Reflections on Visiting the Yancheng Museum

Yancheng, bordering the Huai River and the sea, was built upon salt, thriving because of it. Over 2000 years of changes have nurtured Yancheng's long and profound historical context, constituting the city's ever-lasting civilization and history. To understand a city, start with its museum. Looking back on Yancheng's history, the rise and fall of the salt industry is the pulse of the region's cultural development. The prosperity and decline of the salt industry have always been closely related to the overall situation of the times, whether it was unity or division, peace or turmoil. Therefore, the peaks of Yancheng's salt industry and even the entire regional socio-economic development generally occurred during relatively unified and stable periods, such as the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The production, management, and sale of sea salt, along with the repeated migrations centered around the salt industry, brought bureaucrats, literati, merchants, craftsmen, and farmers from all over the country to Yancheng. They continuously injected new elements and vitality into Yancheng's social production and cultural economy, not only presenting a diverse cultural landscape but also fostering a regional cultural spirit of hard work, cooperation, and tolerance.