Duan Lian: Marine Culture and the Rise and Fall of Nanhui Salt Industry Video Shooting: Cao Junjie, Jiang Tsunami, Editor: Wu Ruoning Packaging: Zhou Pinglang (02:56)
The gang body that runs through Shanghai is a natural coastline, and the land east of the gang body is all formed by sediment deposits, which is different from the west of the gang body.
Most of the land in Puxi, Shanghai today, was roughly landed during the Tang and Song dynasties. In the tenth year of Tang Tianbao (751), the Shanghai region had an independent administrative establishment, Huating County, which originated from three places, namely Kunshan, Jiaxing, and parts of Haiyan. Haiyan is a very old county, set in 222 BC, it is close to the sea, the salt pans face each other, stretching endlessly, hence the name.
The area of present-day Nanhui belonged to Changren Township in ancient times. From this map, it can be seen that after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, the land began to slowly extend and develop in a southeasterly direction. This also explains very well what is said in the Book of YueJie: "Lou Dong Ten Mile Pit, the ancient name Changren Pit, came from the sea. ”
Shanghai County during the Song and Yuan Dynasties
In the Yuan Dynasty, with the growth of the population, in the 29th year of the Yuan Dynasty (1292), the northeast of Huating County, Changren, Gaochang, Beiting, Xinjiang, and Haiyu 5 townships and 26 baodi were set up in Shanghai County. Since then, the administrative structure of the present-day Shanghai territory has undergone several changes, until 1958, the surrounding suburbs and counties were successively incorporated, thus forming the Shanghai municipality in the regional scope today.
In the fourth year of Qing Yongzheng (1726), Changren Township and Xiasha Salt Farm were carved out of Shanghai County to establish Nanhui County. In the 10th year of Qing Jiaqing (1805), part of Nanhui County and part of Shanghai County were set aside to establish a relatively independent administrative agency, the Chuansha Fumin Department. This was a relatively special administrative setup until it was changed to Chuansha County after the Republic of China. In 1993, Chuansha County merged with the Pudong part of downtown Shanghai and the Sanlin district of Shanghai County to form Pudong New Area. In 2001, Nanhui County was established as a district. In 2009, Nanhui District was abolished and merged into Pudong New Area.
Pudong has many interesting place names, such as Xiasha, as well as three stoves, six stoves, large groups, four groups, and salt warehouses. Are the large regiments and the fourth regiment a military organization, and are there troops stationed there? Do the three stoves and six stoves have anything to do with our farmhouse stoves in Pudong? It is inevitable that there will be these doubts when you see these place names. The last place name is "salt warehouse", which is more clear, and can be associated with salt at once.
Let me start with the first place name, "Xiasha". Among the emblems of Shanghai is the image of sand boats, which are the most typical marine transport vessels in Shanghai, and its official name is called anti-sand flat bottom boats. At that time, the coastal shipping route, especially the section from Shanghai to Tianjin, had a lot of dark sand. The so-called sand is a small piece of land that has not yet finally formed but will slowly be deposited into land. It may be submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide. These hidden sands pose a great threat to sailing ships. Because the bottom of the sand boat is flat, it is especially suitable for driving on the dark sandy route in the coastal area, so it is called "sandproof flat bottom boat". With the accumulation of sediment in rivers, some sand will be separated from the mainland to form islands, such as Chongming, and hengsha island that we are familiar with; some sand will form new land, such as xiasha, including Chuansha, so the place name with "sand" is particularly abundant along the coast of Pudong. Xiasha originally had a very elegant name called "Crane Sand", it is said that in ancient times, it was rich in cranes, which was a place where literati raised cranes, called "Crane". Then, when the salt field is set up in this place, the Xiasha salt field is formed. This salt farm was the largest in the two Zhejiang regions at that time, with the highest output, the best quality of salt, and the fame of Xiasha was also growing. In the Yuan Dynasty Chen Chun's "Boiling Wave Diagram", a set of very standardized and very advanced salt making processes in the Xiasha Salt Field at that time was introduced.
8 processes produced in the salt industry
As we all know, in ancient Times, Shanghai had three major economic pillars, the first was the salt industry, the second was the shipping industry, and the third was the cotton textile industry. To some extent, the salt industry should be the earliest to develop. Since the birth of human beings, there has been a history of using salt for a long time, and adding some condiments when cooking is not only to change the taste, but also to enhance their physique. In a certain sense, the use of salt is also one of the differences between humans and animals. As mentioned earlier, Haiyan County was established in 222 BC, during the reign of the Qin King in the late Warring States period. In the territory of present-day Shanghai, the Tang Dynasty set up a salt official, there was a centralized storage place, and five generations later, a salt farm was set up. Therefore, the salt industry should be the earliest of these three pillars. Although sand boats appeared in the Tang Dynasty, I personally believe that it was from the Yuan Dynasty that Zhu Qing and Zhang Xuan participated in the shipping of grain and gradually began to prosper. The cotton textile industry appeared later, the late Song Dynasty cotton seeds and cotton planting technology were imported into the Shanghai area, the Yuan Dynasty Zodiac Went to Hainan Island to learn the advanced weaving technology of the Li people, improve it, and return to Shanghai to promote it, thus setting off the peak of Shanghai's cotton textile industry.
After the establishment of the Xiasha salt field in the Song Dynasty, the salt industry reached its peak during the Yuan dynasty and the Ming Dynasty. During the Yuan Dynasty, an important measure was taken, called "merging stoves into regiments". Just talked about the three stoves, six stoves, this does refer to the pot and stove, but not for household use, but for cooking salt. People organize production around this pot stove, thus forming a production unit. However, this kind of production mode with stoves as a unit is still a relatively scattered situation, so the Yuan Dynasty began to form two or three stoves into a cluster, and set small-scale production into large-scale production. The regiment was organized and regulated in a certain way, and it was indeed a bit of a semi-militarized concept. According to current research, there are three sources of salt production: the first is recruited from the neighboring areas to the west, generally poor, desperate, and even unable to feed themselves; the second is the local war or disaster, who have fled to the desert; the third is the criminals and displaced people, who are of course forced. Their social status is relatively low, their status is hereditary, and they do tiring and heavy work. For these people, the government must regulate them and restrict their personal freedom to a certain extent.
As the coast moved east, the salt works themselves changed. The salt works were constantly relocated, and new salt works were established, thus forming a "new field", and later the management agency was moved from the new field to the large group. Although the salt people are very poor, the salt field is after all a place of commerce and trade, which opens the prelude to the construction of towns in the Nanhui area. The earlier town in Nanhui was Zhoupu, which later set up a salt field in Xiasha, and then came to Xinchang later, and there was also a large group. After the Ming and Qing dynasties, various institutions and buildings were left here. For example, although Liuzao is a township, it has its own local city god temple; there is also the Ningbo Guild Hall in Zhoupu, because of the development of trade and trade, there are more foreign merchants, thus setting up this kind of organization with the nature of a township association and the attributes of a trade association. Taking Xinchang as an example, after the Yuanming Dynasty, with the commercial trade, the market gradually prospered, gradually surpassing Zhoupu and becoming the largest town in Nanhui.
Xinchang Ancient Town
In the early days, Nanhui also had agriculture, and the agriculture in Nanhui was mainly bounded by Zhoupu and Xiasha. To the west is a relatively traditional agriculture, and to the east is dominated by salt farms to make salt. In the west, caotian or yousi land is under the jurisdiction of Changren Township, and is built in Bao and Tu; in the east, it is called Zaotian or Yansidi, which is under the jurisdiction of the Xiasha Salt Field, and is built with regiments and stoves. However, this land is close to the sea after all, and its degree of salinization is high, and it is generally not suitable for rice cultivation, but only suitable for dry crops. One of the more common crops is the cotton that was commonly planted in Shanghai after the Yuan and Ming Dynasties.
The Yuan Dynasty and ming dynasty were the peak of the Nanhui salt industry, and the output of the salt industry dropped greatly after the Ming Dynasty. First, as the coast moves east, it is more and more inconvenient to divert water, and the second is because the sea water is getting weaker and the concentration is not reached, resulting in an increase in the cost of salt production. The coast moved east, the sea became lighter, and the salinization of the land gradually decreased. Coupled with the production and life of the salt people in the past, the land west of Zhoupu and Xiasha has also become more and more mature. The original trenches that diverted seawater were excavated and turned into stove ports for small ships to navigate, and could also be used to irrigate farmland. By the time of the Republic of China, rice had even begun to be planted on the original saline and alkali land.
Before the founding of New China, most of the land in Nanhui was already completely dominated by traditional agriculture. In addition to rice and cotton, there are also cash crops, the more famous is nanhui dwarf vegetables, more famous is the peach, now Nanhui every year to hold a peach blossom festival. The land of Nanhui is very suitable for the cash crop of peaches, because its alkalinization and maturation degree are just right, the climate is good, and the peaches can grow well here. Nanhui peach is also a famous species, the source comes from Shanghai Gu's Luxiang Garden, after several generations of breeding and cultivation, there are now large group honey, Xinfeng honey famous varieties. A few years ago, Nanhui brought back from Japan the purebred "Dew Fragrance Garden Peach", which branched and scattered in the homeland and produced good fruits.
After the modern era, Shanghai's sand ship merchants participated in the establishment of the Steamship Merchants Bureau, becoming the first generation of modern shipping giants to go to the world, and the shipping industry also made Shanghai turn into the largest port in China. Ancient Shanghai, famous for its "quilts under the roof", has transformed from the original cotton producing area and hand-made textile town into the center of the modern machine cotton textile industry. Shanghai's shipping industry and cotton textile industry have created a glorious history in ancient times and modern times, and only the oldest salt industry seems to have declined.
In fact, the story of salt does not end in Shanghai or Nanhui. Although the output of the Xiasha salt field after the Ming Dynasty became lower and lower, and the production was gradually stopped after the Qing Dynasty, the salt plant mechanism was still there. By the middle and late period of the Republic of China, there were still 4 salt works in Shanghai, some of which were still in production. Salt is a state-controlled monopoly commodity, so salt taxes are quite high and profits are high. Shanghai is located between Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, Jiangsu and Zhejiang respectively set up institutions in Shanghai to collect salt taxes, after consultation 40% to Jiangsu, 60% to Zhejiang. The Beiyang government signed an aftermath loan agreement with the five banking groups of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Japan to pay off the debt with salt tax income, and the remaining amount is called "salt surplus", which is also a huge fiscal revenue, which has become a piece of fat that all forces covet and compete for. In order to be in charge of salt administration, the government of the Republic of China set up an agency dedicated to the salt tax in Shanghai, called the Songjiang Salt Tax Audit Institute.
Song Ziwen and Song Zi'an in a group photo
In 1927, the National Government of Nanjing was established, and began to reform the salt administration, and the New Salt Law was promulgated in 1931. At this time, Song Zi'an had just graduated from Harvard University with a master's degree in economics, and in August 1929, he was arranged by his brother Song Ziwen to become the manager of the Songjiang Salt Inspection Institute. Later, Song Ziwen formed a private armed tax police group during the salt tax collection process. The TaxAtion Police Corps was the most well-equipped unit in China at that time, and later made great achievements in the War of Resistance Against Japan. Judging from the stories of Song Ziwen and Song Zi'an, the story of salt is far from over. Today, salt is still an essential part of our daily lives. I believe that whether it is Nanhui or Shanghai, as a gift from God to us, we have a lot of stories to tell on the topic of salt.
(The author Duan Lian is an associate researcher at the Institute of History of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and this article is based on the author's lecture on "Nanhui - To the Sea: From a Water Town to a First-Class Coastal City" at the official lecture series of lectures in Modu and Xincheng on December 23, 2021, and has been reviewed by the author.) Compiled by Wu Ruoning, an intern of The Paper, and Linjie Wang, a reporter of The Paper)