Salt (56 page)

The Last Salt Days of Zigong

I
N FEBRUARY 1912,
ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.

Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman Empire or Egypt with the last pharoah abdicating in 1912. For China, the following century has been a period of transition—dramatic change and perpetual reevaluation.

After 1912, the new Chinese republic struggled economically at a time when World War I was consuming the treasuries of Europe, blocking loans that might otherwise have been available for a young and embattled government. With Western encouragement, the Chinese went back to one of the old ideas of the emperors. Salt could fill their treasury.

In April 1913, the new Chinese government obtained a Western loan from the Quintuple Group of Bankers of £25 million. The entire revenue of the salt administration was put up as security to repay the loan. The salt administration that the republic inherited from the emperors was elaborate but extremely corrupt. In order for it to regain credibility in the eyes of Western bankers, the Chinese had to place a foreigner in charge of purging the system. An Irishman named Sir Richard Henry Dane was hired to be chief foreign inspector to the Chinese government. Amusingly, in the hindsight of history, Dane’s great qualification for this post was that he had been inspector general of the Salt Excise in India at a time when Indian salt policy was still considered an enormous success. Dane himself freely admitted that in India local salt had not been able to compete with Liverpool salt, but what was viewed as the important accomplishment in India was that the administration had derived enormous revenue from salt.

Nicknamed “the salt king,” Dane seems to have been a British colonial cliché, complete with bushy mustache, walking stick, and a reputation for big-game hunting. According to a 1917 issue of the American magazine
Asia
, when the Chinese offered him the position, he had been about to embark on a two-year “hunting trip in the wilds of Africa.”

Interviewing the new republic’s new salt king,
Asia
magazine described Dane as “shaggy and blustering.”

“I suppose you Americans know nothing about Chinese salt or its administration,” he began a bit testily, as he finished a scone and set down a cup of tea in his comfortable apartment in Peking.

In the old administration, salt was taxed along the road from producer to consumer. To cross Hubei Province, one had to pay forty-two different taxes. In theory, salt production was a government monopoly, but in practice China was too large for the government to control all salt production, trade, and transport. Instead, it merely tried to control commerce, by authorizing an elite group of merchants to transport the salt from place of production and then taxing the transportation. These elite firms, known as Yuen Shang, were usually family owned and either rented out these rights or maintained them as a family monopoly from generation to generation. In Chinese folk literature, the salt smuggler is always a hero fighting the evil and corrupt salt administration. The villain of the story is often not the government but the Yuen Shang.

Salt merchants amassed great wealth and liked to display it. Both Shaanxi Province, north of Sichuan, and Shanxi Province, north of that and near Beijing, are famous for elegant mansions built by seventeenth-century salt merchants. In Suzhou, a city of canals some fifty miles west of Shanghai, best known for its silk merchants, the gardens that have become one of China’s leading tourist attractions were built by salt merchants.

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.

D
ANE 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.

A
T 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.