In ancient China, sea salt, lake salt and well salt were mostly made of halogen, or boiled with firewood, or weathered by the sun and evaporated by water.

Before the Song Dynasty, the manufacture of sea salt was all fried.

Stir-frying salt consumes a lot of wood and is labor intensive. Since the Northern Song Dynasty, the drying method of sea salt has appeared. Due to technical reasons, the effect is not very good, so fried salt is still more than dried salt. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, most sea salt producing areas were changed to sun drying, and the technology was gradually improved. Those woks and salt frying equipment set up along the coastline for thousands of years have naturally become a thing of the past.

South China, such as Hainan Island, is an ideal place for drying salt with abundant sunshine. The simplest method is to use the beach sediments dried by the sun, pour in seawater, filter to make high-salinity brine, and then store the brine in a pool and evaporate in the sun to form salt.