There is a long history of alcoholic drinks in China. They include rice and grape wine, beer, whisky and various liquors including baijiu, the most-consumed distilled spirit in the world.
Name
(jiǔ) is the Chinese character referring to any drink containing appreciable quantities of ethanol. Its Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as *tsuʔ, at which point it was generally applied to drinks made from fermented millet. By the time of the first certain use of distillation during the Jin and Southern Song dynasties, the Middle Chinese pronunciation was tsjuw. It is often translated in English as "wine", which misrepresents its current usage. In present-day Mandarin, jiǔ most commonly refers to pure alcohol, hard liquors, and strong rice wine, while wine and beer are distinguished as pútáojiǔ (, lit. "grape jiu") and píjiǔ (, "'beer' jiu"), respectively.
Nonetheless, there are many cultural parallels with the use of wine in European culture. Chinese food employs jiǔ in its recipes and formal dining in an analogous manner; likewise, there are many parallels in upper-class etiquette and religious observance. It appears prominently in all of the Chinese classics, including the Rites of Zhou and the Record of Rites, and has been a constant theme of Chinese poetry since its origins, all similar to the treatment of wine in Europe.
History
Ancient China
Chinese alcohol predates recorded history. Dried residue extracted from 9,000-year-old pottery implies that early beers were already being consumed by the neolithic peoples in the area of modern China. Made from rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn, it seems to have been produced similarly to that of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.
Within the Yellow River area which gave rise to the Chinese culture, numerous bronze vessels preserved from the later Shang dynasty (whose oracle bones contained the first surviving Chinese characters) include many which were apparently used to warm alcohol. At the time, millet was the area's staple grain and these drinks may have been similar to modern huangjiu. Traditional Chinese historical accounts such as Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian relate various legends and myths concerning the origin of alcohol in China. One account says that the brewer Yidi presented the first alcoholic beverage as a gift to the emperor Yu the Great BC. Another credits its invention to Du Kang.
Chinese alcohol figured prominently in Zhou-era accounts of the removal of the Mandate of Heaven. The final ruler of the Xia dynasty, the emperor Jie, was said to have shown his decadence by constructing an entire lake of jiu to please one of his concubines. The pool was said to have been large enough to navigate with a boat. The story was repeated in accounts of Di Xin, the last emperor of the Shang. Alcoholism was said to have been so rampant among Shang culture that reducing it presented one of the principal difficulties for the new Zhou dynasty.
In the far northwest of modern China, the introduction of the irrigation and grape vines responsible for Xinjiang's raisin and wine production are generally credited to settlers from 4th-century BC Bactria, one of the successor states to the empire of Alexander the Great. However, new research has refuted the notions of a foreign origin for Chinese grape wine and grape vines, because the history of Chinese grape wine has been confirmed and proven to date back 9000 years (7000 BC), including the "(earliest attested use)" of wild grapes in wine as well as "earliest chemically confirmed alcoholic beverage in the world", according to Adjunct Professor of Anthropology Patrick McGovern, the Scientific Director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.
Professor McGovern explains: