Chapter 529: Digging a Pit

An hour later, at the salt flats where the Wei River meets the sea. This was the First Emperor of Qin's first sight of the ocean. A wind carrying the briny tang of seaweed brushed his beard and hair. Gazing out, a vast blue-green expanse filled most of his vision, great waves surging as if the sun, moon, and stars all emerged from within. Seeing this scene for the first time, he found it nothing short of magnificent, sweeping away all the pent-up frustrations in his heart!

But his gaze did not linger long on the sea's surface. Very soon, the First Emperor was drawn to the salt flats on the beach, crisscrossed with paths and divided into plots like farmland.

"Explain," the First Emperor said, looking at Heifu and pointing at these salt fields. "What is all this?"

Heifu reported: "By Your Majesty's command, I set out to reorganize the salt administration of Jiaodong. I discovered that Jiaodong's salt production is not even half of what it was under the Tian Qi! There are two reasons for this."

He began pointing out the problems one by one: "First, pirate raids have left the coast unsettled. The artisans and convict laborers of the salt flats have scattered, and the scale of operations is far smaller than before."

"Second, for nearly a thousand years, the people of Qi have continuously boiled the sea to make salt, exhausting the firewood along the coast. Now, wood must be hauled from hills further inland, making the cost extraordinarily high…"

Heifu was right. In this era, sea salt was basically all obtained through boiling and decoction. It is said that the first person to invent this was called "Susha-shi," a chieftain of the Lai Yi people.

As Heifu imagined it, Susha-shi was probably a foodie. While boiling clams and snails in a clay pot by the sea, he accidentally boiled the water dry, only to find a layer of crystallized sea salt left at the bottom of the pot. He reached in for a taste, and from then on, the door to a new world was opened. The locals worshipped him as the "Salt Progenitor," who became the supreme god of the savory faction.

Heifu still remembered the scene from a few months ago, when he first visited the coastal salt flats after suppressing the Tian clan rebellion in Yeyi: Channels drew in seawater during high tide into large, dug-out pools. Convict men and women carried wooden buckets, hauling the seawater bucket by bucket to the brine-boiling stove houses. Inside were two rows of stoves sunk into the ground, with clay cauldrons set atop them. A constant stream of people brought in firewood, burning and boiling the sea day and night without pause. The entire coastline billowed with thick, rolling smoke…

The method was much like refining sugar. First, it was boiled in large cauldrons to create a high-concentration brine, then transferred to smaller cauldrons. The final result was a white, hemispherical mass—this was the finished pan-salt. It was then smashed and broken apart into loose sea salt for sale.

The prime season for boiling salt was from the tenth month to the first month each year. This was the agricultural off-season, and nearly all the common people along the coast of Qi would be mobilized to cut firewood, carry water, and boil the sea for salt. In three months, they could produce thirty-six thousand zhong of salt!

By the time of the Tian Qi, this figure had tripled, reaching a hundred thousand zhong annually. Jiaodong's output was roughly fifty thousand, but the price grew more and more expensive because the consumption of timber was simply too great.

Heifu continued: "Salt is a government monopoly. After deducting the base cost, a heavy tax is levied on top of it. As a result, the price of the official salt produced is as expensive as sugar or honey!"

Brown sugar from Nan Commandery was still considered a luxury item at present. This comparison made the high cost of sea salt abundantly clear. Of course, the reason it was so expensive was largely due to the court's crushing salt tax. Using the same method, the price of private salt was only a third or even a fifth of the official salt. The common people were no fools; they would certainly rather secretly buy private salt.

With costs rising daily and the market squeezed out by private salt, expanding the reproduction of Jiaodong's official salt naturally became empty talk. This was also the reason why official salt production in Jiaodong was increasingly in decline.

The First Emperor nodded. Heifu's analysis hit the current ills right on the mark. It was not just Jiaodong; the other coastal commanderies all had similar problems to varying degrees. The Qin dynasty's system of state salt and iron monopolies had run into a brick wall in these places.

Heifu offered two solutions. The first was to intensify the crackdown on pirates and private salt. The second was to lower the cost of official salt, bringing its price down a little so that it could still be profitable.

"Thus, I thought of the method used to make salt at the Hua Ma Pool in Beidi Commandery—no need for boiling, simply obtained by the sun's rays and the wind's evaporation…"

In Heifu's imagination, salt was inherently soluble in water. Once the seawater dried up, wouldn't layers of salt just precipitate out? This was the solar evaporation method widely used in later generations.

But it was easier thought than done. The ancients were no fools; why would they abandon a simple and easy solar evaporation method to use a boiling method that consumed roughly four hundred jin of firewood to produce one zhong of salt?

After conducting field investigations and consulting artisans, Heifu learned that boiling sea salt was truly a matter of having no other choice. The salinity of seawater was far lower than the brine of the Anyi Salt Pool or the Hua Ma Pool. Solar evaporation would take far too long, and the winter sun during the agricultural off-season was too weak to make it feasible.

After making inquiries, he discovered that some salt flats in Jiaodong, due to the increasingly tight supply of coastal timber, had already adopted a half-sun, half-boil method: imitating the well salt of Ba and Shu, they first stored the brine and let it evaporate under the sun for a cycle after autumn to increase its concentration, then boiled it once winter arrived. This reduced fuel consumption and lowered costs.

But to rely entirely on the sun? The weather along the coast was fickle. Perhaps just when the brine had thickened and success was nearly at hand, a sudden rain from the sky would ruin all the previous efforts.

Heifu needed to find the most effective and fastest method to pioneer the solar evaporation method. In his previous life, he hadn't studied science or engineering and knew nothing about these things. So, he put up a notice and tricked the fangshi—those who specialized in studying the transformations of yin and yang, who dealt daily with cinnabar and such substances, purifying dew and refining elixir pills, conducting what were essentially physics and chemistry experiments—into coming. But then he hauled most of them off to the seashore and made them brainstorm solutions together with the artisans.

The fangshi were instantly dumbfounded. They had originally wanted to seek the "Way of Immortality" for the emperor, but now they were thrown in with lowly craftsmen and convict laborers, dealing with seawater and mud all day. Of course, they were unhappy. But after a few protesters were detained by Heifu on the grounds of disobeying orders, they could only obediently get to work.

Three cobblers with their wits combined surpass Zhuge Liang. After several months of intensive study, the fangshi and artisans actually came up with a brilliant method!

"Your Majesty, please come this way."

Heifu led the way, guiding the First Emperor deeper into the salt fields by the sea. The first things they approached were pits and hollows, but these were not for evaporating salt; they were for making mud…

These pits, dug on the beach, were now filled with seawater left from the last high tide. A group of convict men and women stood barefoot in the fields, using toothed wooden rakes to harrow the ground in crisscrossing patterns, mixing the seawater with the sand and mud. Under the blazing sun, this mixture turned into hardened, compacted clumps, which were then carted away piece by piece to the rear.

Heifu said, "This is the first step of salt production."

The assembled officials were puzzled, because those hardened, blackish mud clumps seemed to have nothing to do with white, crystalline salt.

Heifu next led them to several parallel channels and pointed, saying, "These were built back in the time of the Jiang Qi, and have lasted for centuries. Their purpose is to use the tides, allowing seawater to flow through the channels into storage ponds, making it convenient to draw water for boiling."

The group followed the channels to the edge of a massive water storage pond. Here, the seawater was diverted into shallower evaporation pools. After several days of exposure to the blazing sun, the water level had slightly decreased.

"This is the second step of salt production."

Beside each evaporation pool stood an animal-powered waterwheel. Blindfolded donkeys walked in continuous circles, driving the waterwheel to ceaselessly lift water from the pond and deliver it to the next station: the filtration pools.

The filtration pools were shaped much like terraced fields. At the outlet of each tier, several layers of bamboo matting were set, held in place by fixed bamboo frames and padded with bamboo slips and thatch. The hardened mud slabs, rich in salt content, were placed in the middle. After the seawater drawn from the storage pond entered the filtration pools, it flowed from the higher tiers to the lower ones. Before entering the next tier, it was filtered once by the difference in water level, and this process was repeated over and over, filtering through five or six cycles before it was done. The entire process took as little as one day or as long as two.

Heifu said this was the third step of salt production: brine leaching. The entire process was lengthy, but after filtering for one to two days, the lowest filtration pool would yield a brine of relatively high concentration! To achieve this by relying solely on wind and sun would take over ten days!

"Wait a moment. The Grand Provisioner says that this seawater, after being filtered several times, becomes saltier and saltier?"

The Fifth Rank Grand Master Ziying, who was accompanying them, grew more and more confused as he listened. This contradicted the common sense he knew. Under Qin law, descendants of the Qin could not be registered in the clan rolls without merit. Although Ziying was the son of Chengjiao, the Lord of Chang'an, his father had betrayed the state in his early years, making Ziying's background quite awkward. It was only by earning some merit in the army that he had been exceptionally promoted to Fifth Rank Grand Master. He often saw soldiers drink unboiled water, but they liked to filter it once through hemp cloth to make it look clearer.

Ziying knew that the murkier the water, the clearer it became after filtering. In his mind, the taste should also become more bland. Why was it that here at the filtration pools, as one went lower and the water was filtered many times over, it became clearer, yet the taste became saltier instead?

"The Governor of Jiaodong is not wrong; it truly does become saltier and saltier."

When Zhang Cang had come with Heifu to inspect earlier, he hadn't believed it either. But after taking a sip of the water from the topmost and bottommost filtration pools, the contrast was stark. The former was merely ordinary salty and astringent, while the latter nearly choked him to death. Thus, he had no choice but to accept this fact.

He had also pondered the reason and seemed to have a sudden realization, but Heifu asked Zhang Cang to keep silent for the moment. Here, he still wanted to dig a little pit for the fangshi…

Faced with this question, the assembled ministers looked at each other, and the emperor also harbored doubts.

Heifu, however, smiled. "If it were not strange, how could it be called a wondrous art and ingenious technique?"

With that, he looked toward Lu Sheng and Han Zhong, the two men trailing at the end of the procession, and said:

"This method was devised through the collective wisdom of the Jiaodong fangshi. I, too, do not understand the reason behind it. Perhaps it involves the profound mysteries of the transformations of yin, yang, and the five phases? I have long heard that Master Han Zhong understands yin and yang and is skilled at transforming substances. Might I trouble you, Master, to dispel our confusion? What do you say?"

…

PS: I tried my best, but after researching all night, I only managed to write one chapter. I'm so slow I want to cry. The second chapter will probably be done around 1:30 AM. If you can wait, then stay up with me.

This salt-sunning method is different from the modern one. It uses the ancient five-step method from Xiechi and Hainan, which is the brine-leaching method. It seems to have more reference value.

(End of chapter)