Salt is an important ingredient of daily diet and people cannot live without it. It can help the human body to keep active, so they can farm and work. We can pickle the food with salt to prevent it from spoiling. Food can be shipped to other places after being pickled. People started to know the importance of salt.
Because of its necessity, salt was traded in royal courts in ancient China, and in old days, the Chinese courts earned most of their revenues by salt business. 50-80 percent of their revenue was from selling salt. Meanwhile, courts forbidden private salt selling channels. Because selling salt was a huge business, courts did not allow potential traders to become strong. If salt smugglers got caught, they would get serious punishments.
In my opinion, selling salt was an important way for courts to control people because they needed salt every day. In other words, emperors controlled people’s living. The courts could earn enough revenue to continue ruling, while local rebel powers struggled to grow because they were earning little money.
Salt is not just a cheap ingredient we see today, but it was a strong ruling measure in the past, and we can say that most of Chinese dynasties built their foundation on salt.
