In the past few years since I joined the Xiangshan Intangible Cultural Heritage Volunteers, I have gradually realized that the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage skills is becoming more and more important. As time goes by, more inheritors will pass by. .
I have grown up by the sea since I was a child. As soon as I open my eyes, I can see the sea through the window, and seawater is the raw material for making sea salt. After many complicated processes, it is dried and then becomes Crystal clear sea salt.
Salt is a necessity for human survival. The production of sea salt has a history of thousands of years and has had an important impact on Chinese history and economy. Xiangshan sea salt drying has very typical technical characteristics and is the epitome of thousands of years of traditional Chinese sea salt production skills. It is also an intangible cultural heritage with historical and cultural value.
Speaking of sun-salt craftsmanship, it has a very long history among handicrafts, and its products are closely related to people's daily lives and industrial production.
The history of sun-dried salt in Xiangshan is that in the Tang Dynasty, salt was fried using native methods. In the Song Dynasty, there were scraping mud brine and throwing ash to make brine, and decoction and crystallization. People in the Yuan Dynasty called sun-dried salt "boiling". Starting from the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, the plate-drying method of crystallization was introduced from Zhoushan, and in the late Qing Dynasty, the vat-drying method of crystallization was introduced, which became a major change in the salt production process. After the 1960s, the flat beach drying method was successfully tested, new technologies were adopted, and manual operations were gradually replaced by machines. The traditional salt drying technique gradually disappeared from the stage of history. Until the early 1990s, a few salt fields such as Jinxing and Fantou in the old salt areas still retained the coexistence of manual and mechanical operations. For more than a thousand years, the salt-drying areas have been distributed in the coastal areas of the county, starting from Qiancang in the north, turning from Juexi River to Shipu in the south, and the four capitals, circuitous for more than 200 miles, are surrounded by kitchens and houses. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the salt areas (fields) were adjusted and renovated several times. By the end of the 1970s, five backbone salt fields were formed: Changguo, Hua'ao, Baiyanshan, Xinqiao and Danmen. The total area is nearly 30,000 acres, which is nearly ten times larger than the original salt land.
Therefore, Xiangshan sun-dried salt has many cultural heritage values. Inheriting and protecting its traditional skills is of great significance to the construction of local culture, education and economy.
My grandpa is a traditional salt dryer in Xiangshan. His house is in Jinji Village, Jinxingxia, Shipu. When I was playing at Jinxing’s house when I was a child, I saw many salt fields, endless salt fields. That's when I was shocked.
Although my grandpa has left me, I often think of the scene of my grandpa drying salt. For as long as I can remember, I can see the whole process of drying salt next to my grandfather. Salt is made from seawater as the basic raw material, and uses the white mud (salty mud) or gray soil (mud) that appears on the beach near the beach. It is combined with sunlight and wind evaporation to make salt brine through methods such as drenching and splashing, and then through sunlight, wind energy, etc. The method crystallizes to produce finished salts of different thicknesses. High-quality salt is still solid and unbreakable, its cubes are corrugated and angular, and it is transparent and white. There are more than ten steps in the entire process, which is purely manual. It seems simple but reflects wisdom.
1. Develop a beach: build a pond offshore to control the tide, build a sluice to receive the tide and drain away desalination; dig ditches to build a beach as a boundary, forming a square beach, and surround the beach with ditches to store seawater (and dig several pools at the same time) (Tide storage)
2. Making ash soil: First use a sharpener to peel the mud from the pine beach, then use a bamboo pole to smash the mud into pieces, and then use a bamboo pole to scoop the mud into thin, ash-like shapes. Pick up the sea water in the pool, sprinkle it evenly with a wooden ladle, so that the mud (ash) absorbs the salt in the water, splash it again at noon, and then dry it in the sun until sunset. Use a sharpener to gather the mud (ash), and use wooden boards to clamp it into a long embankment shape. Protect against night rain. The next day it was fine, so I still dug and bulldozed it, and used the same method as before to loosen it. Generally, within two to three days in midsummer and four days in autumn and winter, the mud (ash) is already full of salt.
3. Making brine: Build a circle of earth like a cabinet at a convenient location in the center of the beach, eight feet long, six feet wide, two feet high and three feet deep. It is called gray. Open a well next to the slide, eight feet deep. Lay several sections of short wood flat on the bottom of the slide. Then lay dozens of thin bamboos on the wood, cover it with firewood ash, and then fill the slide with mud (ash) from the drying ground. Then cover the ashes with straw, pick up the sea water in the pond and pour the grass ashes on it, so that it slowly seeps into the well, and it becomes salty brine (fresh brine). The saltiness of brine is determined by the sinking and floating of stone lotus. Later, the salt fields were spread with firewood ash, and seawater was introduced into the salt fields to absorb the salt content. The ash is dried in the sun and then swept into a pile. Repeat this process for two days. The ash is full of salty content. Then pick up the ash into the drain bowl, fill it with sea water until the drain is low, and it will become fresh brine.
4. Crystallization: The first is the arrow method. Set up a clay stove, put an iron plate and an iron pot on it, pour brine into it and heat it, stir the powdered saponins and half bran into the brine, and it will become instant Salt. The second is to bask in the open air. Choose a moderate area in the salt field and form a square grid (each grid ranges from fifty to one hundred square meters). The soil in the grid is compacted, paved with broken jar pieces, divided into grids, and fresh brine is injected into the grid. Sunlight and wind are used to condense and crystallize the brine into salt.
It is reported that a large number of poetry, proverbs, dramas and other literary and artistic works about salt have been preserved in Xiangshan. In 2008, Xiangshan’s “sea salt drying technique” was included in the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage lists.