by Xinhua writer Jiang Duo
QINGDAO, July 29 (Xinhua) -- Not much of a beer drinker, I arrived in Qingdao expecting little more than a famous local brew that would taste much like any other beer on a supermarket shelf.
Then I saw people walking home with beer sloshing inside clear plastic bags.
The pale golden liquid swung from their hands like groceries bought for dinner. It was a sight unfamiliar to me, but entirely ordinary in this coastal city in east China's Shandong Province.
For generations, Qingdao residents have carried fresh draft beer home in whatever containers were available. A resident remembers that in the 1960s and 1970s, bottled Tsingtao Beer was mainly available during major holidays and was rationed to five bottles per household. Draft beer, however, was not subject to the same restrictions.
People drank it from thick white porcelain bowls or brought thermos flasks and aluminum kettles to neighborhood shops to take it home. Plastic bags began appearing in the early 1980s and soon became a fixture of Qingdao street life.
The containers changed with the times, but the ritual remained.
This bond is especially visible each summer, when the Qingdao International Beer Festival fills the city with crowded tents, music and glasses raised beneath the night sky. This festival prompted me to look beyond the celebrations and ask how beer had become so deeply rooted in the city.
At the Tsingtao Beer Museum, part of the answer stands beneath the red-brick walls of the original brewery -- a massive Siemens motor built in 1896. This machine powered production for decades, remaining in use until 1995. More than a century after it was made, it can still operate when connected to electricity.
The brewery itself was founded in 1903 by German and British merchants. It introduced European brewing techniques to China's eastern coast and soon became one of the most advanced beer factories in the Far East. Its machinery and raw materials were brought to Qingdao from Germany.
Just three years later, its beer won a gold medal at a beer exposition in Munich.
The brewery changed hands as China passed through war and upheaval. It came under Japanese control after Japan seized Qingdao during World War I and returned to Chinese hands following victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in 1945.
Even the Chinese word for beer carries traces of this history. Early Chinese renderings included words pronounced "pijiu" but written with different characters. Local historical records show that the character now used in the standard Chinese word for beer gradually gained currency in Qingdao before being widely used across the country.
Yet beer did not remain simply an imported product with a translated name. It was adapted via local production, knowledge and ingredients.
One example is hops, the plant that gives beer much of its aroma and bitterness. In the early years of the People's Republic of China, imported hops became difficult to obtain because of Western economic blockades. In 1950, Tsingtao Brewery planted a 32-mu (about 2.13 hectares) experimental field in the city's Licun Village and produced China's first locally grown hops.
Two years later, the brewery established a hop-growing base covering more than 700 mu. The variety, later known as Qingdao Dahua, was eventually introduced to Gansu and Xinjiang, both located in northwest China, where hops became an important source of income for local growers.
As the beer took root in Chinese soil, it was also beginning to spread abroad.
By the 1940s, Tsingtao Beer had already reached Southeast Asian markets. Continuous large-scale exports began in 1954, when the brewery's foreign exchange earnings exceeded 1 percent of China's total for the year.
By 1978, Tsingtao Beer had generated more than 100 million U.S. dollars in foreign exchange earnings for the country. At one point, it accounted for nearly 98 percent of China's beer exports.
Today, Tsingtao Beer can be found across six continents and in over 120 countries and regions. "Many of my friends know Tsingtao Beer first, and through it, they came to know Qingdao," said a British visitor.
Beer also became a way for Qingdao to welcome the world. The city held its first International Beer Festival in 1991, attracting over 300,000 visitors and serving some 17,000 cases of beer. More than three decades later, the event has become one of the city's best-known annual celebrations, with last year's edition attracting some 20 million visits while more than 2,900 tonnes of beer were consumed.
The old motor at the museum serves as a reminder of machinery once shipped across the ocean. But production lines operating in Qingdao today are very different from those initial ones. In 2021, it became the world's first industrial internet "lighthouse factory" in the beer and beverage industry, significantly increasing average daily output. Intelligent systems now connect orders, procurement, production and logistics.
"In the past, switching products required adjustments across multiple machines and took considerable time," said Jiang Yongmeng, a packaging line manager at Tsingtao Brewery. "Now, intelligent control allows us to switch production plans within seconds."
This transformation can be tasted beyond the factory. Tsingtao's fresh, unfiltered beer has a shelf life of only seven days, but a digital supply chain now allows consumers in more than 40 Chinese cities to enjoy it as fast as 30 minutes after placing an order.
Alongside the traditional brew are experimental varieties flavored with strawberry, grapefruit or Sichuan pepper, as well as beer snacks and merchandise designed for younger generations of consumers.
On my last evening in Qingdao, I watched people once again carrying plastic bags of beer home from neighborhood shops. They no longer looked strange.
Inside each bag was a drink that had arrived with foreign machinery, acquired a Chinese name, taken root in local soil and traveled back out to the world.
And yet, after more than a century, it was still something simple: fresh beer taken home for dinner. Enditem
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