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We have so far explored a rich history of soju that involves its growth – first locally, then regionally, then globally – as an alcoholic beverage of choice made possible by the development of distillation technologies and their transfer through cross-cultural exchange. In the twenty-first century, soju has expanded beyond its longtime Korean horizons and entered the global market, where it has successfully won brand recognition and gained acceptance among the world’s universally popular spirits. This is taking the drink beyond not only its traditional economic sphere but its cultural sphere as well.
Chapter Six establishes the base from which to extend our examination of soju into the future, using the comparative cases of Japan and what is now Mexico. Japan, which has been interacting with its neighbors on the Korean Peninsula and in China for centuries, long ago developed a drinking culture, one that resembles those of Korea and China. While sake, a fermented, strained wine, predominates in Japan, the spirit known as shōchū (written with the Chinese characters shaozhou 燒酎, “roasted liquor”), Japan’s counterpart to soju, also developed as a unique form of distilled liquor. Theories abound about how such spirits developed in Japan. Here, we examine the possibility that transfers of distilled liquors and distillation methods occurred between China and Korea and Japan. Next, we extend our comparison to a more surprising place, Mexico. Anthropological field research on underground still production of alcohol in Mexico points out the resemblance of local stills to Mongolian types, suggesting the possibility that Afro-Eurasian distillation methods influenced alcohol development there both before and after the arrival of Europeans. Even if we cannot deny the possibility that distillation developed independently there, a comparative examination of the rise of distilled liquors in different places of the world remains a worthy endeavor.
Chapter 4 observes the development of soju in Korea during the Chosŏn period, which is characterized by its localization with regard to methods and culture. This period is important to the history of soju, because the spirit spread rapidly throughout Korea and settled into its role as an important Korean alcohol, along with other kinds of alcoholic beverage that had been consumed since antiquity. Soju evolved, leading to its documentation in a variety of sources, including cookbooks that provided households with recipes using soju, medical books containing guides for medical applications of soju, and official documents testifying to the governmental use of soju in domestic and diplomatic gift-giving, an important political activity in premodern government. Soju continued to spread as well: from Korea, the spirit traveled to countries like Japan, as either a diplomatic gift or a trade commodity, creating the opportunity for its transformation into a local Japanese beverage still popular today.
Chapter 1 opens the book with a brief global history of distilled liquors, focusing on current debates about their origins and early development and the possible transfers of knowledge that linked major Eurasian societies in ancient times, including Greece, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, China, and Mongolia. This allows us to perceive the multiple origins of soju, moving beyond the expected linear causation. A circulation pattern appears throughout Eurasia, at least wherever premodern occurrences of cross-cultural, inter-civilizational exchanges are well documented. A close examination of distillation processes in the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Central Asia reveals that they bear different characteristics with regard to both their ingredients and their distillation methods. However, one cannot overlook the fact that all the distilled liquors in these countries were originally called arak (ʿaraq meaning “sweat” or “perspiration” in Arabic), which suggests a common agent of transference – namely the Mongols. While the Arabs probably developed distilled liquors, including ʿaraq, the Mongols contributed to a mass-produced arak with portable stills and then popularized the word. With this, the chapter ends with an overview of the Mongols’ role in the widespread dissemination of arak-type spirits to different parts of Eurasia, including Korea.
Chapter 5 explores the great transformations that soju has undergone during the contemporary period, which spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the consequences of that change for the societies that have consumed the spirit. During the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), new distillation methods introduced to Korea from Japan fundamentally changed the methods of distillation from the traditional still to continuous distillation using large machines. Even after the end of Japanese colonialism, and the Korean War (1950–1953), the Korean government supported factory-manufactured soju made from potatoes because the country lacked grain. Only in the 1980s did the government begin to promote traditionally distilled soju as a minsokchu (national folk liquor), part of its policy of promoting national culture. At the same time, the modern form of industrial soju continued to develop in variety, contributing to the popularization of soju at cheaper prices, at different levels of alcohol content, and with a variety of tastes. With these developments underway, producers began to export soju to other countries, in the long run making it into a global brand. With these dramatic changes in its production, distribution, and consumption, people began to debate what constituted traditional soju.
Soju, the “national” distilled alcoholic drink of Korea, has now become one of the world’s most popular drinks, most recently thanks to the recent pop-cultural phenomenon of Korean Wave (Hallyu), represented by the growing popularity of K-pop, Korean dramas, and Korean foods in today’s globalizing world. Clear and colorless, with a taste similar to vodka, soju is a kind of spirit, or distilled liquor, which obtains a high percentage of alcohol content by means of a distillation technology that separates alcohol from the water and other compounds of fermented material. Though not as famous as such spirits as whiskey and vodka, soju currently enjoys increasingly widespread popularity worldwide. Like many other modern spirits today, the companies behind many modern soju brands produce on a mass scale in factories using modern technologies. As a consequence, few people today are aware of the drink’s ancient origins or how it became popular in Korea.
Chapter 3 examines cross-cultural contacts between the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) in Korea and the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) in China and Mongolia (and the broader Mongol Empire), in order to refine our historical context to make clear the kind of Sino-Korean interactions that made the transfer of distilled liquors to Korea possible. As its suzerain state on Koryŏ’s border for nearly 150 years, the Mongols were able to exert considerable influence on Korea. This opened the way to a wide range of cross-cultural interactions, from the stationing of Mongol soldiers on Cheju Island to trade to court relations and intermarriage, situations that created opportunities for the exchange of such things as liquors, concepts of drinking culture, and still technologies, laying the foundations for soju’s development. Such a process is not excusive to alcohol; we see similar patterns in a variety of cultural artifacts (even Korean foods and national dress). Cross-cultural interactions between the Yuan and Koryŏ realms provided Koreans with access to genuinely cosmopolitan societies in Eurasia, so the range of influences went well beyond China or the Mongols. In this way, soju provides an excellent vehicle for understanding both the extent of Eurasian influence on Korea and also Korea’s place in Eurasia under the Pax Mongolica.
Chapter 2 examines the history of alcoholic drinks in Korea from ancient times, and explores Korean sources to ascertain how distilled liquors like soju and arak suddenly appeared when they did in the late Koryŏ period, in the fourteenth century. An overview of the standard literature on the history of soju in the Korean language points the way to solving the key question of soju’s origins in Korea, namely the rise of the Mongol Empire. Thus it becomes important to reconstruct the broader historical context of the Mongol period that facilitated the transfer and rapid rise of soju in Korea. This also opens the door to rich new evidence from recent pioneering efforts in historical, archeological, and anthropological studies that have shed considerable light on discussions of Eurasian distillation transfers generally. Such material not only helps us connect soju’s development to events all over the continent, but also establishes a useful context for comparative analysis. Thanks to these new sources, we are able to revise the standard approaches to the history of distillation technology in Korea in cross-disciplinary ways.
Hyunhee Park offers the first global historical study of soju, the distinctive distilled drink of Korea. Searching for soju's origins, Park leads us into the vast, complex world of premodern Eurasia. She demonstrates how the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wove together hemispheric flows of trade, empire, scientific and technological transfer and created the conditions for the development of a singularly Korean drink. Soju's rise in Korea marked the evolution of a new material culture through ongoing interactions between the global and local and between tradition and innovation in the adaptation and localization of new technologies. Park's vivid new history shows how these cross-cultural encounters laid the foundations for the creation of a globally connected world.
Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia engaged in vigorous cross-cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean. This book focuses on the years 700 to 1500, a period when powerful dynasties governed both regions, to document the relationship between the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the arrival of the Europeans. Through a close analysis of the maps, geographic accounts, and travelogues compiled by both Chinese and Islamic writers, the book traces the development of major contacts between people in China and the Islamic world and explores their interactions on matters as varied as diplomacy, commerce, mutual understanding, world geography, navigation, shipbuilding, and scientific exploration. When the Mongols ruled both China and Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their geographic understanding of each other's society increased markedly. This rich, engaging, and pioneering study offers glimpses into the worlds of Asian geographers and mapmakers, whose accumulated wisdom underpinned the celebrated voyages of European explorers like Vasco da Gama.