Drunk in China: Baijiu and the World's Oldest Drinking Culture by Derek Sandhaus (review)

In Drunk in China, Derek Sandhaus has produced an outstanding contribution to both popular and scholarly studies of drinking culture in China, and Chinese history and culture more broadly. Sandhaus has previously published Baijiu: The Essential Guide to Chinese Spirits; Tales from Old Peking, and Tales of Old Hong Kong; and edited the truly scandalous Decadence Mandchoue. For those familiar with his work, the lively narrative he creates and his attention to detail will come as no surprise. For those unfamiliar with his work, this volume is an excellent entree to his oeuvre.

Sandhaus starts with an engaging description of alcohol's long history in China, then moves to demonstrate how drinking culture changed over thousands of years, including how over the course of the last half-century baijiu (literally, white wine) became one of the most visible symbols of the extensive corruption of the government and society that the Chinese Communist Party dominates. Sandhaus argues that, for much of alcohol's nearly 10,000 years of history in China, its consumption was for the most part controlled through refined Confucian rituals, economics, and often-relative scarcities of the grains necessary for the production of the preferred types of alcohol.

Contrary to popular perceptions that Chinese do not drink alcohol, Sandhaus demonstrates that China has perhaps the world's oldest drinking culture, dating to 7000-5800 b.c.e. (p. 43). Thus, alcohol consumption predates China's recorded history, and it has even been theorized that rice cultivation was first begun to create alcohol, not food (p. 47). Sandhaus provides a lively recounting of the legendary origins of alcohol, dating to Yi Di or Du Kang, names that have become synonymous with alcohol in China. The invention, three thousand to four thousand years ago, of qu—grains mixed with water to create bricks that breed molds, yeasts, and bacteria—to produce grain alcohol has even been cited as one of China's greatest inventions. Over time, the ease of producing grain alcohol, and its powerful effects, made it become more popular than beer, laying the foundation for various forms of Chinese and East Asian alcohol.

Some of China's most renowned historical figures were known to drink extensively, like Li Bai (701-762) and Du Fu (712-770)—who, in their drunkenness, left rich literary legacies. The colourful character Wu Song from the fourteenth-century novel Outlaws of the Marsh downed an incredible eighteen cups of grain liquor and went on to kill a tiger with his bare hands, setting in place an ideal of masculinity that lasts to this day (pp. 81-82). However, despite its long history, popularity, and the incredible examples of the above-famed bibulous fellows, alcohol was also known to destroy dynasties. Sandhaus points to two of the most egregious cases of alcohol abuse—the last king of the Xia dynasty (2070-1600 B.C.E.), a tyrant who allegedly forced 3,000 naked people to drink from a lake of wine (p. 54), and the final Shang dynasty (1600-1050 B.C.E.) king, whose end was prefaced by his infamous "pools of wine, forests of meat" (p. 55). Both kings shine as exemplars of the worst kind of excessive, destructive alcohol consumption.

China's unique alcohol culture includes medicinal and "potency" alcohol, with ingredients as varied as deer, seal, or dog penis (deer penis is believed to be the most powerful) (p. 114) as well as deer antlers, lizards, snakes, tiger bones, and parts of other once-living creatures big and small. These ingredients have been used for centuries and no doubt have inspired many foreigners to look askance at such alcohol—regardless of its taste or efficacy.

Part of this book's narrative tracks Sandhaus' "conversion from baijiu [sic] skeptic to evangelist" (p. 8) and his search for an appropriate vocabulary to describe varieties of alcohol that...