I grew up by the sea when I was a child. Open your eyes and you can see the sea through the window. Seawater is the raw material for drying sea salt. After many complicated processes, it shows crystal clear sea salt through drying.
Salt is a necessity for human survival. The preparation of sea salt has a history of thousands of years, which has had an important impact on the history and economy of China. The drying of Xiangshan sea salt has very typical technical characteristics, which is the epitome of thousands of years' traditional sea salt making skills in China and an intangible cultural heritage with historical and cultural value.
Speaking of drying salt technology, it has a very long history in manual technology, and its products are closely related to people's daily life and industry.
In the history of drying salt in Xiangshan, there was a method of frying salt by indigenous method in Tang Dynasty, and a method of scraping mud and throwing ash to make brine in Song Dynasty, which was boiled and crystallized. People in the Yuan Dynasty called drying salt "boiling wave". From the Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty, the pan-drying crystallization method was introduced from Zhoushan, and then the cylinder-drying crystallization method was introduced in the late Qing Dynasty, which became a major change in salt-making technology. After 1960s, the flat beach salt drying method was successfully tested, and new technology was adopted. Manual operation was gradually replaced by machines, and the traditional salt drying technology gradually withdrew from the historical stage. Until the early 1990s, a few salt fields in old salt areas such as Jinxing and Fantou still maintained the coexistence of manual and mechanical operations. For more than 1000 years, the salt-drying area has been distributed in the coastal areas of the county, starting from Cang Qian in the north, and winding for more than 200 miles from Juexi to Shipu and Sidu in the south, including the kitchen. After the founding of New China, the salt area (field) was abandoned after several adjustments. By the end of 1970s, Guo Chang, Hua 'ao, Baiyanshan, Xinqiao and Danmen had formed five key salt fields. The total area is nearly 30 thousand mu, nearly ten times more than the original salt land.
Therefore, drying salt in Xiangshan has many cultural heritage values, and inheriting and protecting its traditional skills is of great significance to local culture, education and economic construction.
My grandfather used to be a traditional salt-drying man in Xiangshan. My grandfather's family went to jinji village under the Venus in Shipu. When I was a child, I saw many salt fields, endless salt fields. I was shocked at that time.
Although grandpa has left me, I still often think of the scene of grandpa drying salt, and I can see the whole process of drying salt around him from the moment I can remember. Salt is made of seawater as the basic raw material, using white mud (salty mud) or lime soil (mud) appearing in offshore beaches, combining solar energy and wind evaporation, making brine by showering, and then crystallizing by solar energy and wind energy to make finished salt with different thicknesses. High-quality salt still has solid fingers that will not break, and the cube is angular, transparent and white. There are more than ten procedures in the whole process, which are purely manual and seemingly simple but reflect wisdom.
1. Develop beach fields: build offshore ponds to resist tide, and build gates to absorb tide and release light; Dig ditches and build Dream Valley as the boundary to form a square beach field. The ditches around the field store seawater (and dig several ponds to store tide at the same time).
2. Lime-made soil: firstly loosen the mud in the beach field with a knife, then break the mud into pieces with a shovel, and then pull the mud into fine powder with a bamboo pole, which is as fine as ash. Pick out the seawater in the pond, sprinkle it evenly with a wooden spoon to make the mud (ash) absorb the salt in the water, sprinkle it again at noon and then bask in the sunset, gather the mud (ash) with a knife and clamp it with wooden boards to form a dam to prevent it from raining at night. It's sunny the next day, and it's still flat. The method is the same as before. Generally, from the second day to the third day in midsummer and the fourth day in autumn and winter, mud (ash) is full of salt.
3. Brine making: Build an earthen circle, such as a cabinet, at a convenient position in the center of the beach, which is eight feet long, six feet wide, two feet high and three feet deep, and it is called ash slip. Drill a well next to the chute, which is eight feet deep. The chute is paved with short pieces of wood, and then dozens of thin bamboos are laid on the wood, which are covered with firewood ash. Then, the threshed ground mud (ash) is filled in the chute and used firmly. Then cover the grass ash with straw, and the seawater in the pond splashes on the grass ash, so that it slowly seeps into the well, which forms salty brine (fresh water brine). The measurement of salt water salinity depends on the fluctuation of shilian. Later, the salt pan was covered with firewood ash, and seawater was introduced into the salt pan to absorb its salt. When the ashes are dry, they are swept into piles. If you repeat it for two days, the ash will be full of salt. Then pick the ash until it leaks into the bowl, and fill it with seawater until it leaks low, which is light salt water.
4. Crystallization: first, the arrow method is used to set up a mud furnace, put it on an iron plate and an iron pot, inject brine for heating, and stir the Gleditsia sinensis powder and half bran into the brine to form salt instantly. The second is to bask in the sun, and choose the middle section of Yantian to form grids (each grid is 50 ~ 100 square meter). Compacting the soil in the grid, paving broken cylindrical blocks, dividing the grid, injecting fresh brine into the grid, and concentrating and crystallizing the brine into salt by sunlight and wind.
It is reported that Xiangshan has preserved a large number of poems, proverbs, plays and other literary and artistic works about salt. In 2008, Xiangshan's "sea salt drying technique" was included in the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.