So back
we come after a month in China and we are shattered, dirty and
overwhelmed by massive colds. We have infected an entire 777 on the
return flight from Beijing to London and can now barely talk. All we
want to do is die in the quiet of our own home. And it is only at
this point that I yearn for my bottle of Three Gorges Wine Company
52% liquor, reasoning that not even the Three Gorges liquor can be worse
than the way I currently feel and maybe a shot would actually help.
Then I remember that I left it in a fridge somewhere in China and
anyway, it's truly undrinkable, dead or alive.
I
acquired this awful liquid, this Three Gorges baijiu (I think it's known as) at a place called Yichang on the Yangzi River. I paid too much for it
(£1.60 for 125 ml); but then again, Three Gorges Wine Company liquor
is so bad that a little goes a really long way. I only bought it
in the first place because I'd seen other people (blokes, invariably)
tucking into variations of the stuff in eateries and restaurants and
reasoned That
must be just the thing, taken in small quantities, to round off a
hard day's sightseeing.
Could
not have been more wrong, of course. I don't think I've ever drunk
anything so alarming, not even when I was a teenager experimenting
with bucket homebrew and amateur wine and White Shield. The one and
only time I consumed Three Gorges Wine Company 52% liquor (Lake
North Famous Brand Goods
it also said in English in small print as a come-on) I was almost
blinded. It started off nice and cold from the fridge before
exploding into a horrible stale grappa kind of nose after which all I
remember is choking helplessly while tears coursed down my cheeks. I
was on fire and I was crying and having convulsions. It was
authentically frightening. What was in the bottle? Various
ingredients had been suggested to me by people along the way,
including wheat, rye, rice, grapes, sorghum and barley, but the
colourless, slightly viscous end product wasn't really intelligible
on account of the coughing and blinding; and even when I wasn't blind
I couldn't read the Chinese writing on the label to get a better
idea.
Was
it just a terrifying one-off? Hard to say. Higher-end variants are
heavily advertised on roadside billboards as well as sold in
relatively smart liquor shops, so there's nothing unfamiliar about
the basic concept. In fact I watched a bunch of local lads in the
great city of Tianjin start off their evening meal with a large
bottle of baijiu
split
four ways, followed by three bottles apiece of dependably excellent
Tsingtao beer - and still manage to cope with chopsticks and a
cauldron of boiling hot bouillon.
So, no, my Three Gorges wasn't entirely freakish. Baijiu
is
apparently the most widely-drunk hard liquor in the world and I just
picked a terrible example.
Would
I have been better off with one of the local regular wines? A
Cabernet Sauvignon from the Great Wall winemakers? A camel-themed
rosé
whose label I could not construe, but which the translation app on my
phone rendered as Drunk
Piece?
A Chilean red called Legend
of Chilephant
with an elephant on the label? Yes, of course: they wouldn't have
made me cry. On the other hand, I did drink some Changyu sparkling
white which looked like wine but tasted just like the Sprite in a
neighbouring glass, so maybe it's not as simple as that.
Either
way, the experience was pretty emblematic. I mean, China is an
astonishing, hugely impressive work in progress, crammed with
energies and achievements and modernities barely forty years after
the end of the Cultural Revolution; but it's also relentless, fairly
bonkers, extremely hard to decode, hugely unrelaxing for the Western
tourist. A modest bottle of bathtub hooch turns out to be not a way
of unwinding, but an incredibly challenging thing, a threat, an affront to the
sensibilities which this
traveller did not even begin to anticipate. That and stewed chicken
feet for breakfast: we still have so much to learn.
CJ