Does Hong Kong's long-forgotten tradition of distilling unique spirits belong firmly in the history books, or are the tides just beginning to turn?
This story appears in the Hong Kong edition of the Tatler Dining Guide 2022, now available at all good bookstores and online.
On any given night, bars across Hong Kong can be found pouring an encyclopaedic array of world spirits that would make even the United Nations blush. A particularly itinerant drinker could conceivably begin their liquid journey with a refreshing Kenyan gin lengthened with tonic at Dr. Fern’s, before moving to Awa Awa for Okinawan awamori, and ending the night at The Daily Tot sipping on a rhum agricole from the tiny French-Caribbean possession of Martinique.
However, conspicuously absent from Hong Kong’s landscape of alcohol—and in spite of its long and once-proud history—is a category whose omission comes across as a blinding slight in hindsight: Cantonese liquor. No, we’re not talking about homegrown gins that sprung up in the wake of the global gin boom, and are based on a Western liquor to begin with. We’re referring to a far more esoteric and deep-rooted tradition with a centuries-old presence in the Guangdong region, derived from the millennium-old culture of Chinese baijiu and huangjiu (yellow wine). Today, however, the industry is almost non-existent, and seen as a historical artifact to Hongkongers—if they are aware of its presence at all.
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What is Cantonese liquor?
Above all, Cantonese liquor is distinct. Unlike Shaoxing wine, which refers to a specific style of huangjiu that must be produced in its namesake city and is known the world over for its use in Chinese cooking, Cantonese liquor is a catch-all term that refers to any liquor traditionally distilled in Canton, or modern-day Guangdong province.
Within this region, though, exists a world of difference. There’s Yuk Bing Siu, a clear rice-based liquor that is infused with pork fat before bottling to impart notes of milk, rose and pandan; Ng Ka Py, a medicinal wine fortified with the bark of the cortex acanthopanacus herb, once described by John Steinbeck in East of Eden as “the drink that tastes of good rotten apples”; and Mui Kwe Lu, a rose-flavoured sorghum spirit used as the secret ingredient in making Cantonese roast meats, cured sausages, and braised dishes like soy sauce chicken.
The beginnings of these indigenous spirits can be traced back to a myriad of family-owned distilleries, many of which originated from the city of Foshan throughout the 1800s. Their formation built upon the area’s reputation for spirits-making, dating back to Foshan’s exemption from alcohol tax in the Northern Song dynasty and its history as a hotbed for the production of ceramics—all the better for crafting the jars in which spirits were to be made.
As these distilleries grew in size, the first place they looked to expand, naturally, was the burgeoning British entrepot of Hong Kong, just a day’s boat ride away on the other side of the Pearl River Delta. By the 1930s, just before the outbreak of World War Two, Hong Kong boasted over a dozen distilleries, many of which had clustered around Wing Lok Street and Bonham Strand in Sheung Wan.