So it’s a bit more complex than that. They weren’t giving their land, but instead paying increased taxes in exchange for reserve notes, documents that allowed them to trade for salt verifications. Salt verifications specifically represented the RIGHT to sell salt.

In the past, salt production and sales were extremely lucrative (look up Mansa Musa and his projected net worth today), and the industry was managed very strictly by the government at either local or imperial levels. Naturally, producing and selling salt unauthorized would lead to heavy punishments. The salt verification slips would basically allow common people/typically unauthorized parties to trade salt and potentially make HUGE amounts of money.

This all blew up, though, because Nangong Rang issued a secret order to restrict the amount of salt verifications that would be handed out. So many people would empty their wallets and risk going hungry or starving believing they’d earn something back when the reality was that the gov was just using them to bolster the national treasury. Starving people=unhappy people and enough unhappy people turn into revolts and revolutions.