A County Made Out of Salt

Baodi's local saying is that the salt office came before the county, and the record supports it. In the third year of Tianfu, 938, the Later Jin ceded the Sixteen Prefectures to the Liao, and the Liao set up Xincang town on this ground. Salt was already the reason the place mattered: after the middle of the Tang, the Tianjin region had become a route for grain and cloth moving north, with salt works at Lütai and salt and storage facilities at Baodi. A place that administers salt is worth more to a state than a place that grows grain, which is why the office preceded the county by more than two centuries.

The county was made by moving people. In the twelfth year of Dading, 1172, the Jin took 15,000 households from the eastern part of Xianghe County and established Baodi County, with its seat at Xincang town, a first magistrate named Wang Yan bearing the honorific Zhenwei General, and an earthen wall built around the seat. The name is a sentence about salt: the county was called Baodi because salt is a treasure of the state, and the phrase takes the sense of storing it as one stores the classics of the capital. A name that translates roughly as precious as a hill is a fiscal statement.

The year after the county was founded, its salt administration was consolidated. In the thirteenth year of Dading, 1173, the salt inspection office and the Yong salt office were merged into the Baodi Salt Office, one of the seven salt offices of the Jin, with a supply territory covering the Central Capital circuit. That is the clearest statement of what the place was for: not a market town that happened to have salt, but an administrative centre for distributing a state monopoly across a circuit. At the 2020 census Baodi had 722,367 residents, and the Chaobai Xin River now runs through the whole district, past ground that has been organised around salt for most of its recorded history.