Spittal, Aborigines, sulphur mining and more ...

The practice of making short-fermentation, crude, sweet, weak-strength alcoholic beverages for weddings and other festivities is well documented in Chinese historical texts, and is still undertaken by Taiwan’s Aborigines.

Although today’s Aborigines use the same qu as their Han Chinese neighbors, their ancestors made alcohol by chewing cooked grain and spitting it out, allowing the amylase enzymes in their saliva to start the fermentation process. This primitive brewing method was discovered by peoples the world over, but has been almost totally replaced by the more effective, higher strength alcohol methods introduced from outside.

At the beginning of the 17th century, about 2% of Taiwan’s population was non-Aboriginal (mostly Chinese fishermen and perhaps a few Japanese traders), but there was no systematic immigration. By a hundred years later, not only had Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese had varying success at establishing colonies, but they left a number of written documents that shed light on indigenous life then and perhaps as it had been earlier.

Chinese sulfur miner Yu Yong-he (陏永河), who visited Taiwan in 1696, and Dutch missionary Candidius in the 1620s both record the chewing and spitting of rice to make alcohol. Other Chinese and Western sources also claim that the bulk of Aboriginal rice and sugar crops were used for the production of alcohol. If true, it perhaps supports archaeologist Wu Qi-chang’s agriculture-for-alcohol theory (see xx).

Today’s Aborigines merely smile when asked about saliva-started alcohol, saying that was a practice of long ago. Indeed, in theory at least, Aborigines – like all Taiwanese – have had to relearn the home manufacture of alcohol, as it was banned by the Japanese colonial authorities following their establishment of a monopoly bureau (though it wasn’t enforced in some indigenous areas until as late as 1936). In practice, of course, illegal production merely moved higher into the hills and deeper into the forests.