Zigong

Mr. Ye told me that an open-air exhibition hall will be built on the new excavating site where visitors can have some sort of Indiana Jones experience.

One ancient dam was built way back to transport salt out of Zigong to the rest of the country. Actually, this city is so closely knitted with salt that even its name derives from two different kinds of salt well separated by this river here.

The well salt business in Zigong could be traced back to Han Dynasty almost two thousand years ago. As the salt business prospered, numerous villages and townships were developed during the past millennium. It's not an exaggeration that almost every community here has something to do with salt.

The boom brought by salt business can be seen literally everywhere in this small town. For example, check out these elaborate buildings, they are known as tongxiang huiguan, sort like a chamber of commerce and clubhouse built by salt businessmen from the same province. During their spare time, they would just gather inside the clubhouse, gamble away the easy money they made from dealing with salt. And if they got too carried away and lost all their money, don't worry. there was a pawnshop just right across the street.

Why did they build such a high threshold? Well, basically, there are two main reasons: first of all, to keep good fortune in and secondly, keep women out. In old times, women wore long skirts and had those small wrapped feet, so it's physically impossible for them to cross the high threshold. Why do they want to do that, we'll find out later.

The site protected by the high threshold is Shenhai salt well, one of the original salt wells and salt workshops left from the 19th century. Well salt is still produced here the old way.

Host: I started to get the hang of it. This is a critical step of making salt, remove the puff from the surface. I really enjoy doing this at this time of the year coz it keeps me warm. The boiling temperature of salt is over 200 degree Celsius. Can you imagine working in summer in this workshop? So in the past, men working in this workshop didn't wear any clothes. That is why women were not allowed to enter!

The production method is quite self-explanatory - using natural gas to boil the bittern until there is only salt left. During the boiling process, soymilk would be added into the bittern to separate foreign substances.

For hundreds of years, Zigong people adopted this simple, yet time consuming and labor intensive method to produce salt. According to the worker here, it takes about eight hours to distill one pan of salt bittern, and yield about 80 kilograms of table salt.

But it is said to be the best table salt you can find in the whole country, at least for making Sichuan style pickles.

Like in most cases, the people sitting in the office always make the most money. The manager's desk was located at a great position to monitor the wooden derrick and the workshop.

The towering wooden derrick of the salt well is almost a symbol of Zigong. Used to be all over the area, nowadays only a few were kept as a tribute to the past.