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.

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.

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.

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.

[7] 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.

[8] Professor McGovern explains: The earliest chemically confirmed alcoholic beverage in the world was discovered at Jiahu in the Yellow River Valley of China (Henan province), ca.

The Jiahu discovery illustrates how you should never give up hope in finding chemical evidence for a fermented beverage from the Palaeolithic period.

You might think, as I did too, that the grape wines of Hajji Firuz, the Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia would prove to be the earliest alcoholic beverages in the world, coming from the so-called "Cradle of Civilization" in the Near East as they do.

The Dutch historian Frank Dikötter describes the period between the Han and Tang dynasties as a "golden age" for alcohol, when it was commonly consumed in conjunction with mineral drugs, notably Cold-Food Powder, until the "rise of a tea culture during the Tang was a significant shift away from heavier patterns of intoxication".

[10] As noted in Shen Kuo's 11th-century Dream Pool Essays, much of the socializing among the gentry concerned "drinking guests" (jiuke).

[11] Distillation may have been practiced in China as early as the later Han but the earliest evidence so far discovered has been dated to the Jin and Southern Song.

Despite the popularity of Islam in the Mongol Empire and its growth within China during the Mongolian Yuan dynasty, the common consumption of distilled spirits such as baijiu dates to the same era.

Two of the principal brewers in modern China, Tsingtao and Harbin, are named for the sites of the former major German and Russian breweries.

Other establishments such as the EWO Brewery Ltd., (now owned by Suntory), grew up to serve demand for western beer in the Shanghai International Settlement.

[14][15][16] Huangjiu or "yellow wine" is a fermented alcoholic beverage brewed directly from grains such as millet, rice, and wheat.

Its production requires crushing the grapes by hand, then straining them through atlas silk and boiling the juice with an equal volume of water, as well as added sugar.

The ginger-flavored liqueur Canton is no longer produced in China but is instead imported for consumption in the United States from a distillery in France unrelated to its original production.

Chinese alcoholic beverages were traditionally warmed before being consumed, a practice going back to the early dynastic period.

The drink was thought to prevent disease and misfortune (particularly snake bites and digestive worms) and to promote health; although modern Chinese authorities discourage the practice, it is still legally available for consumption.