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0064 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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C

238   SING-IRANICA

wine in the same manner as for grape-wine. Certain it is that distillation is a Western invention, and was unknown to the ancient Chinese.' Li Si-éen fails to inform us as to the time when the distillation of grape-wine came into existence. If this process had become known in China under the Tang in connection with grape-wine, it would be strange if the Chinese did not then apply it to their native spirits, but should have waited for another foreign impulse until the Mongol period. On the other hand, if the method due to the Uigur under the Tang merely applied to fermented grape-wine, we may justly wonder that the Chinese had to learn such a simple affair from the Uigur, while centuries earlier they must have had occasion to observe this process among many Iranian peoples. It would therefore be of great interest to seize upon a document that would tell us more in detail what this method of manufacture was, to which the Tang history obviously attaches so great importance. It is not very likely that distillation was involved; for it is now generally conceded that the Arabs possessed no knowledge of alcohol, and that distillation is not mentioned in any relevant literature of the Arabs and Persians from the tenth to the thirteenth century.2 The statement of Li Si-éen, that distillation was first practised under the Mongols, is historically logical and in keeping with our present knowledge of the subject. It is hence reasonable to hold (at least for the present) also that distilled grape-wine was not made earlier in China than in the epoch of the Yûan. Mon Sen of the Tang says advisedly that grapes can be fermented into wine, and the recipe of the Sung does not allude to distillation.

In the eighteenth century European wine also reached China. A chest of grape-wine figures among the presents made to the Emperor K`an-hi on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1715 by the Jesuits Bernard Kilian Stumpf, Joseph Suarez, Joachim Bouvet, and Dominicus Parrenin.3

P. OSBECK,4 the pupil of Linné, has the following notice on the importation of European wine into China: " The Chinese wine, which our East India traders call Mandarin wine, is squeezed out of a fruit which is here called Pausio,5 and reckoned the same with our grapes.

1 Cf. BRETSCHNEIDER, Bot. Sin., pt. II, p. 155; J. DUDGEON, The Beverages of the Chinese, pp. 19-20; EDKINS, China Review, Vol. VI, p. 211. The process of distillation is described by H. B. GRUPPY, Samshu-Brewing in North China (Journal China Branch Roy. As. Soc., Vol. XVIII, 1884, pp. 163-164).

2 E. O. v. LIPPMANN, Abhandlungen, Vol. II, pp. 206-209; cf. also my remarks in American Anthropologist, 1917, p. 75.

3 Cf. Wan Sou .en tien   ',;;A, Ch. 56, p. 12.

4 A Voyage to China and the East Indies, Vol. I, p. 315 (London, 1771). b Apparently a bad or misprinted reproduction of p'u-t'ao.

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