Salt Works on the Yuncheng Salt Lake

The lake is the reason there is a city here. Yuncheng Salt Lake lies at the northern foot of the Zhongtiao mountains, is the largest lake in Shanxi, and is the third largest inland lake of the sodium sulphate type in the world. Its 154 square kilometres are made up of several basins and flats: Jie Pond, Xiao Pond, Duck Pond, Tangli Beach, Beimen Beach and Wuxing Lake. Jie Pond is the largest, 97 square kilometres of water 321 metres above sea level, 20.8 kilometres from end to end. Salt has been taken from these flats for more than four thousand years, under the names Jie salt, Lu salt and Hedong salt, and the tax on it was once an important part of state revenue.

The lake has no river feeding it. The Sushui, the one stream in the neighbourhood, empties into Wuxing Lake in the west, which then drains into the Yellow River, so the flats are supplied by groundwater and by weather rather than by current. That weather is the mechanism. The annual average temperature is 13.6 degrees, rainfall 559.3 millimetres, and evaporation 2,550 millimetres, close to five times the rain. Water arriving on the flats leaves again as vapour, and what it carried stays behind as halite and mirabilite. The lake is a natural brine pan: the industry built on it is still a base for chemical raw materials, and the holiday name for the place is China's Dead Sea.

Salt revenue did not only fill a treasury; it produced a town. At the end of the Yuan dynasty a walled city was begun here in 1356, the sixteenth year of the Zhizheng era, under the salt commissioner Na Haidejun. It was first called Phoenix City, and it was renamed Yuncheng because it was the seat of the salt transport office; the name means something like the City of Salt Luck. The English account of the city makes the same connection, saying the town was built at the end of the Yuan and renamed for the City of Salt Luck. Salt from these flats was an important source of revenue in ancient times and helped shape regional trade routes.