Chinese Alcohol Use and Hong Kong

Over the millennia China has relatively successfully developed the ability to feed itself, despite periodic and even severe crises in food production due to floods, wars, and other  calamities. A more or less continuous Chinese cultural pattern of life, based on the reproduction  of political control over agricultural resources, survived changes of dynasties. The large Chinese land mass produced varied agricultural crops, and the society  it  supported  became  specialized  and  differentiated,  producing  specialized life-styles based on differing degrees of access to the agricultural product by social groups.  The  spread  of  newly  introduced  crops lake  Champa  rice and sorghum (kaoliang) in Sung times and New World crops in Ming times helped make China of the later imperial centuries one of the  better fed large countries in the world. Some agricultural products not directly consumed for subsistence could be transformed by fermentation  into  alcoholic  beverages,  and  some  of these  beverages  retained considerable food value.