Tujia Zajiu Sipping Wine 土家咂酒
Tujia Zajiu Sipping Wine is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
Tujia Zajiu Sipping Wine (土家咂酒) is a grain wine of the Tujia (土家) people of Shizhu (石柱) in the Wuling Mountains (武陵山区) of Chongqing, drunk by sucking it from the jar through small bamboo tubes. The People's Daily Overseas Edition calls drinking zajiu a custom particular to the Tujia and a speciality of Huangshui National Forest Park (黄水国家森林公园), and the Shizhu culture and tourism committee lists zajiu among the county's local products.
How it is made
Zajiu is made from sorghum or barley. The fermented grain is packed into a jar and the mouth is sealed with mud; after about eight days the mash gives off a clear liquor that can be drawn off as it is drunk. For drinking, boiling water is poured onto the mash stored in the jar and bamboo tubes are pushed in. A Qing-dynasty Shizhu county annal (石柱县志), quoted by the paper, describes the same method: mash stored, water added to make wine, a bamboo tube put into the jar and the wine sucked gently.
How it is drunk
Several people sit round one jar, each with a small bamboo tube pushed into it, and host and guests drink together while they talk; sometimes the host sings folk songs or drinking songs to welcome the guests. In the Tujia villages of Huangshui National Forest Park, hosts carry out the jar in both hands and fit it with bamboo tubes for visitors.
Tujia families prepare zajiu for rice transplanting, the Qingming festival, the grain harvest, the Mid-Autumn and Double Ninth festivals and other big celebrations, both for themselves and for guests from far away.
Where it comes from
The paper links two poems to the drink. It says the Tang poet Bai Juyi (白居易), while prefect of Zhongzhou (忠州) on the Yangtze, often drank zajiu with local people and wrote a line about drinking through a vine stem. A local story holds that when the Taiping general Shi Dakai (石达开) reached the Tujia villages of southeast Sichuan in 1862, the villagers welcomed his troops with zajiu, and he wrote a poem on zajiu in which five dragons hold up a sky-supporting pillar and drink the Yangtze until it flows backwards.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.