Chinese Beverage Is Ancient History

Nearly every culture has its own version of the fermented alcoholic beverage, and the Chinese are no exception. New research shows that the Chinese have a history of fermented beverages as long as or longer than anyone else.

The new findings place China right at the beginning of the worldwide history of fermented beverages. Archaeologists suspect that barley beer may have been made in the Middle East before 7000 B.C., but confirmatory evidence has not yet been found. Even if there had been earlier barley beers, the study puts China in the lead for the earliest possible production of grape wine, which didn't appear in the Middle East and Mediterranean region until 6000 to 5000 B.C.

"The idea that the pre-Bronze-Age Chinese made grape wine is new," says Bennet Bronson, curator for Asian archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum in Chicago. "In China, grape wine has always been regarded as a late idea imported from Central Asia or points further west."

"These developments in China [occurred at] about the same time as similar developments using barley and grapes in the Middle East," says the study's team leader, Patrick E. McGovern, a chemist and archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. "We still don't have evidence of early beer, but we have evidence of grape wine [in the Middle East] going back to 5400 B.C."

The fermented beverages seem to have been developed independently in China and the Middle East, but scientists don't know for certain. "There's no evidence for any kind of contact between the two regions that we know of yet," McGovern says, "but there might be some kind of indirect set of ideas that's being passed back and forth across central Asia [in a way that] has been poorly explored so far."

MCGOVERN AND his collaborators used various techniques--including gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and infrared spectroscopy--to analyze extracts from the shards for fingerprint compounds supporting their claim of a fermented beverage.

They found chemical signatures characteristic of beeswax, which indicates that honey was most likely present. Rice would have been definitively indicated by oryzanol, a phytosterol specific to rice. Although the researchers have not yet found oryzanol, database matching of their analytical results with chemical signatures of modern rice strongly suggests the presence of rice. For the fruit, they looked for compounds associated with modern wines, such as tartaric acid.

"Tartaric acid was critical for trying to figure out what the fruit would have been in this beverage," McGovern says. In the Middle East, tartaric acid is associated exclusively with grapes, but when McGovern and his team started looking through the Chinese botanical and herbal literature, hawthorn fruit jumped out as a possible source of tartaric acid, with four times the amount found in grapes. According to McGovern, in a paleobotanical study at the Jiahu site done by other researchers, only two types of fruit seeds have been identified--grapes and hawthorn fruit. "We don't know which one or whether both were used," McGovern says.

In addition to the Neolithic pottery sherds, McGovern and his colleagues analyzed liquid that was found in tightly lidded 3,000-year-old bronze vessels from the ancient capital city of Anyang, dating back to the late Shang/Western Zhou dynasties, about 1250–1000 B.C. At the site, 52 of 90 vessels found still contained liquid.

McGovern suspects that corrosion caused oxidized copper to accumulate around the rim cradling the stopper or lid, hermetically sealing the vessel and preventing further loss of liquid through evaporation. The lids on the vessels are so tight that the liquids inside cannot be explained "as groundwater coming in," he adds.

The liquids differ from the older mixed beverage. No beeswax was found, implying that honey wasn't added. Also, tartaric acid was present only in small amounts. This finding is consistent with the use of molds to break down the carbohydrates of rice into simple sugars, a process used in the uniquely Chinese method called amylolysis fermentation.

"The famous still-fragrant liquid found in sealed bronze containers of the Shang and Zhou periods does indeed seem to have been made by the amylolysis process," Bronson says. "Chinese chefs, poets, and wine connoisseurs must be delighted to hear that their beloved yellow Shaoxing-type rice wine has a history even longer than that made famous by historical figures like Li Bo, who had so many great poems inspired by it."