Roots & Routes: Two Thousand Years, Repeatedly Broken

Chinese wine has a 2,200-year past, and almost no continuity. Why the gap is more important than the length.

By Tianqi · May 10, 2026 · 9 min read

A Two-Thousand-Year Timeline

The history of Chinese wine is older than most people imagine.

It is not a product of post-1978 reform-era China. It is not a twenty-first-century imitation of Bordeaux. It has roots more than two thousand years deep. Those roots only show in flashes, visible in some centuries, gone in others, never forming the continuous wine civilization that Europe built.

That discontinuity is the most important key to understanding Chinese wine.

Act I: Seeds From the Silk Road (2nd century BCE – 10th century CE)

Zhang Qian and the Eastward Journey of the Vine

In 138 BCE, the Han emperor Wudi sent a diplomat named Zhang Qian into Central Asia. The mission was military, to find allies against the Xiongnu nomads pressing on China’s northern frontier. The mission’s by-product changed Chinese agriculture.

In Dayuan (in the Fergana Valley, in present-day Uzbekistan), Zhang Qian saw extensive vineyards and a working winemaking tradition. He returned to the Han capital with a report on the products of the western regions. Grapes were on the list.

In 103 BCE, the general Li Guangli was sent on a campaign to Dayuan. He came back with vine cuttings and the techniques for making wine, settling them in Liangzhou, modern Wuwei, in Gansu, on the Hexi Corridor. The historian Sima Qian, writing in the Records of the Grand Historian, noted that “around Dayuan, wine is made from grapes; the wealthy store ten thousand dan of it.”

The vine entered China through the Hexi Corridor, on the Silk Road. The same corridor still grows wine today, twenty-two centuries later.

The Tang Dynasty: A Golden Age

If Chinese history has a golden age of wine, it is unambiguously the Tang.

Emperor Taizong, in the seventh century, conquered the kingdom of Gaochang (in modern Turpan, in eastern Xinjiang) and brought back the mare’s-teat grape variety along with its winemaking method. Court records report that Taizong personally took part in refining the technique. The wine was described as “sharp, fragrant, layered like clarified butter.”

From there, grape wine spread through the Tang court and aristocracy.

The most famous literary record is Wang Han’s Liangzhou Verses:

Fine grape wine glows in cups of jade in the night. I would drink, but the lute on horseback urges me on. Should I lie drunk on the battlefield, do not laugh. Of those sent to war since ancient times, how many returned?

The setting is Liangzhou again, a military and trading hub on the Silk Road, the same Wuwei that had received the first cuttings nine hundred years earlier. The wine is poured into cups carved from Qilian Mountain jade. The lute presses the riders to mount. They lie drunk in desert sand. This is not the courtly elegance of the capital. This is the rough lyric of the frontier.

The poet Wang Wei adds a different angle: “New-rich wine of Xinfeng goes for ten thousand a measure; the young blades of Xianyang ride together; meeting, sharing a cup, they bind their horses by the willow.” References to grape wine fill Tang poetry. It was not only an aristocratic drink. It had moved into wider social life.

In Tang Liangzhou and Chang’an, wine sat at the crossroads of cultures. Sogdian and Persian merchants traded and feasted there. Wine was a marker of cosmopolitan exchange.

The Yuan: A Mongol Interlude

The Mongol empire stretched across Eurasia. Its rulers had encountered grape wine during their westward conquests, and their tastes ran toward it.

Under the Yuan dynasty (the Mongol period in China, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), a state winemaking institution was established in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Court consumption was substantial. But it was a court taste. It did not penetrate Han Chinese daily life.

Act II: The Long Silence (14th – 19th Centuries)

When the Ming dynasty replaced the Yuan in 1368, the Han Chinese restoration came with a deliberate erasure of Mongol cultural symbols. Wine consumption collapsed with it.

This does not mean the grape disappeared. Table grapes, especially raisins and sweet eating varieties, continued to be grown across northern China. The dried grapes of Turpan and the Longyan (literally “dragon’s eye”) variety of Xuanhua never stopped. But winemaking? It nearly stopped.

China’s drinking culture returned to its grain-spirit foundations: yellow rice wine and the distilled grain spirits that became baijiu.

For close to a thousand years, from late Tang to the end of the Qing, there was no continuous Chinese winemaking tradition. Compare this to France, where the line runs from Gallo-Roman vineyards through monastic estates and Bordeaux’s 1855 classification to the modern AOC system without a single major break.

This is the most fundamental difference between Chinese and European wine. It is not a difference of terroir or of grape variety. It is a difference of civilizational continuity.

A French estate can say: we have made wine on this land for three hundred years. The oldest functioning Chinese winery, Changyu, was founded in 1892. Its full story spans only 130 years.

Act III: The Modern Beginning (1892 – 1980s)

Zhang Bishi and the Founding of Changyu

A wealthy overseas Chinese merchant named Zhang Bishi, born in Guangdong but enriched through plantation enterprises in colonial Southeast Asia, founded the Changyu Pioneer Wine Company in Yantai, on the Shandong coast.

Why Yantai? Zhang Bishi had spent decades doing business in the Malay Peninsula and Java, where he had encountered European wine. He saw that Yantai’s maritime climate and rolling-hill terrain resembled some European wine regions. (A French consular official visiting Yantai in 1871 had drawn the same comparison.)

Changyu imported more than a hundred grape varieties from Europe. It hired the Austrian winemaker Baron Maximilian von Babo. It built China’s first underground wine cellar. In 1915, Changyu’s brandy won a gold medal at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Changyu mattered for more than being first. It established a template that the rest of Chinese fine-wine history would re-run for a century: import European varieties, hire a foreign winemaker, build a modern winery. Ningxia in the 2000s, Yunnan in the 2010s, Shandong throughout, all of them retrace this path.

Tonghua: The Wine of the Founding Banquet

In 1937, a Japanese trading firm established a winery in Tonghua, a small city in Jilin in the cold northeast. In 1945, the People’s Liberation Army’s predecessor unit took over the operation.

On 1 October 1949, the day the People’s Republic of China was founded, the official banquet for eight hundred guests served Tonghua wine.

By quality standards, Tonghua at the time was a sweet wine made from the wild Vitis amurensis (mountain grape), a different category altogether from the international dry-wine mainstream. The Tonghua story belongs to political narrative, not to terroir.

Guo Qichang and China’s Two Firsts

Shacheng, in Huailai county, Hebei. The winemaker Guo Qichang, working at the Great Wall winery, produced China’s first dry white wine, Great Wall Dry White.
Changli, also in Hebei. Guo’s team produced China’s first dry red wine.

Dry white and dry red, those words are quiet now, but they marked an inflection point. Until the 1980s, Chinese wine meant sweet wine, closer to a fortified or liqueur. Dry wine is the global mainstream. Guo Qichang took China into that mainstream.

He was one person who connected two future regions: Huailai and Changli. The father of dry wine in China is not an overstatement.

Act IV: The Contemporary Rise (1990s to Present)

A Timeline

Year	Event	Significance
1892	Changyu founded	Birth of modern Chinese wine
1949	Tonghua wine at the founding banquet	Political anchor
1979	Great Wall Dry White born	The dry-wine era begins
1983	Great Wall Dry Red born	The Cabernet Sauvignon era begins
1997	Grace Vineyard founded (Shanxi)	Birth of the boutique-estate movement
2001	Domaine Franco-Chinois established (Hebei)	Marselan introduced to China
2007	Silver Heights’ first vintage (Ningxia)	Ningxia goes boutique
2011	Helan Qingxue wins DWWA top award (London)	International blind-tasting breakthrough
2013	Ao Yun project launches (Yunnan)	LVMH enters
2014	APEC state banquet drops baijiu for wine	National-stage shift
2019	Xi–Macron summit served Ningxia wine	Diplomatic recognition
2020	Huanren ice wine in EU–China GI agreement	International GI mutual recognition
2023	Ningxia’s first Demeter biodynamic certification	Biodynamic milestone
2024	China joins the OIV	Formal seat at the international wine institution

Two Parallel Threads

From the 1990s onward, the rise of Chinese wine has run on two separate tracks.

Track one: industrial-scale expansion. Three big brands, Changyu, Great Wall, Dynasty, have dominated the domestic market with mass-volume, factory-style production. Output rose. Distribution widened. Quality varied wildly. The mission of this track was simply let Chinese consumers drink Chinese wine. Quantity, not quality.

Track two: the boutique rise. Grace Vineyard in 1997, Silver Heights in 2007, Helan Qingxue’s London win in 2011, a generation of small-scale, high-quality, internationally aware estates began to emerge. Their mission was a single sentence: China can make good wine.

The two tracks still run in parallel today. The fifty-yuan Great Wall dry red on a supermarket shelf and the eight-hundred-yuan Ningxia single-vineyard Cabernet at a boutique winery are two completely different Chinese wines.

Understanding that internal divergence is a precondition for understanding Chinese wine.

Discontinuity, and What It Gave

Chinese wine history is a history of breaks.

The Han brought the vine. The Tang made it flower. The Song and Yuan held parts of it. The Ming buried it. Changyu reopened the door in 1892. Tonghua got onto the founding banquet. Dry wine arrived in 1979. International recognition came in 2011.

Between every two of those moments is a break. Varieties were lost. Techniques broke down. Institutions changed. Generations turned over.

This stands in sharp contrast to France. French monasteries planted vines in the late Roman period and never stopped. Over a thousand years they accumulated terroir knowledge, varietal selection experience, and winemaking techniques. The Burgundian climat concept, terroir resolved to the level of an individual parcel, is the result of centuries of patient observation. No single generation could produce it.

China does not have that accumulation.

But seen another way: a break is also the absence of a burden. French wine carries the weight of AOC regulations, ancestral practices, and family inheritance. Some of that weight is good (it guarantees quality). Some of it is bad (it slows innovation). A Chinese winemaker is not pressed by grandfather did it this way. Any variety. Any region’s playbook. French oak or concrete eggs. They are free to choose.

In that sense, the history of Chinese wine is not a two-thousand-year tradition. It is two thousand years of threads, and thirty years of practice. The threads run from Zhang Qian, through Wang Han, through Zhang Bishi. The practice begins in the 1990s and is still going on.

The current period is the longest unbroken stretch of Chinese winemaking since the Tang.

PLACEHOLDER:map-historical will appear inside §1, the Silk Road grape diffusion route, marking Dayuan, Liangzhou, Chang’an, and Yantai.