Zigong Salt History Museum, Salt production heritage museum in Ziliujing District, China
Zigong Salt History Museum occupies a traditional guildhall and displays thousands of tools, drilling equipment, and devices used in salt mining operations. The exhibits span multiple halls showing how extraction and production methods evolved over time.
Wealthy salt merchants from Shaanxi built this guildhall between 1736 and 1752 during Emperor Qianlong's reign when the salt trade was booming. The building itself stands as evidence of the tremendous wealth and influence these traders had accumulated.
The guildhall was built as a gathering place for merchants from Shaanxi province who dominated the salt trade and wanted to maintain their cultural identity. Walking through it today, you sense how important it was for these traders to have a space where they could conduct business and preserve their regional connections.
The museum is centrally located in Zigong, making it easy to reach from most parts of the city. You can interact with displays and actually handle some of the historical mining and production devices to better understand how workers used these tools.
Workers here used natural gas from underground deposits to heat salt brine and transform it into solid salt, a technique that was highly innovative for its time. This method gave them a major advantage over salt producers in other regions who relied on slower techniques.
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