Earliest distilled liquor in China found in owl vessel

A recent analysis of a liquid found in a bronze vessel from the Shang Dynasty (1600 B.C.-1046 B.C.) has confirmed that it is distilled liquor, pushing the appearance of distillation technology on the Chinese archaeological record back 1,000 years. This means the distilled liquor appears in China around the same time as it appears in Egypt, not brought to China centuries later through trade.

Archaeologists from the Jinan Institute of Archaeology discovered the bronze owl-shaped vessel in Tomb M257 at the Daxinzhuang site in Jinan, in Shandong Province, in December 2010. The quality of the design and casting is excellent and very few owl vessels of this quality have been found in the province.

Archaeologists could tell that the sealed vessel still contained a small amount of liquid, but because the lid and body were firmed corroded together, researchers were not able to open it to test the contents. Only in late 2024, after the Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism approved the conservation and protection plan for all of the artifacts recovered from the Daxinzhuang excavation, could the vessel be opened and its contents analyzed.

Experts at the Shandong Provincial Cultural Relics Protection, Restoration and Identification Center were able to carefully treat the corrosion at the contact point and open the lid. There was only a small amount of red rust, cuprous oxide, on the interior wall of the vessel, proving that the container was tightly sealed during the burial rituals and the contents were not fully oxidized. The tight original seal tightened further by corrosion also prevented the liquid contents from evaporating. The vessel was found to contain a clear fluid suspected to be wine that had been buried with the deceased as a funerary offering.

A sample of the liquid was sent to the archaeology laboratory at Shandong University for testing. Researchers deployed solid phase microextraction-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry technology to enrich the volatile organic molecules in the sample. The analysis found the sample contains water, ethanol, ethyl acetate and other products of distillation. It does not contain the sugars proteins found in fermented fruit and rice wine, nor does it contain the organic acids found in fermented wine that gives it an acidic pH of 3-4. Those acids act on bronze, dissolving the copper corrosion materials into the liquid turning it blue. Only volatile organic components with a boiling point below 100°C survive the distillation process, therefore, distilled wine does not contain those acids, does not turn blue from copper oxidation and has a neutral pH. The liquor from the Shang Dynasty vessel is colorless and has a pH of 5.8, just short of neutral.

Alcohol brewed and fermented from fruit and rice have been found going back to the Neolithic (9,000 years or so ago) and written sources from as far back as the Zhou dynasty (1046 B.C.–256 B.C.) detail making alcoholic beverages via fermentation, but before this discovery, the oldest archaeological evidence of distillation in China was equipment found in tombs from the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.–220 A.D.).

This Shang Dynasty bronze owl vessel is now in the collection of the Jinan Institute of Archaeology.