Taiwan’s Salt Industry: 338 Years of Sun-Drying and How It Found a New Existence After Industrialization

30-Second Overview: Taiwan’s salt has never simply been a white powder sitting on the dining table. In 1665, Chen Yonghua channeled seawater into salt pans at Saikou in Tainan; more than three centuries later, industrialization, labor shortages, and imported salt brought the final batch of sun-dried salt to a close in 2002. Today, the Jingzaijiao Salt Field in Beimen and the Zhou Nan Salt Field in Budai, Chiayi, still dry salt, preserving not just a product, but a way of life co-created by the sea, wind, land, and salt workers. ¹

In 1665, in the Tainan area of Saikou during the Ming Zheng period, Chen Yonghua faced a practical problem: the boiled salt was bitter, and the island could not rely indefinitely on external supplies. He thus built salt pans, turning seawater into brine and letting the sun complete the final step. This decision is later regarded as the beginning of Taiwan’s sun-dried salt industry. ¹

This story is easily told as a beautiful fable about “ancestors adapting to nature,” but salt fields are actually a sophisticated system of land engineering. Seawater first enters evaporation ponds, where moisture gradually decreases; the brine is then sent to crystallization ponds. The size, slope, dikes, and monsoons of the ponds all affect whether salt can crystallize at the correct time. In 1824, salt merchant Wu Shangxin established the Zhou Nan Salt Field in Budai, Chiayi, dividing the salt fields into water pans, earth pans, brine vats, and brick-and-tile pans, making the production process easier to manage. ¹

📝 Curator’s Note: Salt fields are not a patch of “empty land”; they are a factory that breaks down seawater into many stages, with the sky serving as the roof.

Salt Comes from More Than Just Seawater

Before large-scale salt fields emerged, people across Taiwan had already obtained salt through different methods. Data compiled by the Archives and National Memory Agency notes that the Tao people of Lanyu (Orchid Island) scrape salt layers from rock surfaces after the tide recedes; the Siraya people process salt soil during the dry winter season, using water washing and boiling to extract salt. These methods were small in scale, yet they remind us that the history of the salt industry should not begin only from the day the state established salt offices. ¹

Once salt pans and salt fields became institutionalized, the coastline was re-cut into a series of spaces that could be measured, taxed, purchased, and transported. The object of a salt worker’s labor was not a pot of salt, but dikes, pond grids, brine, and crystallization time. Every link required balancing seawater, monsoons, and human labor. ¹

This explains why the ruins left by salt fields are particularly prone to misreading. Without workers, tools, and transport routes, tile pans appear merely as fragments on the ground. Only when placed back into the production process do they become a technology that can still be understood. ^{1 2}

Salt Was First a Necessity of Life, Later an Industry

The Qing dynasty’s salt system made this matter more institutionalized. In 1726, the Qing government established salt offices to manage the salt monopoly, prohibiting private drying and selling. In 1798, the method of drying salt shifted from sand pans to water plots and plot pans, changing the production structure of salt fields. ¹

The salt monopoly was not merely managing a condiment. Salt was a material for preserving food, maintaining daily life, and supporting state finance. Academic research places the salt industry back into Taiwan’s history of industrial development: it once connected livelihood, finance, transport, and industry simultaneously, and cannot be understood solely through the “salty taste” of local snacks. ²

After Taiwan became a province in 1885, Liu Mingchuan reorganized salt administration organs and sales networks. The reform did not immediately solve production and supply-demand issues, but it began to treat the salt industry as one requiring institutions, capital, and logistics, rather than just a craft produced individually by salt workers on the coast. ²

The Monopoly System Connected Salt Fields to Industry

In 1895, Japan began governing Taiwan. Initially abolishing the salt monopoly and allowing free production and sales, the result was market disorder, and many salt fields fell into abandonment. In 1899, the Governor-General’s Office restored the salt monopoly; by 1901, Taiwan’s salt production had returned to the scale of the Qing period, with surplus salt exported to Japan. ¹

This turning point illustrates a counter-intuitive fact: monopoly is not merely a restriction, but also a infrastructure that binds production sites, purchasing, transport, and sales together. When Japanese industry increased its demand for industrial salt after World War I, Taiwan’s salt fields were no longer just supplying household table salt, but were pulled into the chains of chemical industry and imperial trade. ^{1 2}

In the 1930s, the Taiwan Salt Corporation applied to develop centralized earth-pan salt fields in Qigu to supply industrial salt. The South Japan Salt Industry Corporation, established in 1938, acquired large amounts of land in Budai, Qigu, and Kaohsiung; in 1941, Taiwanese salt fields were forcibly acquired. The expansion of salt fields thus included both technological upgrades and the redistribution of land and production power under colonial rule. ¹

📝 Curator’s Note: Salt fields look quiet, but they have never been places without power; who can dry salt, who can sell it, and who gets the land determines not only the taste of salt, but who can remain living by the sea.

Post-War Salt Supported Industrialization While Exposing Its Limits

After the war, the original salt companies were taken over and reorganized. Taiwan successively had salt fields in Lugang, Budai, Beimen, Qigu, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. In 1953, the Taiwan Salt General Plant of the Salt Affairs Bureau under the Ministry of Finance was established, responsible for the production and operation of the nation’s salt industry. ¹

Industrialization caused salt demand to increase rapidly. Data compiled by the Archives and National Memory Agency shows that between 1952 and 1961, agricultural and industrial salt usage rose from 35,000 to 245,000 metric tons; between 1962 and 1965, although Taiwan’s annual production occasionally exceeded 500,000 metric tons for several consecutive years, output remained heavily affected by extreme weather. ¹

The government began construction of new salt flats in the First and Second Zones of Qigu in 1971, completing them in 1977. This was the only new salt field built entirely by Taiwanese after World War II; the fan-shaped salt fields of Qigu, often seen today, emerged during this engineering project. ¹

In the same era, Taiwan also built an ion-exchange membrane electrodialization refined salt plant in Tongxiao. The Tongxiao Refined Salt Plant, commissioned in 1975, did not need to wait for sunny days and could supply table salt and some industrial salt. The future of the salt industry thus split into two paths: one remained by the sea, relying on sunlight and manual labor; the other entered factories, replacing weather with stable industrial processes. ¹

Mechanical Harvesters Could Not Save Sun-Dried Salt

In the 1970s, the young and middle-aged population moved into the industrial sector, and salt fields began to face labor shortages; manual sun-dried salt had high costs and unstable quality. Starting in 1980, the Salt General Plant sent personnel to the US, France, and Australia for inspection; in 1983, it purchased salt harvesters and washing equipment, and the Budai Salt Field began trials of full mechanization. ¹

Mechanization made salt fields more concentrated and larger, facilitating machine access, but conflicted with Taiwan’s climatic conditions. Salt field operations continued until 2002; after the last mechanical harvest was completed, all salt fields in Taiwan closed; the history of Taiwan’s sun-dried salt, calculated from 1665, had run its course for the 338 years noted in the archives. ¹

This end cannot be simplified as “tradition losing to modernity.” What truly drove it away from the coast was the combined pressure of labor shortages, weather limits, costs, quality requirements, and global salt trade. After Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization in 2003, salt imports were liberalized; Taiwan Salt shifted to supplying industrial needs with imported salt, while table salt was supplied by the Tongxiao Refined Salt Plant. ¹

📝 Curator’s Note: The endpoint of sun-dried salt was not a single machine pressing a stop button, but the entire nation deciding to obtain the same white substance in another way.

Re-drying Is Not About Bringing Back the Old System

Post-2003 re-drying faced an already changed market. The state no longer supplied all industrial needs through the former salt field system, and local salt fields could not sustain themselves relying solely on old large-scale production and sales; they had to renegotiate production, education, tourism, and cultural assets within the same field. ^{1 3}

This transformation has an easily overlooked cost: re-drying requires reorganizing pond grids, repairing tools, arranging tours, and ensuring salt workers’ knowledge can be learned by the next generation. Zhou Nan Salt Field combines re-drying with environmental education; Jingzaijiao turns carrying and harvesting salt into experiences, both answering the question of “who will maintain this landscape.” ^{4 5 6}

What they do differs from the industrial salt plants’ pursuit of stability, scale, and efficiency. The value of sun-dried salt lies not in its production volume being sufficient to replace imports, but in allowing people to see the process of a product from seawater to crystallization, and enabling the locality to transform a finished industrial memory into work that is still happening. ^{5 3}

Jingzaijiao Leaves Behind Tile Pans, Not Just Sunsets

After production ceased, salt fields did not immediately become simple landscapes. The Jingzaijiao Tile Pan Salt Field in Beimen, Tainan, resumed drying salt, making carrying salt, harvesting salt, and salt field tours visible and learnable work. The Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Coastal National Scenic Area Management Office currently still lists traditional sun-drying, carrying, and harvesting as field experiences, indicating that the object of preservation is not a static ruin, but a technology that can still be operated. ⁴

The Cultural Heritage Network lists the Beimen Jingzaijiao Tile Pan Salt Field as a case study of a historical building; its value lies in the rarity and local characteristics of tile pan salt fields, not merely in the word “ancient.” ⁷

Official local cultural articles describe Jingzaijiao as one of the oldest existing tile pan salt fields still operating by traditional brine-drying sun methods, linking this continuous production to the 1665 starting point of the salt industry. This narrative is suitable for understanding the direction of preservation, but “360 years” is a generalization by that official article regarding southwestern coastal salt industry culture and should not be mistakenly written as if every existing salt field has produced continuously for 360 years. ³

Zhou Nan Leaves the Questions After Cessation on Site

The timeline of the Zhou Nan Salt Field in Budai, Chiayi, is more direct. The Ministry of Culture’s Museum Island records that Zhou Nan Salt Field was established in 1824, ceased drying in 2001, received funding from the Cultural Heritage Regeneration Project for reconstruction in 2008, resumed re-drying, launched salt products in 2013, and developed environmental education and sustainability actions. ⁶

The focus here is not to arrange the old salt field as a nostalgic background, but to acknowledge that re-drying requires new work. the Taiwan Tourism Bureau places Zhou Nan Salt Field’s experiences, the Salt Thanking Festival, and high-quality local-flavor salt in the same field; the salt field has become a node for local activities and education again, rather than a space containing only old photographs. ⁵

Salt field rehabilitation thus has its own realistic limits. Small-scale sun-dried salt cannot replace the supply of national industrial salt, and cultural experiences and product sales cannot pretend to be equivalent to the industrial scale of the past. What it can do is put “how salt comes” back into human hands, allowing visitors to see the relationship between wind direction, brine, tile pans, and salt workers’ movements. ^{5 6}

Museums Collect Salt Workers’ Lives, Not Just Salt

The Taiwan Salt Museum in Qigu opened in January 2005, positioned as a venue for the education, research, and promotion of salt industry culture. The museum’s official introduction positions it as a thematic hall preserving hundreds of years of salt industry cultural assets; a dedicated article from Taiwan Sugar Corporation records that the building’s white pyramid shape echoes the salt mountain, using wax figures, architectural models, real objects, salt industry history displays, and oral history to present the work and life of salt workers. ^{8 9}

The Tainan Tourism Network’s detail page places salt workers drying salt, salt well sentries, salt transport trains, salt village clinics, local elders’ oral accounts, and yellowed photographs in the same narrative group. The importance of these objects lies in returning the salt industry from production tables to a society where people commuted, sought medical care, and took trains to transport salt. ¹⁰

The museum’s current open status also reminds us that cultural preservation is not a one-time solution. Both the Tainan Tourism Network and Taiwan Good Travel information indicate that the Taiwan Salt Museum has been closed for renovation since January 10, 2022, with the reopening date subject to official announcements; therefore, this article does not write visitation information as a fixed recommendation. ^{10 11}

Salt Fields Have Not Returned to the Past

After 2002, Taiwan did not re-establish an industry supplying national industrial needs through sun-dried salt. What returned is something else: Jingzaijiao leaves tile pans and drying actions in Beimen; Zhou Nan returns re-drying, environmental education, and the Salt Thanking Festival to Budai; Qigu uses the museum to preserve salt workers’ objects, sounds, and work memories. ^{4 5 9 6}

Thus, the white crystals seen in salt fields today cannot be understood merely as “ancient methods reappearing.” It is more like a locality’s answer to industrialization: when large-scale production has shifted to imported salt and refined salt plants, the locality still chooses to let seawater enter the ponds, let wind pass through the dikes, and let people relearn how to wait for a grain of salt to form.

These fields also ensure that salt workers’ tools, oral accounts, and work rhythms do not remain only in archives, but can continue to be explained in the next experience and tour. ^{4 9}

In 1665, Chen Yonghua channeled seawater into the salt pans at Saikou; in 2002, the last mechanical salt harvester left the salt field. Between these two years lies not a straight line from tradition to modernity, but a coastline repeatedly adjusting its relationship with salt. Today’s Jingzaijiao and Zhou Nan do not bring Taiwan back to 1665; they only ask: when salt no longer requires us to dry it, can this land that has been dried for salt still allow us to see our own lives anew? ^{1 4 5}