How an ancient rice beer helped brew Chinese civilisation

In the earliest days of ancient China, one of the driving forces that helped turn a group of relatively autonomous societies into what we would now call the Chinese civilisation was something many people still enjoy today: alcohol. In a new paper published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a team of scientists from the US and China described how the quest for red rice beer contributed to cultural interactions among neolithic peoples that would eventually lead to the birth of Chinese civilisation. The study focused on alcoholic red rice beer made in a large clay basin called dakougangs. The Dawenkou culture, some of the earliest settlers in China living in modern-day Shandong province in eastern China between 4,600 and 6,700 years ago, created the fermentation recipe. While ancient Chinese societies fermented all sorts of alcohol, the dakougangs would have been a major technological breakthrough, and it quickly spread westwards. However, despite knowing that there were dakougangs in eastern China thousands of years ago, the drink’s origin has not been identified. “Dakougangs were not made in every settlement but were mainly found in large elite burials. It is not clear exactly where dakougangs were made, how they were distributed or if they were traded as commercial items,” said Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford University and one of the authors of the paper. Because of its elite status, red rice beer would have been an important commodity amid a culture of “competitive feasting”. At the time, “individuals who could provide large quantities of such beverages would have been more competitive for status and prestige in the community”, the authors wrote. “Particularly if the drinks were of an exotic type.” The dakougangs were likely displayed for the general public during ceremonies and were probably drunk from a communal pot by participants. “The feasting events were likely to have been competitive for social status and prestige among individuals and households,” the authors wrote. In a separate paper from September 2021, Liu wrote: “Feasts could have fostered an element of solidarity among participants, signalled various kinds of information to participants and the broader community, and enhanced prestige of the hosts.” Feasting and alcohol fermentation has a long history in China, with the first evidence of alcohol consumption emerging around 9,000 years ago. While it was not the only tool of cultural exchange, alcohol was important for bringing cultures together, facilitating knowledge transfers and eventually intertwining the regions into a civilisation. This moment of Chinese history is called the “interaction sphere”, a term coined by the late professor of archaeology Kwang-chih Chang in 1986 to describe the period when regional cultures were becoming increasingly layered, complex, and crucially, woven together. Liu said: “The interaction sphere emerged before the beginning of the Bronze Age, or the Three Dynasties; beginning around 4,000 years ago. We do not see it ‘end’, but it developed into a new phase in Chinese history.” A sacred drink Based on archaeological evidence, the dakougangs were made in basins around 40-70cm tall and made of clay. The drink was brewed from a grain-based mixture of rice, millet, Job’s tears, Triticeae and snake’s gourd root. The recipe leverages a mould called monascus to create a fermentation starter named qu, which is still used today. The feasting events were likely to have been competitive for social status. The new study published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences The monascus produced a red hue, which created a mythological symbolism because it would have been associated with blood. “The symbolic implication of red colour associated with the seemingly magical transformation from cereal to alcohol, as well as the psychoactive effect of the beverage, may have contributed to the importance of red rice beer, which probably was regarded as a sacred substance,” the authors wrote. Learning how to brew a sacred or exotic alcoholic drink might have been revered knowledge, so learning how to make dakougangs could have helped “local elites improve their abilities to gain and maintain social status and prestige”. This revelation, the authors wrote, could shed “new light on the intensified transregional interactions which contributed to the growth of social stratification at the dawn of Chinese civilisation.”