The Untold Stories of China’s "Firewater"

Maotai is associated with celebrations and tragedies.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The Wall Street Journal recently did a video report about Maotai, China’s most well-known hard liquor. The report shared some interesting facts about Maotai: It’s the go-to drink for China’s rich and powerful, especially the Communist Party leadership; it tastes like firewater because it contains 53% alcohol; each bottle, depending on the vintage, can easily fetch tens and thousands of dollars; the company’s market capital reached over $500 billion in 2021, surpassing the valuation of China’s largest bank; the company’s hefty valuation has since dropped, but at nearly $300 billion today, it is still the world’s largest beverage company. Besides these impressive numbers, the video showcased many smiling and happy Chinese people drinking Maotai. 

While I appreciate the WSJ’s effort to introduce an important brand and the culture behind it to its worldwide readers, I am a bit turned off by the report because it feels like a marketing campaign for Maotai. Before anyone throw a few hundred dollars for a bottle of Maotai, I’d like to share a few untold stories related to this fiery liquor. 

Maotai has been produced in the village of Maitai, Guizhou province, for hundreds of years. Guizhou is an inland province in Southwestern China. Its mountainous terrains have made the province a tough place to either have a large-scale agriculture industry or be accessible to the outside world for trade. Not surprisingly, Guizhou has long been the most impoverished province in China. 

The Maotai village, however, has benefited from nature since it sits in a relatively flat pocket of land near a mineral-rich river, which is ideal for cultivating grains. The area is known for being home to a special red sorghum, a key ingredient of Maotai.

Travel writer Derek Sandhaus who visited the village of Maotai in 2014, wrote:

“The liquor that made the Maotai township famous is produced in long, squat buildings near the banks of the Chishui River. Inside, they feel like something more akin to a coalmine than a distillery—a dark flurry of steam and earth, heat and frenetic energy. Teams of barefoot men rush about with wheelbarrows full of sorghum, others stand ready with rakes and shovels. A thick haze of vapor rises from the stills and piles of fermenting sorghum, clouding the room. Elsewhere steel cranes drop the grains into deep, stone-lined pits.

It is a labor-intensive process that involves multiple fermentation-distillation cycles over the course of a year. Fermentation pits require constant tending, and more than a hundred aged spirits go into the finished baijiu. A whiskey distillery can comfortably operate with a handful of employees, but baijiu requires an army.

Though the scale is grander today, the techniques remain much the same as they have been for centuries.”

Making Maotai is not only labor-intensive but also requires an enormous supply of grains. Therefore, throughout China’s ancient history, emperors ordered all distilleries, including Maotai village, to cease production during famines to conserve grains to save lives. 

Between 1958 and 1961, the disastrous economic policies of the Chinese Communist Party dictator Mao Zedong caused the Great Chinese Famine. As villagers were dying right outside the gate of Maotai’s distillery, workers inside, who were half-starving themselves, weren’t allowed to distribute grains to save their families and neighbors from crushing hunger.

Maotai’s production continued because it was Mao’s favorite drink. We don’t know how many villagers of Maotai died of starvation. Historians estimate that about 40 million Chinese perished during the famine, including my dad’s maternal grandmother and his favorite aunt and her family of five. But the dictator in Beijing and his minions didn’t care. 

My dad told me that nowadays, Maotai from the vintage years between 1958 and 1961 could easily command over $1 million a bottle due to the limited quantities (in the WSJ video, one bottle of Maotai from 1970 sold for $1.4 million at an auction in Hong Kong). He couldn’t contain his indignation, “How could any Chinese drink Maotai from those years? The liquor was made out of the Chinese people’s blood!”

Mao died on September 9th, 1976. After the news of his death was announced through the radio, all works and productions in China stopped so everyone could attend the public mourning of Mao. Images from that time showed people were devastated: some punched their chests, others fainted, and everyone who didn’t faint was crying. I asked my dad if he cried, and I imagined that his answer would be “no” since he endured three years of hardship in a labor camp during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Surprisingly, my dad said he did cry. Public demonstration of sadness, including crying for the “dear leader,” was mandatory and necessary for survival. Party members embedded in the crowd watched everyone else’s reaction closely. Those who didn’t exhibit sufficient grief were reprimanded later. “So did you fake a cry?” I asked my dad. He told me that although many people did fake it, he shed real tears, not for the dictator, but for all the family members he lost during the famine. 

Dad said he got wasted at a friend’s house that night. They shared a few glasses of Maotai; his friend had hidden it so well that it survived multiple raids by Red Guards. I initially assumed what my dad and his friend did was unique. Then I read Frank Dikotter’s brilliant book, “The Cultural Revolution.” Dikotter wrote that after Mao’s death was announced, “In Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunan, liquor sold out overnight.” Apparently, there were many behind-the-door celebrations that night. 

I have never tasted Maotai. Since leaving China at a young age, I have never developed any taste or appreciation for hard liquors.  Even after I started drinking socially as an adult, I avoided touching Maotai. 

After I got married, my husband and I traveled to China for our honeymoon. My dad gifted us a bottle of Maotai, which he had saved for many years and hoped to drink at his favorite child’s wedding (He never openly declared it, but I always assumed  I was his favorite child.) Unfortunately, my parents couldn’t attend our wedding in America. Thus, Dad asked us to take the bottle of Maotai to America and wait to open it when we had our first child. 

On May 14, 2018, my parents were with us when our son Lucas was born and died. No one mentioned the bottle of Maotai in the cabinet again. My dad hasn’t touched a drop of rice wine since then. 

Lucas would have been six years old this week.

To many Chinese people, Maotai represents national pride, a status symbol of their success, or even an investment opportunity to get rich. To my dad and me, Maotai is about a national tragedy that the Party is eager to eradicate from history and the Chinese people’s collective memory, and the personal sorrows we carry for the rest of our lives.