Place · salt mine · Pakistan
Khewra Salt Mine
The second-largest salt mine in the world, cut into a Precambrian evaporite seam in the Salt Range and worked more or less continuously since the medieval period. The British systematised it: Dr H. Warth's main tunnel of 1872 opened the lower levels and put the workings on a rail plan that is still in use. Nineteen storeys and some forty kilometres of tunnel now run into the hill, and the salt monopoly it fed was one of the revenue instruments colonial India was governed by.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.648, 73.008
Worth knowing
The miners built a mosque out of translucent salt bricks inside the workings, lit from behind, along with a salt model of the Minar-e-Pakistan — architecture made of the mineral it stands in.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyNandana, the Salt Range
Both sit on the Salt Range escarpment within about forty kilometres of each other, and both are about the same geology. Nandana was the Hindu Shahi fort where Mahmūd of Ghazni fought in 1014, and where al-Bīrūnī later measured the earth's radius using the dip of the horizon from its height. Khewra is the salt itself — a Precambrian evaporite seam worked into nineteen storeys of tunnel. The range that gave the Shahis their frontier forts also gave colonial India one of its principal revenue monopolies.
- AnalogueKutch Rann salt & embroidery
Two salt landscapes on opposite sides of the subcontinent, both turned into revenue instruments by the same state. The Rann of Kutch is solar: brine evaporated in pans by Agariya families working the flats each dry season. Khewra is mineral: rock salt cut from a Precambrian seam in the Salt Range, systematised by Dr Warth's tunnel of 1872. The colonial salt monopoly taxed both, which is why a tax on salt could be made to stand for the whole imperial economy in 1930.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Khewra Salt Mine”. Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation records; Geological Survey of Pakistan on the Salt Range Formation.
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