Salt Trade and Rebellion in Medieval China -

 

We tend to take salt for granted nowadays.

 But salt was big business for much of history and that was especially the case in Tang China.

 Controlling its production and the massive financial gains from its distribution was often high on the agenda of ruling dynasties, rebels, and brigands alike.

 Furthermore, salt is essential to

 human nutrition, and in medieval China it was used in the preservation of meat, fish, and vegetables, which was a huge factor in enabling the land to sustain ever-larger populations.

 Thus, the salt industry was crucial to the welfare of the people, the health of the economy, and in turn, the stability of the state.

 It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the medieval Tang regime tried to heavily control and regulate salt. While this was good for state coffers, it had a negative knock-on effect that created discontent in various layers of society.

 And for certain organized malcontents, the allure of the vibrant illegal trade in contraband salt could offer a path to riches or, in some cases, pave the way for grander, imperial ambitions.

 But how could there be such a thing as “contraband salt”, and why was trading in salt like this illegal to begin with? This is the story of how two salt smugglers spelled the death blow for the once-grand Tang dynasty… The Tang regime managed to hold onto power after the devastating 7-year long An Lushan Rebellion, that plunged much of the northern part of the empire into chaos. But the dynasty was severely weakened politically and economically.

 Quarrelling political factions competed for control and influence over court politics, which created a huge financial burden on the state, because the bloated Tang government was already extremely expensive to run.

 Making matters worse, the aristocracy and Buddhist monasteries used the economic hardship left in the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion to buy up large tracts of land, which significantly decreased the

 amount of land that was taxable.

 This interruption of collection of the land tax only exacerbated Tang China’s financial woes.

 To arrest the decline and prevent

 the country from falling into chaos, the regime pivoted to a different mechanism of taxation. In 758 AD the Tang court implemented several policies to enforce a government monopoly on the sale of salt and iron.

 In the case of the lucrative salt industry, the regime recognized the strategic value of the vast coastal salt marshes in Northern Jiangsu, which were connected via big rivers and canals to the interior. By controlling the salt marshes, the government could set up their own monopoly price, which was an indirect tax they could collect in advance from producers.

 The Commission was formed at the top to oversee the scheme, headed by a Salt Commissioner. It controlled the Regional offices, which were the only place where salt was to be sold by licensed producers. The salt was then resold only to licensed merchants at marked up prices, who then passed on the high cost to consumers.

 It was the peasants who suffered the most because they had to spend a higher percentage of their incomes on basic food goods. The key element of the scheme was the use of merchants, for they could travel and reach more consumers in areas of the country where the central government had limited authority, which in turn increased the effect of the salt policy.

 With this, the Tang regime was quickly able to recover its finances and in just a few years after the monopoly was established, salt taxes provided more than 50 percent of the total government revenue. It is no exaggeration to say that the prosperity and stability of the dynasty itself rested on its income from salt.

 Naturally, those officials who had been allocated to oversee the production of salt, supervise trading, and enforce the monopoly, held some of the most powerful and highly regarded positions in the empire. They had such influence that their story, immortalized in statutes, edicts and legal precedents, is one that is told often.

 There is another side to this story, however, one that is more difficult to piece together.

 As pervasive and well-established as the salt regulations were, they were not full proof. Outside the watchful eyes of the officially regulated markets in the cities, there sprawled a vibrant and nationwide unofficial network of those involved in the smuggling and bootlegging of contraband salt.

 After all, the government mark-ups on salt made it considerably more expensive, so there were always many who bought and traded in salt in secret, selling at beneath the marked-up

 price yet at a price that could

 still secure themselves a tidy profit.

 Against this backdrop, Huang Chao —a man who would one day pronounce himself Emperor—was born into a family of several generations of salt merchants, while Wang Xianzhi (d. 878)—the leader of the uprising that would enable Huang to do so—entered the risky vocation of salt smuggling as a youth.

 So, while they would eventually join in arms to overthrow the state, the two men could be said to have started out on opposing sides of the salt industry. However, the world of salt was probably far less clear-cut than the surviving laws and treatises would have us believe.

 Corrupt officials and licensed traders had ample opportunity to take advantage of their position by taking their own cut of the salt, particularly when times were hard and the legislative infrastructure fragile, as was most definitely true in the final century of doomed Tang.

 The revival of the governmental salt monopoly, necessary as it may have

 been to rebuild the country, did not just raise the price of pure salt.

 It had also had a knock-on

 effect on all those essential

 everyday preserved foods that required salt to make. It was as unpopular among the people as it was with merchants like Huang Chao’s family, who made their living through salt.

 No doubt, in these tough times, both the bands of salt smugglers and the dodgy merchants selling salt at a cheaper rate enjoyed a Robin Hood-like rapport with the common folk. They made lives easier for the needy and were popular for it.

 And with popularity came influence and support.

 When a severe famine exacerbated the situation in the 870s, smuggler Wang Xianzhi’s moment had come.

 Combining his support among the people with his guerilla know-how from years as a cross-district underground smuggler, he put together a band of rebels, seized control of the local region and launched an uprising against the Tang state.

 At first, support seemed only to snowball, with even some imperial army units joining his cause.

 Someone else who joined up at this point was Huang Chao. Huang’s family background in the salt industry had given him much insight into the popular resentment towards state taxes. His biography in the New Book of Tang (an official history completed in 1060) shows him repeatedly deploying a line of rhetoric about the unfairness of taxes and the cruelty of the powers-that-be, to garner support for his rebellion.

 The New Book is surprisingly even-handed in its depiction of the rebellion. It describes the many atrocities committed by Wang and Huang’s rebels, yet does not shy away from pointing out various instances of looting and destruction by imperial troops, the double-dealings and back-and-forth loyalties of the state’s generals as they switched from one side to the other, and the disorganized and ill-thought-through stratagems of the panicking regime as it scrambled to suppress the widespread uprising.

 Much like in the salt trade, the boundaries between the two sides were far from clear-cut, with bandit squads joining the imperial side and imperial troops joining the bandit side as the years unfolded. At one point, the court schemed to buy Wang Xianzhi himself over to the Tang side by offering him an official position. Wang Xianzhi tentatively accepted, but Huang Chao, who seems to have been the more idealistic of the pair, was incensed, both by Wang’s willingness to settle for anything less than a regime change and probably also the fact that he himself had not received an official pardon as a clause of the deal.

 It is said that there was a punch-up between the two, which ended with Huang storming out leaving the beaten Wang on the floor. Thereafter, the two bands parted ways. Soon, in 878, Wang’s group was defeated and he was killed, while Huang’s fought on for a few more years. At one point, they took the capital and Huang declared himself the emperor of a new, Qi dynasty.

 But this was short-lived; before long Huang and his ever-shrinking bandit army were back on the retreat. According to the New Book of Tang, in 884, as it became clear that all was lost, Huang spent his last days lamenting his failure to install a less corrupt regime.

 Rather than face capture by the enemy, he was beheaded by his nephew at his own request.

 In spite of its eventual success in putting down the rebellion, the Tang dynasty proved unable to recover from the widespread destruction, famine and unrest the Wang-Huang uprising left in its wake. It fell a decade later in 906.

 However, the governmental controls on salt and the illicit trade that ran parallel to it did not end with the dissolution of the Tang. In fact, they would remain a feature of Chinese history for around a millennium thereafter. The connection between the salt trade and rebellions also lingered on, and of salt traders-turned-rebels, Huang Chao is only the most famous; there were several more comparable figures to come.