Lidu Liquor: A Thousand-Year Cellar Aroma from the Yuan Dynasty
You probably do not know this, but in Jinxian County, Jiangxi, there is a small town called Lidu. Any random jar of white liquor pulled from its shelves can be traced back, year by year, for more than seven hundred years. I want to be honest with you about how I ended up writing this piece. I was working through a stack of county annals from Jiangxi, the kind of municipal-level zhì volumes that nobody outside a handful of historians and a few stubborn local writers ever reads. Most of them are dense, repetitive, and frankly a little boring. They list officials, list flood years, list tax reforms, list which magistrate repaired which bridge in which year of which reign. I was skimming fast, looking for something unusual. And then I hit the Lidu section. ...