The millennia-old charm of salt quietly flows through the Zhuotongjing Site Park in Guanchang Village, Zhuotongjing Town, Daying County, Suining City. Strolling through the park, the weathered old well of Dashun Stove, aged bamboo water-lifting machines, and rustic salt cauldrons dot the landscape. Each of these timeworn objects—soaked in brine and etched with toil—silently tells the thousand-year saga of how the Chinese have, since the Northern Song Dynasty, unlocked the underground treasures and rewritten the history of world drilling.

Ancient salt-making craft display

Covering an area of over 200 mu (approximately 33 acres), the Zhuotongjing Site Park preserves in their entirety 8 ancient salt wells, 1 former salt worker's residence, a salt-drying terrace, giant brine-drying racks, bamboo water-lifting machines, and 20 goat-horn windlasses, along with 141 pieces of traditional production implements—including measuring vats, old-style salt cauldrons, and wooden brine barrels. Together, they faithfully reproduce the entire technological process of well-sinking, brine-lifting, brine-drying, and salt-boiling as practiced in the Song Dynasty.

The Zhuotongjing (bamboo-tube well) was born during the Qingli reign of the Northern Song Dynasty. Our ancestors pioneered the impact-type percussive drilling method, using circular-edge drill bits to bore wells and moso bamboo as casing to seal off shallow freshwater layers. With only human-powered wooden rigs, they could drill wells up to a hundred meters deep. This technology predates comparable Western drilling techniques by over 700 years, earning it the titles "Father of the World's Oil Drilling" and "the Fifth Greatest Invention of Ancient China."

In the past, salt workers relied on reading geological veins to find brine, sinking tubes into the wells, lifting brine, drying it in the sun, and boiling it in iron cauldrons—day after day, drawing brine from deep underground and sustaining the thousand-year salt industry of northern Sichuan. Today, modern oil and gas drilling equipment can be found in oilfields across the globe, yet the original techniques remain remarkably preserved in the countryside of Daying. The old wells and ancient implements stand as vivid physical testimony to the history of human drilling and exploration.