Lishui Traditional Brewing

Name and category

According to the public notice of January 2024, Lishui Traditional Brewing is one of the new inscriptions in the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level intangible cultural heritage items, in the traditional craft category.

Applicant

The applicant unit named in the notice is the Jingqiao Town People's Government, and the recommended guardian unit is the Jingqiao Town culture and sports station. Three items in this batch were submitted by that town; the other two are Lishui Rice Cake Making and Fermented Rice Pancake Making.

Wording of the item name

The words rendered here as "traditional method" are part of the item's official name and indicate that the craft follows an inherited practice. The notice states no individual process, no product name, no raw material and no fermentation starter.

Brewing in the historical record

The earliest record of brewing in Lishui found in this library is the "Liyang wufan wine" entry in Yuan Mei's Qing-dynasty Recipes from the Sui Garden (Suiyuan Shidan, Tea and Wine List):

余素不饮。丙戌年，在溧水叶北部家，饮乌饭酒至十六杯，傍人大骇，来相劝止。而余犹颓然，未忍释手。其色黑，其味甘鲜，口不能言其妙。据云溧水风俗：生一女，必造酒一坛，以青精饭为之。俟嫁此女，才饮此酒。以故极早亦须十五六年。打瓮时只剩半坛，质能胶口，香闻室外。

Translated: I am ordinarily no drinker. In the bingxu year I drank sixteen cups of wufan wine at the Ye family's house in Lishui, to the alarm of those around me, who tried to stop me, yet I was too far gone to let the cup go. The wine was black and sweet-savoury, its excellence beyond words. It is said that in Lishui the custom is that when a daughter is born a jar of wine must be brewed, made from qingjing rice; the wine is drunk only when that daughter marries, so at the earliest it must wait fifteen or sixteen years. When the jar is opened only half remains, the body sticky to the lips, the fragrance reaching beyond the room.

The entry thus records that in the bingxu year of the Qianlong reign (1766) Yuan Mei drank wufan wine at a Lishui household, and that Lishui had a custom of brewing a jar of wine from "qingjing rice", which is rice dyed with the leaves of the nanzhu (wufan) tree, for a newborn daughter, to be opened when she married.

The custom still leaves traces today: a China Jiangsu Network report of May 2023 notes that wufan wine was offered for tasting at the Wufan festival in Chenguo village, Hefeng Town, and it too quotes the passage above. Whether that wufan wine is the same as this project is not established by any source in this library, so it serves here only as a historical lead on brewing in Lishui, and this entry draws no inference about the project's processes, products or place of transmission.

Points in doubt

First, the records concern wufan wine, and their link to this project is unproven: the recipe book and the festival report both describe a wine made from qingjing rice, in places pointing respectively to the county town area and to Hefeng Town, whereas the applicant for this project is Jingqiao Town; no source establishes that they are the same, so they must not be equated.

Second, no source establishes what period the "traditional method" is measured against, so this entry does not infer a starting date from the item's name.

Third, the processes and products are largely unsourced: no source directly describing this project's raw material, starter, processes, product name or strength was found.

To be added

• the raw material and the fermentation starter;
• the individual steps: soaking the rice, steaming it, mixing in the starter, fermenting and drawing off the liquor;
• the name, strength and storage of the product;
• the brewing premises, vessels and water used;
• the line of transmission and the safeguarding measures.

All of the above remain absent after searching this library's seven source layers, namely official web pages, published notices and lists, the local-gazetteer system, academic papers, classical full texts, media reports and maps; this entry adds nothing by conjecture.