Photos

Few miles before the wonderful beach of Doc Let, there are many big salt fields, with hundreds of workers.

*Scanned image*

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Sodium chloride, also known as common salt, table salt, or halite, is a chemical compound with the formula NaCl.
Sodium chloride is the salt most responsible for the salinity of the ocean and of the extracellular fluid of many multicellular organisms.

Salt eliminated dependency on the seasonal availability of food and allowed travel over long distances. By the Middle Ages, caravans consisting of as many as forty thousand camels traversed four hundred miles of the Sahara bearing salt, sometimes trading it for slaves.

Until the 1900s, salt was one of the prime movers of national economies and wars. Salt has played a prominent role in determining the power and location of the world's great cities. Liverpool rose from just a small English port to become the prime exporting port for the salt dug in the great Cheshire salt mines and thus became the source of the world's salt in the 1800s.

Salt created and destroyed empires. The salt mines of Poland led to a vast kingdom in the 1500s, only to be destroyed when Germans brought sea salt.
Venice fought and won a war with Genoa over salt. Genoa, however, had the last laugh. Genovites Colombo and Caboto destroyed the Mediterranean trade by introducing the new world to the market.

Salt was once one of the most valuable commodities known to man. Salt was taxed, from as far back as the 20th century BC in China. In the Roman Empire, salt was sometimes even used as a currency, giving us the term salary.
The Roman Empire controlled the price of salt, increasing it to raise money for wars, or lowering it to be sure that the poorest citizens could easily afford this important part of the diet.

In later times, for instance during the British colonial period, salt production and transport were controlled in India as a means of generating enormous tax revenues. This ultimately led to the Salt March, led by Gandhi in 1930 in which thousands of Indians went to the sea to illegally produce their own salt in protest of the British tax on salt.

Before the salt mines of Cheshire were discovered, a huge trade in British fish for French salt existed. This was not a happy accord, for each nation did not want to be dependent on each other. The search for fish and salt led to the Seven Years War between the two. With the British in control of saltworks in the Bahamas and North American cod, their sphere of influence quickly covered the world.
The search for oil in the late 1800s and early 1900s used the technology and methods pioneered by salt miners, even to the degree that they looked for oil where salt domes were located.

From Wikipedia