Salt (57 page)

The brine was piped to gas-heated pans in the boiling house. Then a ladle of ground yellow bean, soya, and water would be added. After about ten minutes a yellow scum would form on the surface and be skimmed off, ridding the salt of impurities with a simpler formula than Europeans ever found. After the brine had been boiled five or six hours to pure crystal, the salt was shoveled into a barrel and hardened.

In 1835, a new well, the Shen Hai well, was drilled in Zigong. At 2,700 feet, it struck natural gas. At 2,970 feet, the well reached natural brine, but the drilling continued down to 3,300 feet, making it at the time the deepest drilled well in the world. Twenty-four years later, an American would be cheered for the achievement of having drilled 69.5 feet in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The Chinese used oxen until 1902, shortly before Dane’s arrival, when coal-fired steam engines were introduced. In the nineteenth century, the Zigong ox herd was usually about 100,000 head. Because of the oxen, in Zigong, unlike most of China, beef, albeit very tough beef, was part of the working-class diet. At the rig where they labored, salt workers would boil the tough old ox meat until it was tender, and then they would add the most common Sichuan seasoning,
ma-la
.

Unique to Sichuan,
ma
is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called
huajiao
—with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties grow in Sichuan, clay red peppercorns and the more perfumey brown ones.
La
means “hot spice” and is accomplished with small burning red peppers. The combined seasoning, ma-la, defines the taste of Sichuan food.

Another specialty of Zigong salt workers was
huobianzi
. The tough thigh of an old salt well ox was cut by hand in a continuous paper-thin slice by slowly turning the leg. Some pieces could be two yards long. Zhang Jianxin, managing director of Sichuan Zigong Tongxin Food Corporation in Zigong, where huobianzi is still made today, complained that it is difficult to get a leg as tough as the legs from the old working oxen, but some farm animals too old to work are satisfactory.

The strips were seasoned with soy sauce and salt, then air dried and grilled over a low heat from burning ox dung. Today, a gas heater is used, but it is said that huobianzi that is cured over ox dung has “a special fragrance.” It is served with a vegetable oil containing hot peppers.

Meanwhile, the wealthy salt merchants went for more exotic fare. In China, the more obscure the ingredients and the more arcane the method, the more status the dish has. “Soaked frog” was a specialty for Zigong salt merchants. A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large jar of brine. Live frogs would be put in the jar, and they would desperately perch on the pieces of wood. The jar was closed and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened, and the frogs would be dead and dried on the wood but preserved because they had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed.

The salt merchants were also fond of stir-fried frog stomachs. Unfortunately, a frog’s stomach, however tasty it might be, does not go a long way. It is said in Zigong that to get one serving of fried stomachs, a cook would kill 1,000 frogs.

T
HE CHINESE CONTINUED
percussion drilling in Zigong even after the American oil industry had developed much faster techniques. Their homegrown technology was slow but reached depths that, even in the age of petroleum, were astounding. In the 1920s, the Chinese drilled a well to 4,125 feet, and in 1966, the Shen Hai well, a record breaker in 1835, was drilled even deeper to 4,400 feet, about four-fifths of a mile.

The Chinese character for
jing
, meaning “well,” is a depiction of a Zigong derrick. The derricks, towers of gray, weather-beaten tree trunks lashed together high in the air, rigged with bamboo leaf ropes, dotted the Zigong landscape the way oil wells do in petroleum cities.

In 1892, Sichuan salt makers discovered the layer of rock salt that feeds the groundwater under Zigong. Today, Zigong produces more rock salt than brine salt. But in the first few decades of the twentieth century, between 300 and 400 brine wells were operating in Zigong.

The beginning of the end for the ancient Sichuan salt industry came belatedly in 1943, when for the first time a rotary drill, bore a well in Sichuan. It took another twenty years for the change to become apparent. In 1960, Zigong was still a backward provincial town of a third of a million people living among medieval brine derricks. That year, the last percussion-drilled shaft in Sichuan was completed. Along with modern rotary drills and rock salt mining, Sichuan salt producers were soon using vacuum evaporators, making modern white salt with crystals of a uniform size.

It was in the 1960s that Zigong got its first “modern” public transportation. As brine boiling was fading, Sichuan engineers found a new use for the natural gas at the wells. Buses were built with giant gray bladders on the roofs, filled with the local natural gas. They started out on their routes with the huge rectangular bladder on top almost as big as the bus. The big bladder swayed and jiggled like Jell-O as the bus rounded corners, and then it gradually deflated, the gray bag sagging from the roof, as the gas was used up. Locals call the buses
da qi bao
, which means “big bag of gas.” The buses need frequent refueling. Today, with Zigong tripled in population, the old buses are considered an embarrassing eyesore, and the remaining ones are left with the undesirable rural routes.

The character
jing,
on Derrick brand soy sauce labels.

Brine well derricks in Zigong in the early 1960s. Photo by Yu Minyuan.
Zigong Salt History Museum

Z
IGONG IS NOW
a sprawling city of 1 million people, including residents of the suburbs. Stone-edged holes in the ground are all that remains of many wells. Only a few derricks are left standing in the hilly municipality, though many were not torn down until the 1990s, some as recently as 1998. Scholars struggle quixotically to save them, but these are not good times for landmark preservation in a China passionate about modernization. In 1993, two twin derricks, the symbol of Zigong, one 290 feet high and the other 284 feet high, were torn down. They were dangerously decrepit, and the government would not spend the money to repair them. “They didn’t understand the value, that these things are only in Zigong,” said Song Liangxi, a Zigong historian.

The Shen Hai well, the rugged old contraption of tree trunks and rocks, still operates. As with hundreds of wells that once pumped in Zigong, the threshold to the front gate is two feet high—to symbolically keep the wealth inside. The well has ten workers, who keep it operating twenty-four hours a day. A cable slowly lowers into the earth for several minutes and then emerges with a long wet bamboo tube that is held over a tub by a worker who pokes the leather valve at the bottom of the tube, releasing several bucket-loads of brine. The brine is still evaporated in pans heated by the gas from the well. In 1835, when the well was drilled, it had an estimated 8,500 cubic meters of gas. In the year 2000, the operators believed it had 1,000 cubic meters left.

The Shaanxi guild hall remained a guild hall until the fall of the last emperor. Then it became a local headquarters for the Chinese nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek. After the Communists came to power, Deng Xiaoping, a native of Sichuan who became secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, decided to make it a salt museum.

Today in Zigong, there are still some crumbling tile-roofed Chinese houses with the roof tips turned up in the southern style, but most of them are in disrepair, seemingly awaiting demolition. The new buildings seem kitschy spoofs on urban high-rise architecture. As in Beijing, historic monuments were torn down to make way for buildings that will never be completed, that remain concrete and exposed steel rods because the companies building them went bankrupt. But the guild hall is preserved as a national monument.

Of greater interest to the locals than the guild hall is the small amount of salt still made at the Shen Hai well. They call it flat pan salt and believe it is better for pickling than the industrial salt made in vacuum evaporators. Paocai and zhacai makers want flat pan salt for their pickled vegetables. It is sold in the Zigong market, but outside of Zigong, this medium-grained, untreated salt is becoming difficult to find. Zhang Jianxin at the Sichuan Zigong Tongxin Food Corporation wants flat pan salt for his huobianzi and other products such as
larou,
a traditional Sichuan cured pork. Zhang Jianxin’s recipe for larou is as follows:

Cut pork into pieces any size. Cover with salt and spices including huajiao, leave it a week, wash off the salt, hang it four feet above a charcoal fire and smoke it slowly for two days. Add peanut shells and sugarcane trimmings to the charcoal. People at home add cypress leaves.

But Zhang Jianxin has trouble finding a salt that he wants to use. “Vacuum salt is too fine-grained and also they add chemical things I don’t like,” he said. The added chemical to which he referred is iodine, which he said has a taste that “is bad for our product.”