Please look down at your feet. The ground is paved with round, plate-like objects. These are broken pieces of pottery, laid out to form the floor of the salt…
Multilingual AI audio guide exhibit on WOUDiO (PWA). WOUDiO pioneered the world’s first audio guide platform with built-in donation: listeners can support the cultural venue without leaving the listening experience. The text below is the localized description, details, and narration script for this audio guide stop.
Please look down at your feet. The ground is paved with round, plate-like objects.
These are broken pieces of pottery, laid out to form the floor of the salt field. If the ground were left as bare earth, soil would mix into the salt. By laying down pottery shards, pure white salt could be harvested. In other words, broken vessels were used in place of tools that could not be afforded.
This salt field was opened in the early nineteenth century and remained in use for a long time.
If you visit in the evening, try facing west. The sunlight reflects once off the white surface of the salt, so it appears doubled.
A little further north lies the Qigu wetlands.
In winter, the black-faced spoonbill comes here. It is a bird that sweeps its flat bill from side to side in the shallow water, searching for fish. It is said that only a few thousand remain in the world, and a considerable portion of them spend the winter in this very area.
The reason these birds come here is the presence of shallow water made by human hands—salt fields, aquaculture ponds, disused waterways.
It was people who filled in the inner sea, and it was also people who left behind shallow water in its wake. That the birds can rest here now is the result of what was left behind afterward.
Even without binoculars, if you see what looks like white specks scattered across the water's surface—that is them.
