Ming Salt Law Reform

Timeline

1. 1489Lianghuai · LianghuaiIn the early Hongzhi era, the Ming faced the dual pressures of depleted frontier stores and a stalled salt law. The Lianghuai commission weighed over a million certificates of salt year after year, yet merchants submitted only two or three out of ten of the clipped certificate stubs, with large numbers of salt certificates seized by powerful interests through proxies. From the Xuande era to the late Chenghua era, the Lianghuai commission fell short of boiling households' salt-tax quotas by more than ten percent annually, and official salt supplies were severely inadequate.
2. 1489Beijing · BeijingVice Minister of Revenue Li Si was ordered to reform Lianghuai salt law and memorialized about the severe backlog of unsold certificates and the falsification of clipped certificate stubs. He proposed that each salt office, in addition to annually reporting the amounts of weighed salt certificates, must also submit registers of the clipped perforated stubs returned by merchants to the Ministry, to prevent falsification of dual accounts. He also obtained approval for merchants to purchase surplus salt from boiling households to supplement official granary stocks, easing the shortage of official salt.
3. 1489–1491Lianghuai · LianghuaiAlthough the Hongzhi 2 salt law reform failed to eradicate deep-rooted abuses such as powerful interests monopolizing salt lots, it set the precedent for merchants buying surplus salt to fill shortages, laying the practical groundwork for Ye Qi's zhese (commutation) proposal in Hongzhi 4, under which merchants paid silver to the salt commission in place of delivering grain for salt. This was an important prelude to the Ming salt policy's transformation from in-kind kaizhong to monetization.