Before the lanterns and before the dinosaurs made it famous, salt made Zigong rich — and made it ingenious. For nearly two thousand years this corner of Sichuan has pulled salt from brine trapped deep underground, and in doing so the city’s well-drillers solved engineering problems that the rest of the world wouldn’t crack until the industrial age. Zigong’s nickname says it plainly: the Thousand-Year Salt Capital (千年盐都).
Salt you can’t see
Sichuan’s salt isn’t mined from rock or evaporated from the sea — it’s dissolved in brine locked hundreds of metres below ground, often alongside natural gas. To get it, you have to drill. And from the Song dynasty onward, Zigong’s salt-workers became the best deep-drillers on the planet, inventing a percussion (“churn”) drilling method: a heavy iron bit on a bamboo cable, dropped again and again to pound its way through rock, the hole lined with bamboo tubing.
In 1835, the Shenhai Well (燊海井) reached 1,001.42 metres — the first borehole in human history to pass 1,000 metres deep. It was drilled with bamboo, wooden derricks, and human muscle: no steel, no engines, no geology. Historians call this technique the fifth great invention of ancient China and the father of modern oil drilling.
Fire and brine, together
What makes Shenhai extraordinary is that it produced both of salt-making’s ingredients at once: the brine to boil, and the natural gas to boil it with. The gas was piped to rows of round-bottomed pans where the brine bubbled down into glittering white salt. Remarkably, Shenhai is still working today — a living museum where you can watch salt crystallise in the same pans, over the same gas, drawn from the same 19th-century well.
The wells that named the city
The name Zigong (自贡) is itself a salt story: it fuses Ziliujing (自流井) — the “self-flowing well” — with Gongjing (贡井), the “tribute well”, two of the most famous salt sources in the district. At the industry’s height the skyline bristled with thousands of wooden derricks, some over a hundred metres tall, built without nails and raised by hand.
Where to see it
- Shenhai Well (燊海井) — the record-breaking well, still in operation, with the original derrick and salt house.
- Zigong Salt Industry History Museum (盐业历史博物馆) — housed in the exquisite Qing-dynasty Xiqin Guildhall, a former meeting hall of Shaanxi salt merchants, and one of the finest pieces of architecture in the city.
- Zigong UNESCO Global Geopark — which ties the salt, the geology, and the dinosaurs into one story of deep time.