salt in chinese history
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 9:39 pm
reading about where that "salt shop manual" came from led me to this article on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_in_Chinese_history
so basically a shit ton of economic activity revolved around the salt industry. no idea why a taijiquan handwritten book would be in a salt shop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_in_Chinese_history
so basically a shit ton of economic activity revolved around the salt industry. no idea why a taijiquan handwritten book would be in a salt shop
Lake salt from Jilantai (Inner Mongolia, China)
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.
Complication and frustration in the Ming dynasty
Beginning almost immediately after the founding of the dynasty in 1368, the Ming government found it hard to supply its armies in Central Asia. Officials granted merchants who delivered grain to the frontier garrisons the right to buy salt certificates (鹽引 yányǐn) which entitled them to buy government salt at monopoly prices which they could then sell in protected markets. One scholar has called this salt-grain exchange a “unique combination of state monopoly and market initiative, bridging state and market.” The merchants, however, soon circumvented the system by selling the certificates to others rather than undertaking risky expeditions to deliver the salt, leading to hoarding and speculation.[27]
Lu (Rock Salt; Salt on Land)[28]
The system of government production and merchant distribution required a strong and adaptive bureaucracy. To begin with, the Ming government inherited from the Mongols not a unified national system but a dozen or more regional monopolies, each of which had a different production center, none of which was allowed to distribute salt to the others. Officials tried to control production by continuing the Yuan system of registering hereditary salt producing households (竈户 zàohù). These families were not allowed to change their occupation or where they lived and were required to produce a yearly quota of salt (in the beginning, a little more than 3,000 catties).