan Li is credited with inventing fish farming, which for centuries after was associated with salt-producing areas. The Chinese, like later Europeans, saw that salt and fish were partners. Many Chinese, including Mencius, the famous Confucian thinker who lived from 372 to 289
B.C.
, were said to have worked selling both fish and salt.

T
HROUGHOUT THE LONG
history of China, sprinkling salt directly on food has been a rarity. Usually it has been added during cooking by means of various condiments—salt-based sauces and pastes. The usual explanation is that salt was expensive and it was stretched by these condiments. A recurring idea throughout the ancient world from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, fish fermented in salt was one of the most popular salt condiments in ancient China. It was called
jiang
. But in China soybeans were added to ferment with the fish, and in time the fish was dropped altogether from the recipe and jiang became
jiangyou
, or, as it is called in the West, soy sauce.

Soy is a legume that produces beans, two or three in a two-inch-long furry pod. The beans can be yellow, green, brown, purple, black, or spotted, and Chinese cooking makes a great distinction among these varieties. Jiangyou is made from yellow beans, but other types are also fermented with salt to produce different pastes and condiments. In China, the earliest written mention of soy is in the sixth century
B.C.
, describing the plant as a 700-year-old crop from the north. Soy was brought to Japan from China in the sixth century
A.D.
by Chinese Buddhist missionaries. Both the religion and the bean were successfully implanted. But the Japanese did not make soy sauce until the tenth century. Once they did learn, they called it
shoyu
and industrialized it and sold it around the world.