Three-thousand-year-old moonshine has been found in China. It was kept in a tightly sealed jar in the shape of an owl (3 photos)

The oldest distilled liquid, dating back over 3,000 years, is a unique artifact from the Shang Dynasty that reveals unknown pages of the history of alcohol production.





A recent analysis of liquid found in a bronze vessel from the Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE - 1046 BCE) has confirmed that it is distilled liquor, pushing back the appearance of distillation technology in Chinese archaeological records by 1,000 years. This means that distilled liquor appears in China around the same time as it did in Egypt, rather than being introduced to China centuries later through trade.

Archaeologists from the Jinan Institute of Archaeology discovered the owl-shaped bronze vessel in tomb M257 at the Daxinzhuang excavation site in Jinan, Shandong Province, in December 2010. The quality of the design and casting is excellent, and very few owl-shaped 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 firmly bonded by corrosion, researchers were unable to open it to check the contents. It was not until late 2024, after the Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism approved a conservation and protection plan for all artifacts recovered from the Daxinzhuang excavation site, that the vessel was able to be opened and its contents analyzed.



Experts from 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, copper oxide, on the inner wall of the vessel, proving that the container had been tightly sealed during burial rituals and the contents had not been completely oxidized. The tight original seal, further tightened by corrosion, also prevented the liquid contents from evaporating. It was found that the vessel contained a clear liquid, presumably wine, which had been buried with the deceased as a funerary offering.

A sample of the liquid was sent to the archaeological lab of Shandong University for testing. The researchers used solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry technology to enrich the volatile organic molecules in the sample. Analysis showed that the sample contained water, ethanol, ethyl acetate, and other distillation products. It did not contain the sugars, proteins found in fermented fruit and rice wine, or organic acids found in fermented wine, which give it an acidic pH of 3-4. These acids attack bronze by dissolving copper corrosive materials in the liquid, turning it blue. Only volatile organic components with a boiling point below 100 °C survive the distillation process, so the distilled wine does not contain these 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, slightly less than neutral.

Alcohol brewed and fermented from fruits and rice has been discovered as far back as the Neolithic era (around 9,000 years ago), and written records from the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE – 256 BCE) detail the making of alcoholic beverages through fermentation, but before this discovery, the oldest archaeological evidence of distillation in China was equipment found in tombs from the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE).

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