A Quarter of the Country's Sea Salt

Salt works are a way of harvesting weather, and the Changlu field exists because the weather here is right. The works lie on the west shore of the Bohai Bay, where the land is flat and the beach wide, where the rainy season is short and spring warms quickly, and where wind and sun evaporate seawater faster than rain can dilute it. The field runs for 370 kilometres along the coast of Tianjin and produces more than three million tonnes of sea salt a year; the Binhai account gives about 2.4 million tonnes for the works within the new area. The two figures come from different accounts of the same industry, and each account puts the Changlu share at a quarter of the national sea salt output.

The name is older than the industry's modern organisation. Changlu first appears in the Shuijing and its commentary, and it was given because the place lay by water with much reed. In the Yuan dynasty an office was set up here to oversee sea salt production, and from that point Changlu stopped being only a place name and became the name of the famous salt district of the whole Bohai coast, covering parts of what are now Tianjin and Hebei. The district is treated in the sources as one of the oldest and largest salt regions in China and the most famous of the seven sea salt producing areas.

Salt is one of the reasons Tianjin exists in the form it does, and the connection is fiscal rather than picturesque. At the end of the nineteenth century the salt of the Changlu works was a principal source of revenue for Tianjin, which for a time made the city the economic centre of northern China. Over two thousand years the district played a part in daily supply, in state revenue, in the rise of the modern salt chemical industry and in the development of both Tianjin and Hebei. Its Hangu field, one of the older parts, became one of the first Chinese time-honoured brands named by the Ministry of Commerce in 2006.