Summary: This painting is an illustration of how salt was produced during the Song Dynasty. According to Eugene Anderson’s reading on the Traditional Medical Values of Food in China, salt was one of the five important flavours besides sour, bitter, sweet and pungent, that governed ancient foodways and philosophies of food in China. Thus it is crucial to analyse how salt was produced, distributed and used in imperial China to better understand the historical importance of salt in China’s food heritage.
Key Points
- Salt & Imperial China’s political Economy
- The Bureaucratization of Salt Production
- Technology of Salt production
Painting Title
Salt from Shanxi Province. In the original sequence, there were four depictions of sea salt manufacture illustrating Xieyan 解鹽 (Salt from Xiechi Lake 解池, Shanxi province). Here they are combined into two. This not only made the images more compact, but also saved carving additional wood blocks.
© Library of the Needham Research Institute
Extracted from Wang Shumin and Gabriel Fuentes. “Chinese Medical Illustration: Chronologies and Categories,” in Imagining Chinese Medicine by Vivienne Lo et al. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018.
Bibliography
Wang Shumin and Gabriel Fuentes. “Chinese Medical Illustration: Chronologies and Categories,” in Imagining Chinese Medicine by Vivienne Lo et al. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018.
Esson M. Gale. “Public Administration of Salt in China: A Historical Survey.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 152 (1930): 241-51.
Eugene Anderson. “Traditional Medical Values of Food.” In The Food of China, 229-43. Yale: Yale University Press, 1988.
Joseph Spencer. “Salt in China.” Geographical Review 25, no. 3 (1935): 353-66