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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: ::as there are five phenomena in weather, so are there in the world five tastes… A man would not be unwell if he abstained for an entire year from either the sweet or sour or bitter or hot; but deprive him of salt for a fortnight, and he will be too weak to tie up a chicken…〔Yingxing Song, translated and introduced by E. Tu Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. ''T'ien-Kung K'ai-Wu; Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century.'' (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966). Reprinted: New York: Dover, 1997. ISBN 978-0486295930 (Ch Five, "Salt," pp. 109-113 )〕 ==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.〔Endymion Wilkinson, ''Chinese History: A New Manual'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), p. 447〕 * ''Well salt'' (; ''jǐngyán''): 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.〔Joseph Needham, Colin Ronan, “Salt industry and deep borehole drilling,” in Brian Hook and Denis Twitchett, eds., ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China.'' (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1991; ISBN 052135594X), pp. 446-447.〕 However, even by the end of the 19th century, Sichuan produced only 8% of China's salt.〔 * ''Lake salt'' (; ''chíyán''): produced from salt water lakes in Western China and Central Asia using the same evaporative techniques as for sea water.〔Tora Yoshida, translated and revised by Hans Ulrich Vogel, ''Salt Production Techniques in Ancient China: The Aobo Tu'' (Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1993)(p. 4 )〕 * ''Earth salt'' (; ''tǔyán''): found in sand from the dried beds of ancient inland seas in Western areas and extracted by rinsing it to produce brine.〔 * ''Rock salt'' (; ''yányán''): 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.”〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Salt in Chinese history」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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