According to the records in The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, salt production could be divided into roughly six types: sea, pool, well, earth, cliff, and sandstone—namely, Sea Salt, Pool Salt, Well Salt, Earth Salt, Cliff Salt, and Mineral Salt. Naturally, large-scale production relied mainly on Sea Salt.
It was then produced using the solar evaporation method.
The general process was to make use of tidal flats and establish salt fields. When the tide came in naturally, seawater was channeled into the fields. After being exposed to the sun and wind again and again, the seawater evaporated and grew more concentrated until it reached saturation and crystals formed. That yielded basic Sea Salt.
Its biggest, biggest advantage—
HUGE! OUTPUT!
After all, seawater was...
in a sense, inexhaustible.
Unfortunately, Shen Tang's territory wasn't near the sea. Never mind seawater—if Heaven ever took a bad mood, and she hadn't prepared for drought in advance, she might have to sink wells everywhere just to scrape through the crisis. Where would she get Sea Salt?
The common folk mostly ate Mineral Salt. The production methods were primitive, and the coarse salt they produced was mottled in color, with a strange, bitter taste.
And Well Salt?
That stuff cost too much to produce. To dig for salt, one often had to sink a well ten zhang deep or even deeper before finding brine...
It tasted a little better than Mineral Salt, but the yield was low and the costs high.
Of course—
That wasn't a problem for Shen Tang.
What she had in abundance was manual labor.
Martial Gall Warriors were really useful.
Xun Zhen had once served as a local official, after all. He had plenty of experience governing a territory and had dealt with the salt trade, so he knew a fair