The modern day example of distilled sorghum wine that I brought to class is one of the most famous go-to (cheaper) wines in China — it’s the Red Star Er Guo Tou (红星二锅头), synonymous with working class Beijing. It has a whopping 56% alcohol volume and is distilled using two condenser pots for the best quality wine, hence the name ‘er guo tou’ or “second distillation”/”head of the second pot”. It’s almost always paired with savoury foods and has a very delicate, dry, and light, and subtly sweet taste. To truly understand its link to ancient Chinese concepts of toxicity and intoxication, let’s delve into the sources below:
[1] Yang, Shou-zhong. The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica: A Translation of the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing. Boulder, Colorado: Blue Poppy Press, 1998.
Wine itself sits on a very liminal point in ancient Chinese concepts of toxicity. In the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (神農本草經), it’s used both as an ingredient to enhance herbs from all classes. For example, the herb Niu Xi (Radix Achyrathis Bidentatae) boosts the liver and kidneys and fortifies the sinews and bones “when processed with wine” (Yang, 26). At the same time, it’s also more frequently touted as ‘wine toxins’ (Yang, 47, 52) that herbs, such as Shui Ping, are supposed to eliminate (Yang, 65), curing anything from eye diseases to hangovers.
[2] Li Shizhen. Ben Cao Gang Mu 本草纲目 (Compendium of Materia Medica). Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
[3] “3 Health Benefits Of Sorghum Bicolor – Ben Cao Medical Book”. 2013. Health.Chinaabout.Net. https://health.chinaabout.net/3-health-benefits-of-sorghum-bicolor-ben-cao-medical-book/.
As for sorghum itself, it was classified in a book called the Ben Cao Gang Mu or Ben Cao Medical Book [2], written in the Ming dynasty. Its benefits apparently include nourishing the spleen and the strengthening the stomach, helping to dispel wind and getting rid of diarrhea. In this way, the book also claims that it’s a digestive aid — it serves as a diuretic, meaning it was supposed to increase the production of urine. [3]
[4] Huang, Hsing-Tsung. Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part 5, Fermentations and Food Science. Ed. Needham, Joseph. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 203-39.
Huang’s writing on fermentation sheds further light on two things: how wine such as sorghum wine was originally fermented, and that there were concoctions that extended even to the spiritual realm.
Chinese wine didn’t just dispel physical toxins, as seen in the earlier materia medica, but spiritual ones as well. According to Huang, the ancient physician Hua Tho fashioned a protective wine called the thu su wine, which is a herbal concoction made for a whole family to drink together on every New Years’ Day to keep them healthy and free from evil spirits that cause epidemics. This was in the late Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms period.
[5] P, James. “Red Sorghum: Granddad “Fertilizes” The New Vintage” Red Sorghum, Zhang Yi Mou, 1987. Youtube, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FimtAAq7zqk.
A video I found actually reinforces the visualisations of wine fermentation as seen in Huang, as well as the classification of food and drink according to qi and yin/yang cosmologies as seen in the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing. It is a part of Zhang Yi Mou’s 1987 masterpiece “Red Sorghum”, starring a very young Gong Li, who becomes the owner of a distillery for sorghum liquor and its surrounding sorghum plantations, in very a remote fictional region called Qingshakou, or Murderer’s Pass. In the video, she’s watching her workers make the sorghum wine, before they sing a song of blessing to a fictional wine god.
In the video, we see many references to common tropes in ancient Chinese medicinals — the yin/yang theory, the concept of the flow of qi and how it dispels ailments like a cough. Another important aspect of the video was the aesthetics of the fermentation process. According to the translation, we saw mentions of a spigot and a fire, cold water being poured into a giant condenser pot and we also saw bronze plates, and gigantic earthenware and bronze vessels for storage of the wine.
[6] “Chinese Wine History: The Story Of Du Kang”. 2019. Alh.com.sg. http://www.alh.com.sg/cms/wine.
Mythologies surrounding the birth of sorghum wine exist as well. A living sage of wine called Du Kang (杜康), apparently lived during the Xia (夏朝) Dynasty. Legend goes that Du Kang stored some cooked Chinese sorghum (甜高粱) inside a hollow tree on a winter day. During spring, a fragrant aroma wafted from the tree, which he found was fermented sorghum wine.
[7] He, Zhang. “A 110-Year-Old Wise Man: Professor Libin T. Cheng, One Of The Founders Of Biochemistry And Nutrition In China”. Protein & Cell, 2017. doi: 10.1007/s13238-017-0428-0.
Other myths regarding toxic foods in ancient China include the so-called “dangerous food combinations” that Professor Cheng Libin tackled and disproved in 1930s Nanjing — one of the founders of biochemistry and nutrition in 20th century China.
In the summer of 1935, so-called poisoning by banana and yam was rumoured among the folk of Nanjing. Cheng set out to judge them through scientific experiments. At first, he ate banana and yam simultaneously in order to prove that they weren’t toxic. Then, he collected 184 pairs of ‘poisonous food combinations’ from the ancient Chinese books and selected 14 pairs of foods that were most common in daily life, including crab and persimmon, peanut and cucumber, and so on. Next, he fed them to albino rats, monkeys, or dogs for two days successively. He also selected 7 other pairs for himself and one of his colleagues to eat. They monitored the expression, behaviour, body temperature, color and the frequency of pooping that the animals and they themselves went through for 24h. All of the results were normal and showed no noticeable symptoms of poisoning (Cheng, 1936).
Other references:
[8] Husihui., Buell, Paul D., Anderson, E. N., and Perry, Charles. A Soup for the Qan : Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao : Introduction, Translation, Commentary, and Chinese Text 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2010. 138-42, 144-47.
[9] Detoni, Alessandro. 2011. “Red Star – Alcohol For The Masses”. Alessandrodetoni.Com. http://alessandrodetoni.com/2011/12/23/red-star-alcohol-for-the-masses/.
[10] “Red Star Erguotou | Baijiu Review”. 2018. Baijiu Review. https://baijiureview.com/red-star-erguotou/.