Yí Dí 仪狄
The Patron God of Brewers

YÍ Dí 仪狄 lived in Zhèjiāng 浙江 province is the mists of time and discovered the fermentation of grain.

Some people say that Yí Dí was a woman who inattentively left a bowl of leftover rice high on a shelf and forgot about it until it had fermented. Hating to throw it away if it could be good for something, she tasted it. Oddly, it was delicious, and from this discovery she began fermenting it on purpose.

Centuries later, in the village of Máotái 茅台 in the far-off province of Guìzhōu 贵州 and long after Yí Dí had died, in a certain town an elderly brewer named Lǐ 李 found a homeless, thinly clad woman collapsed in the new-fallen snow.

He carried her back to his house, where he set her before the hearth to warm up and offered her warm rice wine.

That night he gave up his bed to her and slept on a floor mat, where he dreamed that another lady, in cloud of bright colors, descended from heaven with a jar of sparkling fragrant wine, and sprinkled it in front of his house, and then ascended again into the heavens. When he woke up he was alone in his house, for the woman he had rescued from the snow had disappeared without a trace.

When he opened the door, he was amazed to find that a stream had appeared during the night, flowing right in front of his house, with clear sweet water. From this sweet water all the residents of Máotái were able to produce wonderful sorghum beer. People said that the homeless visitor he had taken in was the ghost of Yí Dí, and that the new stream was her reward to the people of Máotái for the great kindness that Lǐ had shown to a distressed stranger.

In time, the sorghum beer of Máotái became the base for distilled liquors. In the Qīng dynasty (period 21) a finely distilled refined, strong liquor, now called Máotái Jiǔ 茅台酒, became China’s most prestigious distilled liquor, with which the Chinese government even today toasts visiting heads of state.

However, most accounts say that this is nonsense. They assert that Yí Dí was surely male, for what woman would invent beer?! Having discovered that grain could be turned into beer, Mr. Yí Dí made a gift of some of it to the emperor Yǔ the Great (Dà Yǔ 大禹, reign 2a-1), the legendary founder of the great Xià 夏 dynasty (period 2).

The emperor found the beverage delicious. But after more sober reflection (and a bad hangover) he decided that it posed a danger to public order, and that nothing was more important than public order. So he ordered the technique of its manufacture suppressed and sent Yí Dí into exile. (Unless, of course, Yí Dí was a woman of an earlier era.)

Yí Dí is worshipped to this day as a patron god of brewers.

The secret, like most secrets, got out. Tradition holds that beermaking was secretly transmitted and revealed (or completely reinvented) by DÙ Kāng 杜康 in the Zhōu 周 dynasty (period 4), because beer was just too wonderful to suppress. So DÙ Kāng is also worshipped to this day as a patron god of brewers. But DÙ Kāng has his own legends, which you can read here.

A famous poem —well, a silly ditty, actually— commemorates disasters wrought by drunkenness: