Ganbei! Alcohol Culture in China
- andrewsingerchina
- Aug 12
- 5 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
Andrew Singer Talks About China and America, Vol. 3, Issue 33
In China, alcohol isn’t just alcohol. It’s a key that unlocks relationships, respect, and belonging — and nothing turns the lock faster than baijiu, China’s throat-scorching national spirit. Not drinking in China is like refusing meat at a Brazilian Rodizio or rooting for the Yankees at Fenway Park. It can be done, but it marks you as out of step with the way things are.
Baijiu, what I have always thought of as “white lightning,” is a potent spirit first distilled in the Yuan Dynasty (or maybe earlier) that rivals tea as the unofficial national drink. Rice wine graced the cups of the scholar-official elite for thousands of years, fruit wine has grown in popularity with the middle class, and there’s always beer. But baijiu — China’s firewater — has now transitioned from a drink of the masses to being the drink of choice across every class.
My own relationship with baijiu began inauspiciously. I was twenty, a nondrinker, and visiting a friend’s family in Xingtai in 1987. The pressure to partake since I’d arrived was relentless. I’m still not sure whether I finally agreed on that last day out of politeness or surrender. My hand shook as I accepted the small shot glass. It was only half full.
Ganbei! I tossed it back. Smooth entry, then a throat spasm, searing heat. I am pretty sure my eyes bugged out. I came close to gagging. I was mortified, but needn’t have been. Around me, smiles blossomed. Tension drained from the room. I had participated. That was what mattered. Everyone was satisfied.
Earlier this year, spending a month in central China, baijiu once again surrounded me. Lunches and more often dinners with my wife’s family and friends stretched for hours, with bottles of the stuff paraded into private dining rooms like honored guests. BYOB – Bring Your Own Baijiu.
Toasts became increasingly elaborate and boisterous as the nights wore on. Shot glasses grew harder to fill without sloshing, precious liquid spilling this way and that. My toasting skills in Chinese are middling at best, but I wasn’t booed, and no one kicked me out.
I still wasn’t drinking baijiu. I drew a line at red wine, which they indulged. I don’t even like red wine, but I drank my share. If I reached my limit, my wife would notice, step in as my socially-acceptable surrogate, and take the toasting heat herself, putting away shots of baijiu like a pro.
During quiet moments, I was reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. America’s Gilded Age, like China’s present, revolved around a strict regimen of relationships, appearances, and protocol. In both, pomp masks truth, and ritual — well served in the Middle Kingdom by alcohol — is the glue that holds society, politics, and business together.
Derek Sandhaus, in his lighthearted and thorough book, Drunk in China, describes the meaning threaded throughout Chinese drinking culture:
“Foremost among ancient Chinese drinking mores was the idea that you never drank to satisfy a craving. You drank always with a nobler intent….‘You never drink without a purpose.’”1
Drinking in modern China may not always be so high-minded, but this is not the land of keggers.
Li Bai, a Tang Dynasty drinking savant and China’s leading poet, wrote thirteen centuries ago, “I only want to get drunk and never to wake…great drinkers are more famous than sober sages.”2
A contemporary, prose poet Liu Zongyuan (Liu Tsung-yuan), praised the “drink divine” for reviving the world anew,3 and, feeling low one morning in 807 AD, opened a fresh jug and thanked the wine gods for chasing away his cares, reminiscing
“we heard some fine words here last night/once we were drunk we stopped talking/we stretched out on sweet-smelling grass/the wealthiest men in the past/surely possessed nothing like this.”4
Imbibing wasn’t about the taste or just for numbing abandon — it was about transformation, connection, the shift in the air between people and in nature. It was custom that gave the world meaning, and it is a custom that carries on in China.
One night in Henan, at a small local restaurant, a man at the next table offered me a flimsy paper cup of local baijiu and a cigarette. To save face — mine, my wife’s, and his — I accepted the cup. My second-ever baijiu tasting. No gagging this time, but I still do not like it.
Later, drunk and playing a raucous game of Huaquan (finger guessing) with his friend, he again offered me a cigarette. After forcing it into my hand, he tried to push it into my mouth to light. I refused. I had drunk his liquor, but that was as far as I would go. He got pissed, slurred something that we think meant that I refused because I was whipped by my wife, and turned away from us in stony disdain. In his eyes I had disrespected ritual, a failure of the highest magnitude.
China takes drinking seriously, but at least in terms of driving, it also takes drinking responsibly — twice upon leaving a restaurant, our dining companions ordered designated drivers via app, men who arrived on scooters, parked them, and drove us home after a night out. One of them considerately put a blanket over the driver’s seat before sitting down.
My favorite story in Sandhaus’s book apocryphally took place after the Han Dynasty fell in 220 CE. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove drank to escape the world. Liu Ling, the most prodigious among them, visited Du Kang, China’s greatest winemaker, whose sign “claimed one cup could put a tiger to sleep, two could knock out a dragon, and if your intoxication lasted less than three years, the drink was free.”
Liu downed three cups, went home for money, and vanished. Three years later, Du went looking for Liu. Liu’s wife told him that Liu had dropped dead after returning home three years prior.
“‘My dear lady,’ replied Du. ‘Your husband isn’t dead. He’s dead drunk.’” They dug up Liu’s body and found him just waking, declaring, “That’s some damned good wine.”5
I will never enjoy baijiu, and I am most certainly not willing to drink my way to toleration and appreciation as did Sandhaus. But I’ve learned about ritual. That the point isn’t to like it (although many do). That the point is to raise your glass, say Ganbei, and drink (sip) to participating in the moment, in step with the culture and custom.
1 Derek Sandhaus, Drunk in China: Baijiu and the World’s Oldest Drinking Culture, Potomac Books, 2019, Page 51
2 Li Bai, “Invitation to Wine,” in 300 Tang Poems, Higher Education Press, Beijing, 2000, Page 159
3 Liu Zongyuan, 300 Tang Poems, Page 464
4 Liu Tsung-yuan, “Drinking Wine, 807 AD, in Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-yuan, translated by Red Pine, Copper Canyon Press, Washington, 2019, Page 55
5 Sandhaus, Page 66