China’s earliest distilled liquor found in owl container –

Recent analysis of liquid found in bronzes from the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC to 1046 BC) confirmed that it was distilled alcohol, delaying the emergence of distillation technology in the Chinese archaeological record by 1,000 years. This means that distilled spirits appeared in China around the same time as they appeared in Egypt, rather than being brought to China through trade centuries later.

In December 2010, archaeologists from the Jinan Institute of Archeology discovered a bronze owl in Tomb No. M257 at the Daxinzhuang site in Jinan City, Shandong Province. The design and casting quality are very good, owlwares of this quality are very rare. Found in the province.

Archaeologists could tell that the sealed container still contained a small amount of liquid, but because the lid and container were corroded together, the researchers were unable to open it to test the liquid inside. It was not until the end of 2024, when the Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism approved the protection plan for all cultural relics unearthed in Daxinzhuang, that the containers were able to be opened and the contents analyzed.

Experts from the Shandong Provincial Cultural Relics Protection and Restoration Appraisal Center carefully dealt with the corrosion of the contact points and opened the cover. There is only a small amount of red rust and cuprous oxide on the inner wall of the vessel, which proves that the vessel was tightly sealed during the funeral and the contents were not completely oxidized. The original seal was further tightened by corrosion, also preventing the liquid contents from evaporating. The container was found to contain a clear liquid, suspected to be wine, and was buried with the deceased as a funerary offering.

Liquid samples were sent to the Shandong University Archaeological Laboratory for testing. Researchers used solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to enrich volatile organic molecules in samples. Analysis found that the sample contained distillation products such as water, ethanol, and ethyl acetate. It does not contain the carbohydrate proteins found in fermented fruits and rice wine, nor the organic acids found in fermented wine (making its pH value 3-4 acidic). These acids act on the bronze, dissolving the copper-corroding material into the liquid, turning it blue. Only volatile organic components with boiling points below 100°C survive the distillation process, so the distilled spirit is free of these acids, does not turn blue due to copper oxidation, and has a neutral pH. The wine in Shang Dynasty vessels was colorless and had a pH value of 5.8, which was close to neutral.

Alcohol brewed and fermented from fruit and rice dates back to the Neolithic Age (approximately 9,000 years ago), and there are written sources detailing the brewing of alcoholic beverages through fermentation as early as the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC to 256 BC) , but prior to this discovery, the oldest archaeological evidence of distillation in China were devices found in tombs from the Han Dynasty (202 BC to AD 220).

This bronze owl from the Shang Dynasty is now in the Jinan Archaeological Research Institute.