The Geography Of Salt Industry In Tang Dynasty

This paper deals with a reflection on the salt industry in Tang Dynasty from the geographical perspective. The research mainly includes the patterns of salt industry production, the zoning in market area, the disparities in salt industry policies in different regions, and the layout of administrations, etc.First of all, the paper researches on the spatial distribution of salt producing area in Tang Dynasty. Comparing with the previous researches, the characteristic of this part is to list the salt industry evolution before Tang Dynasty of each habitats, thus a clear view of habitats'historical development path is obtained. This paper also revised some former wrong issues, and supplemented some omitted salt producing places, then my own viewpoints are made regarding to some arguments, Specially, by using the examination on historical evolution of Zhou(州) and Xian(县), this paper confirmed several cases that some salt habitat ownerships are actually just one same place, though in different historical literatures they appear as different names, or even their locations appear in different Xian names.Based on the research in the first part, the paper continue to analyze the patterns of salt production in Tang Dynasty. It deals with the salt production pattern's evolution from Han to Tang Dynasty, and the interior salt production pattern's evolution in Tang Dynasty. According to different production and consumption characteristics, the causes of patterns'changes of lake salt, sea salt and well salt are discussed respectively from the views of natural environment, military economy strategy, transportation pattern, regional development. Then the paper analyzes the situation of the control on the salt resources by the central authorities and the local governments during the period after AnLushan Rebellion.Then the paper makes a further study on salt sales, focusing on the boundaries of salt market areas in Tang Dynasty. Firstly, with the aid of the extant historical data these boundaries are restored. Then, under the equilibrium framework of production and demand, whether the boundaries are reasonable is analyzed by a three-step method. First step is to estimate the outputs of salt production in each region. To resolve the problem that some data of output of salt production in Tang Dynasty are absent, the following three techniques are adopted: (1) calculating the approximate output by the records of salt industry profits, (2) crosswise contrasting with similar regions and (3) extrapolating the region's missing data by making regressions by using time series data of output of that region. Then each region's overall output of salt industry in the mid or late Tang Dynasty can be estimated. The second step is to estimate each region's salt demand in the mid or late Tang Dynasty, which is inferred by the existing historical data of households in peaceful periods. The last step is to calculate the average location entropy per household in each region according to the two groups of data obtained from above. Based on the driving power of boundary changes, and the causes of cross-border salt sales. The paper also establishes other three modes to address the issue of cross-border sales. They are the pattern of potential cost differences in the border, the pattern of strong market on the frontier line, the pattern of market transmission. Relying on the existing Tang Dynasty transportation geography research the paper introduces the route of salt trade which forming and maintaining the market boundaries.In the end, the paper focuses on the regional differences of salt industry administration in Tang Dynasty. It deals with the topic of the salt industrial policy differences between regions in the early Tang Dynasty. Then the paper concludes the characteristics of production management and the tax policy of the lake salt, the salt well, and the sea salt. The paper specially analyzes the spatial layout characteristics of exclusive-selling institutions in the middle and late Tang Dynasty. As functions and layout of local exclusive-selling institutions are closely linked to the finance of central government, this part deploys around the clue of transformation of financial system of central government.