Taiwan salt festival celebrates one of life's essential elements
For nearly 60 years, one of Taiwan's signature government-invested companies packaged salt that was almost magically deposited for its use on the island's coastal plains. Water from the Taiwan Strait would intrude and recede, leaving enough dried salt behind to sell 200,000 tonnes per year.
But the company, Taiyen Biotech, realised a decade ago that importing the common cooking ingredient cost less than extracting it from the 1,979 hectares of coastal flats. Labour costs for the tough collection work were chewing into the bottom line.
So the firm quit the flats but, since 2002, it has continued in the business, repackaging salt in a variety of shapes and colours.
Taiyen and a local tourism office will stage a salt festival this weekend.
Taiyen sells flavoured salt in five colours: yellow for lemon, orange for mango, red for Roselle tea, green for green tea and purple for seaweed. Cooks are advised to mix it with soups, salads or barbecued meats.
The salt, now refined directly from Taiwan Strait seawater, also gets packed into a line of shampoos. They sell at Taiyen's 100 outlets in Taiwan and, increasingly, on the mainland, where consumers see salt as a disinfectant.
'Why does people's hair fall out?' Taiyen chairman Hung His-yao says. 'It's because the follicles are clogged and salt lets you clean those out. Salt has a natural cleansing and disinfectant quality.'
The salt doesn't even have to dissolve. Taiyen custom builds lasting salt sculptures of Qing dynasty-era animal heads from the 12-part Zodiac cycle for between NT$2,800 (HK$755) and NT$200,000.
Taiyen declined to estimate sales of the new product lines, but Hung says they have helped raise revenues to about NT$2 billion per year.
The festival at the Cigu coastal flats, where naturally formed mountains of condiments-in-waiting still loom over the landscape, will let ticket-holders dive into a salt pool, climb a 20-metre high salt mountain and join a salt sculpture contest. Taiyen sells salt concoctions on the sidelines.
Those who miss it can sift though exhibits at the Taiwan Salt Museum at the same location in Tainan city.
It is hoped the event will appeal broadly to tourists from Taiwan and the mainland, even if only for its novelty value.
'We hope that we can show tourists from here and overseas the natural scenery as well as how salt was processed, turning it into a kind of knowledge culture,' says Kao Hui-kuan, from the Tainan City government's salt flats management office.
Further information:
City of Tainan, tel: +886 6 786-1000, ext 248
