Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  To my mind, the most interesting carryover of ancient technique was the use of qu to break down the starches and start the fermentation. Vast rooms in the wineries were stacked high with qu cakes, measuring nearly a foot on a side. The use of specialized molds to saccharify the grain and begin fermentation meant that the beverage makers of protohistoric China could forgo chewing or malting the grain and had less need for honey or fruit to supply sugars and yeast than did the makers of Neolithic grog. As Chinese culture advanced, the prehistoric extreme beverage fell out of favor and was replaced by millet and rice wines, like those preserved as liquids inside the Shang and Zhou Dynasty ritual vessels.

  Fruits and honey were not totally eliminated from Chinese beverages. Excavations in the Shang dynasty city of Taixi have yielded many funnels and unusually shaped vessels that provide evidence of a lively, diversified local beverage industry. One pottery form, designated the “general’s helmet,” has a pointed, recessed bottom that would have been ideal for collecting sediments from liquids. Another large jar from the site, in addition to the one containing yeast mentioned above, was filled with peach, plum, and Chinese jujube pits, as well as the seeds of sweet clover, jasmine, and hemp. We can only imagine how delicious and intoxicating this beverage must have been. One of the canonical Shang dynasty wines (luo) was fruitbased, and some scholars believe that it was the earliest Chinese fermented beverage, perhaps even the Jiahu grog itself. Today in many parts of China, a popular drink (shouzhou mi jiu) consists of rice wine containing fresh fruit pieces.

  BRIDGING THE GAP

  When did mold saccharification become the sole technique for making fermented beverages? Anne Underhill, who facilitated my entry into Chinese archaeology, also enabled me to begin exploring the six-millennium gap between Jiahu in 7000 B.C. and the Shang dynasty.

  As one of the first American archaeologists to resume excavation in China, Anne had begun exploring the potentially very rich area of southeastern Shandong Province, where the Yellow River flows into the Yellow Sea. Her excavations at Liangchengzhen, carried out with colleagues from the Field Museum in Chicago and Shandong University in Jinan, have revealed houses and burials of the Longshan period, dating from about 2600 to 1900 B.C.

  Ancient Shandong Province is especially well known for its numerous and elaborate drinking cups, which have been found predominantly in burials and appear to have surged in popularity during the late Dawenkou period (ca. 3000–2600 B.C.). By Longshan times, exquisite, tall-stemmed forms (gaobing bei) were being made in a glossy black, eggshell-thin pottery ware. These vessels were accompanied by similarly elegant jars (lei), with high shoulders and a pair of loop handles, reminiscent of the Jiahu jars. We wanted to test the absorptive and evaporative properties of modern rice wine in a container made of this refined ware, so we asked a modern potter to replicate a lei jar in the local clay, together with a convex lid. Not surprisingly, even high-fired pottery is somewhat porous and does not retard evaporation as well as cast bronze. But I hesitated to break the elegant piece to carry out chemical analyses.

  We also chose long-spouted pitchers (gui) with high tripod bases, just like the later Shang Dynasty examples (jue) in bronze. By the time we had completed our selection of pottery types for our study, we had a complete repertoire of drinking and eating vessels—cups, jars, basins, pitchers, and even a probable steamer rack and sieve.

  Our chemical analyses of twenty-seven samples focused on vessels that were most likely used to prepare, store, or drink alcoholic beverages. Because we were not permitted to take our samples back to the United States for testing, Anne put out feelers around town. In short order, the local middle-school chemistry teacher, Laoshi Chen, had invited me to use his laboratory when classes were not in session. We procured glassware and solvents in the city of Rizhao, and I started heating up my sherds in methanol and chloroform. During breaks, I was challenged to ping-pong by the students, who were shocked when I beat them: I was a high school champion. When I ran short on distilled water, Mr. Chen improvised a system that kept it flowing.

  Back in the States, we tested the extracts. The results overwhelmingly pointed to a beverage very similar to the Jiahu grog, which combined a fruit (grape or hawthorn fruit), rice, and honey. The use of a wild grape in the Liangchengzhen grog is a distinct possibility, although only three grape pips have thus far been recovered from Longshan contexts at the site. As many as ten wild grape species grow in eastern Shandong today, and the origins of Vitis in China have been traced to this region.

  Because the Yellow River flows through Shandong, Liangchengzhen would have been in touch with developments farther upstream, including advances in producing fermented beverages. A Jiahu-like beverage at Liangchengzhen indicates that the mold saccharification process had not yet taken hold in the river basin. Yet our analyses of the Liangchengzhen beverage did pick up chemical signs that a plant resin or herb had been added to the grog. Gradually, it would appear, the shamanistic beverage makers were developing medicinal wines, which led to the Shang dynasty chang. In the process, they discovered other properties of particular herbs and molds, which were eventually put to good use in saccharifying rice and millet and speeding up fermentation.

  Our analyses of the extracts also suggested the presence of another, more puzzling ingredient: barley. This staple for making beer and bread hails from the Middle East, where it was domesticated around 8000 B.C. Barley is particularly useful in beverage making because, when malted, it produces a profusion of diastase enzymes that break down starch into sugar. Major American breweries today, like Budweiser and Miller, take advantage of this property of barley by using it to saccharify less expensive rice in their brews. The puzzling aspect of this finding at Liangchengzhen is that no barley kernels or other evidence of the plant has yet been recovered from the site.

  On current evidence, barley was a long time coming to East Asia. It is attested as early as the fifth millennium B.C. in Baluchistan, today a western province of Pakistan. It has been recovered from third-millennium B.C. sites in Central Asia. By the second millennium B.C., it had made its way farther east, as shown by occasional botanical finds from other Longshan sites. We also know that by around 1000 B.C. the domesticated plant was present in Japan and Korea, across the Yellow Sea from Shandong Province. I suspect that it is only a matter of time until evidence of barley is found at Liangchengzhen. The wet coastal environment conspires against the preservation of plant remains unless they have been carbonized by burning.

  By plotting the findspots of those vessels which contained the Liangchengzhen mixed beverage, the religious significance of the drink begins to emerge. Many of the fine black goblets came from graves, where they might have represented either prized possessions of the deceased in life or burial offerings. Pits crammed with hundreds of whole jars, gui tripods, and more goblets were excavated near the burials. But why would serviceable vessels be thrown away? The pits probably hold the leftovers of feasts for the ancestors, as we also believe is the case at Jiahu and is well attested a few centuries later in the major Yellow River urban communities.

  Funerary feasts did not seem far-fetched when the temperatures fell below freezing in the late afternoon, and we huddled together in the only warm room in our dig house, the dining room. There, with the moisture from our breath dripping down the inside windows, we feasted on fresh seafood from the Yellow Sea—mussels, gigantic shrimp, and fish of all kinds. It was often washed down with the local beer, Tsingtao, named after the nearby town where Germans established the first European lager production in China.

  The Liangchengzhen analyses partly filled in the gap between Jiahu and the Shang dynasty, but we needed to know more, especially about the crucial time at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. before the start of the Shang dynasty. The legend of the Mighty Yu’s daughter discovering the first wine in China might contain an element of truth—if this accomplishment were taken to mean the introduction of mold saccharification. I had not gone looking for more sample
s from the Xia dynasty. Instead, as is often the case in the modern academic world, I received a fortuitous invitation. It took the form of an e-mail message from one of the key researchers of the Xia period, Li Liu, who asked me if I would be interested in analyzing pottery from her site at Huizui and nearby Erlitou. Because Erlitou is believed to have been the capital city for the Xia dynasty, it may give us the evidence we need to fill in the gap between the Longshan period and the Shang Dynasty.

  THE WINE POETS OF CHINA

  Beginning in about the third century A.D., an exceptional group of Chinese poets celebrated the importance of fermented beverages. With the fall of the Han dynasty, the wisdom and ceremonial formality of Confucianism appear to have failed. Drawing on a long tradition of shamanism and spiritual inspiration aided by alcohol, the poets, known as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, reinvigorated religious life. Stressing the freedom and naturalism of Daoism, they styled themselves as solitary intellectuals and lovers of nature. In their rustic bamboo grove, they talked philosophy, played music, wrote poetry, and spent much of their time drinking.

  When the Tang dynasty rulers ushered in a rare period of internationalism and creativity starting in the seventh century, another generation of wine poets was on hand to document the exuberant times. Wang Ji was the first poet of the group that came to be known as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. His sentiments are summed up in his poem “To the Pupils of the Transcendental Art”:

  The Tiered City is too distant for collecting magic herbs

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Where are the music players? . . .

  In spring, pine needles ferment in the wine jugs;

  In autumn, chrysanthemums float in the wine cups.

  When we chance upon one another, we would rather get drunk,

  And definitely will not take up mixing the elixirs.

  (Warner 2003: 82)

  In this poem, Wang Ji alludes to other worlds, redolent of magic and reverberating with music, at the same time that he captures the immediacy of a good drink made with pine needles and chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemum wine had long been treasured for its special flavor and its yellow color, symbolizing the emperor. There were many other wines to choose from during Tang times: red wines colored by Monascus mold, green “bamboo” wine, peppered and honeyed wines. It is no wonder that perhaps the most famous Chinese poet of all time, Li Bo, is said to have drowned when he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in a river. He had already written:

  Among the flowers, a winepot.

  I pour alone, friendless.

  So, raising my cup, I turn to the moon

  And face my shadow, making us three.

  (Berger 1985)

  A JAPANESE INTERLUDE

  Except for the 26,000-year-old pottery figurines from Dolní věstonice (chapter 9), Japan holds the distinction of having some of the oldest pottery in the world, the Incipient Jomon pottery vessels dating to 12,000 B.P. As I had anticipated, China has now surpassed Japan in this regard: pottery from Yuchanyan Cave in southwestern Hunan Province is reported by the expedition codirector, Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University, to radiocarbon-date to ca. 15,000 B.P. In the development of fermented beverages, China also had a commanding lead. If we view the Jiahu grog as a kind of rice wine, then it predates the rice wine of Japan, sake, by more than seven thousand years. Had it not been for the domestication of rice and development of the mold-saccharification process in China, sake might not even exist. Japan adopted the winemaking tradition from China only in the third century A.D.

  Admittedly, no chemical analyses of the Incipient Jomon pottery, many of which are large bowls that might have been used to prepare or drink a fermented beverage in quantity, have been carried out. Even more recent examples of Jomon pottery, dating as late as 400 B.C. and including spouted jugs, high-necked jars, and ornate bowls—all wonderfully adapted for a drinking culture—are yet to be tested.

  By the time textual evidence first documents the role of alcoholic beverages in ancient Japanese culture, the debt that Japan owes to China is fully evident. Japan had its own wine poets at about the same time that the Tang dynasty Immortals were holding court. In the eighth century A.D., Ōtomo no Tabito writes in his “Thirteen Songs in Praise of Wine”:

  Sitting silent and looking wise

  Cannot be compared to

  Drinking sake

  And making a racket

  (Berger 1985)

  Sake was served at funeral feasts, as it was in China, and offered up to the gods. The wine god, Ōmiwa no Kami, had shrines set aside in the major sake-producing towns of Nara and Kyoto. Balls of needles taken from the Cryptomeria cypress tree are still produced at these shrines and hung in the rafters of the wineries, to announce that sake is being produced. They recall a time when these needles and the resin of the tree were infused into the wine.

  When the technology was first transferred to Japan, sake must have been prepared like rice wine in China, using the mold-saccharification process. Because of its relative geographic isolation, however, the range of microflora in Japan was more limited, and a different approach was needed. Removing more and more bran from the outer kernel of the rice (“polishing” the rice) resulted in a more refined product. The rationale for using a single species of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to carry out the fermentation follows the same logic. Additives had to be eliminated to keep the wine pure. One must ask, however, in the interests of aesthetics and scientific methodology, whether some of the individual flavors and aromas of a more variable product were not lost.

  THREE

  THE NEAR EASTERN CHALLENGE

  A NEOLITHIC GROG FROM CHINA, dating back to 7000 B.C., challenges the conventional notion that civilization began in the Near East. I had gone to China in 1999 with the same preconception, all the more ingrained because I studied Near Eastern archaeology and history at the University of Pennsylvania and until then had spent most of my career excavating in the Middle East. China is notably absent from all Near Eastern writings until the Roman period. Even the Bible, which purports to give a general perspective of human history and our place in the universe, omits China. The Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12) speaks of the Magi, who followed the star to Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem, as coming from the east, but this mysterious trio were probably Zoroastrian priests from no farther away than Iran.

  I was predisposed to view the Near East as the cradle of civilization for other reasons as well. Our first successes at chemically identifying ancient fermented beverages came with samples from this region. Moreover, according to one theory, the route that modern humans followed when they came out of Africa around 100,000 B.P. led directly to the temperate Middle East, with its range of exploitable plants and animals. (The other possible route would have taken humans across the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, to the Arabian peninsula.) By the northern route, after crossing the Sinai land bridge, they could have proceeded into the hill country of Israel and Palestine, descended into the lush Jordan Valley, and followed this extension of East Africa’s Great Rift Valley north to the oasis of Damascus and beyond. Our enterprising ancestors certainly would have taken some time to explore the possibilities, even the wonders, of this new land before traveling across the formidable land barriers to the east. Following this line of reasoning, I assumed that the Middle East must have developed fermented beverages before any were discovered in China.

  AT THE EDGE OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD

  A good shaman might have told me what was coming. In 1988, a phone call from Virginia (Ginny) Badler triggered the start of our investigation into ancient Middle Eastern fermented beverages, which has continued over the past twenty years. She had noted reddish residues inside large jars, which she believed represented wine dregs.

  Ginny described an archaeological site, Godin Tepe, located high in the central Zagros Mountains of western Iran. As revealed in excavations by the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto, some of the
first city builders in the lowland Tigris-Euphrates Valley of Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, had made inroads into the mountains, more than two thousand meters above sea level. At Godin Tepe along the Khorram River, hundreds of kilometers from their home base, they constructed a military-cum-trading base, dated to about 3500–3100 B.C., or what archaeologists of the region call the Late Uruk period.

  The Late Uruk period is known for many firsts, including the first code of law, the first irrigation system, and the first bureaucracy, but it is perhaps best known for developing the earliest writing system in the world. Scribes were the backbone of the increasingly complex machinations carried out in the palaces and temples of the great cities of Ur, Uruk, Lagash, and Kish. By incising schematic pictographs onto clay tablets with a stylus, they kept track of economic transactions, offerings, and tribute. They also began to draw together the strands of a history of humankind and the gods, as later encapsulated in the Gilgamesh Epic and the Book of Genesis. This information was recorded in the Sumerian language, which has no known affinities to any other language system. The pictographs, like the incised signs on the Jiahu tortoise shells, denoted the objects or ideas that were being conveyed. But the Mesopotamian scribes carried the process a step further by combining individual signs, or logograms, together into words and even sentences.