Throughout the length of China’s seacoast, from as far north as beyond Shanhaikwan, south to Canton, salt is manufactured from sea water in suitable places.  In Szechwan province, we learn from the report of Consul-General Hosie, that not less than 300,000 tons of salt are annually manufactured there, largely from brine raised by animal power from wells seven hundred to more than two thousand feet deep.

Hosie describes the operations at a well more than two thousand feet deep, at Tzeliutsing.  In the basement of a power-house which sheltered forty water buffaloes, a huge bamboo drum twelve feet high, sixty feet in circumference, was so set as to revolve on a vertical axis propelled by four cattle drawing from its circumference.  A hemp rope was wound about this drum, six feet from the ground, passing out and under a pulley at the well, then up and around a wheel mounted sixty feet above and descended to the bucket made from bamboo stems four inches in diameter and nearly sixty feet long, which dropped with great speed to the bottom of the well as the rope unwound.  When the bucket reached the bottom four attendants, each with a buffalo in readiness, hitched to the drum and drove at a running pace, during fifteen minutes, or until the bucket was raised from the well.  The buffalo were then unhitched and, while the bucket was being emptied and again dropped to the bottom of the well, a fresh relay were brought to the drum.  In this way the work continued night and day.

The brine, after being raised from the well, was emptied into distributing reservoirs, flowing thence through bamboo pipes to the evaporating sheds where round bottomed, shallow iron kettles four feet across were set in brick arches in which jets of natural gas were burning.

Within an area some sixty miles square there are more than a thousand brine and twenty fire wells from which fuel gas is taken.  The mouths of the fire wells are closed with masonry, out from which bamboo conduits coated with lime lead to the various furnaces, terminating with iron burners beneath the kettles.  Remarkable is the fact that in the city of Tzeliutsing, both these brine and the fire wells have been operated in the manufacture of salt since before Christ was born.

The forty water buffalo are worth $30 to $40 per head and their food fifteen to twenty cents per day.  The cost of manufacturing this salt is placed at thirteen to fourteen cash per catty, to which the Government adds a tax of nine cash more, making the cost at the factory from 82 cents to $1.15, gold, per hundred pounds.  Salt manufacture is a Government monopoly and the product must be sold either to Government officials or to merchants who have bought the exclusive right to supply certain districts.  The importation of salt is prohibited by treaties.  For the salt tax collection China is divided into eleven circuits each having its own source of supply and transfer of salt from one circuit to another is forbidden.