February 1972: at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the American delegation samples 53-proof Maotai, while Richard Nixon tries to understand why this particular drink—not cognac, not whisky—has become the language of negotiations with Mao Zedong.
On February 17, 1972, Nixon leaves Washington: a helicopter takes him from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base, then Hawaii, then Guam, and only on the 21st—Beijing. He is flying to a country with which the United States had maintained no diplomatic relations for more than two decades. His meeting with Mao Zedong lasts about an hour—the chairman is gravely ill, barely able to stand, yet receives the president in person so the Americans will understand: the negotiations are happening at the highest level. The real work is handled by Zhou Enlai, premier of the State Council, a man who has spent two decades building the protocol culture of the PRC and knows that diplomacy begins not with documents, but with what is on the table.
At official receptions, the Americans are served Maotai—a potent grain distillate from Guizhou Province, smelling of soy and burnt rice, scorching the throat and demanding an acquired taste. Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger are not thrilled by it; the American press will later saddle Maotai with the nickname “liquid razor blades”—a line attributed to television anchor Dan Rather. But at this table, the glass was a statement: Maotai came from Guizhou, from the places the Red Army passed through in 1935.
The visit did not end with a treaty recognizing the PRC—that would come only in 1979. But the Shanghai Communiqué, signed on February 28, recorded that both sides were ready to normalize relations despite their differences over Taiwan. In those same days, Beijing announced a gift to Washington: two giant pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, were sent to the zoo in the American capital—in return for two musk oxen the Americans sent to Beijing Zoo.
The link between Maotai and revolution begins in March 1935, when the Red Army, retreating from Kuomintang forces, passes through the town of Maotai in northern Guizhou. The soldiers are exhausted: more than a year on the march, mountain passes, a shortage of medicine. Several distilleries in the town produce a strong sorghum-and-wheat distillate. Red Army troops buy and requisition the local liquor—not to get drunk, but to rub their feet after the marches and treat wounds.
This is not legend. Geng Biao and Cheng Fangwu recalled fighters buying Maotai from locals: some drank it, others poured it into flasks and rubbed their feet with it on the march, to reduce swelling and get the blood moving. Yang Chengwu described how liquor from the cellars of local wealthy men was distributed to soldiers and peasants, while non-drinkers saved a flask for the road. Something else survives in the documents: an order from Wang Jiaxiang, head of the Red Army’s General Political Department, dated March 16, 1935—Maotai was to be bought from distilleries at a fair price, and the equipment, vats, and cellars were to be protected from destruction.
Stories about Red Army soldiers bathing in distillery vats, or adviser Otto Braun (Li De) supposedly immersing himself in a tank of mash, are pure Kuomintang propaganda. Technically, it is impossible: sorghum fermentation vats are closed, deep, and emit carbon dioxide, which can suffocate a person within a minute. Kuomintang newspapers printed these tales to portray the Communists as drunks and vandals. Zhou Enlai himself explained it differently to Nixon in 1972: on the march, Maotai was considered a cure-all, used to wash the fighters’ wounds. The line between fact and myth runs through the memoirs: the medical use of alcohol is confirmed by testimony; bathing in vats is not.
After the founding of the PRC in 1949, Maotai became part of state symbolism. Zhou Enlai put it on the list of protocol drinks: at banquets honoring foreign delegations, it was Maotai that was served—not rice vodka or imported alcohol. This was a deliberate choice: a drink from a poor province, tied to the Long March, became a sign that the new government remembered where it had come from. By the time of Nixon’s visit, Maotai had already been the language of Chinese diplomacy for two decades, and the Americans were not the first people forced to drink it from small porcelain cups.
After Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the late 1970s, Maotai changed from a protocol drink into a luxury item. Production remained limited: the process requires years of fermentation, controlled humidity and temperature, specific fungal strains. The distillery in Maotai could not scale as quickly as demand for the symbols of new wealth. By the 1990s, a bottle of Maotai had become a scarce commodity—gifted to officials, collected by businessmen, and counterfeited by entrepreneurs of dubious reputation.
The counterfeit market flourished alongside the legal one. Fake Maotai flooded provincial shops: cheap grain alcohol was poured into factory-shaped bottles, tinted with caramel, and fitted with copied labels. The state tried to fight back: holograms on caps, unique serial numbers, QR codes for authenticity checks. But the dispute over how many fakes were in circulation never died down: in 2012, Kweichow Moutai’s management publicly denied the claim that nine out of ten bottles on the market were counterfeit.
At the same time, the auction market grew. Collectors hunted vintage bottles—releases from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when production had not yet become mass-scale. The price depends on four factors: year of release, condition of the packaging, fill level—alcohol evaporates even through a cork—and provenance, a documented ownership history. In January 2022, at a Christie’s auction, a 1959 “Wu Xing” bottle sold for 960,000 yuan (about $150,000). That is not the record: singular examples with exceptional provenance—say, from the collections of high-ranking officials or diplomatic archives—can cost more than a million. But an ordinary 1950s bottle without documentation and with a damaged label may sell for a few thousand dollars, or fail to find a buyer at all.
By the 2010s, the state had tightened control over Maotai’s production and distribution. Kweichow Moutai had gone public back in 2001, and in 2017 it overtook Diageo to become the world’s most valuable alcohol corporation—its market capitalization passed $300 billion. But rising prices made Maotai inaccessible to most Chinese people: a bottle from the current year sells for about 1,800 yuan (around $250), while a ten-year vintage costs several times more. The drink that once treated Red Army soldiers’ wounds is now available only to a narrow circle of collectors and participants in state banquets.
Maotai did not become a diplomatic language by accident. The state chose a drink from revolutionary geography, endowed it with the status of a protocol symbol, and kept production and supply under control—so scarcity would sustain its value. In the glasses of those attending the banquet on February 21, 1972, was Maotai aged more than thirty years.
The revolutionary legend of Maotai is partly true, partly constructed. Red Army troops really did use local liquor for medical purposes—this is recorded in memoirs and orders. But bathing in vats, drunken marches, and other picturesque details were later additions, making the story brighter and more convenient for propaganda. The line between fact and myth is blurred because both sides—the Kuomintang and the Communists—used Maotai as material for their narratives.
After the reforms, the market took up the myth as a weapon. Collectors pay for a connection to history: a bottle from 1959 costs 960,000 yuan not because the alcohol has somehow improved over half a century, but because it is an artifact of an era when the PRC was only beginning to shape its identity. Counterfeits thrive where symbolic value exceeds material value: a fake bottle is an attempt to buy access to history more cheaply.
Today Maotai continues to appear at state receptions—now as a marker of economic power. Collectors chase vintages, the state holds the price, counterfeits multiply. What will happen to the symbol when the generation that remembers the revolution is gone, and new buyers care only about returns—that remains an open question. For now, the market’s answer is this: memory sells, if it is packaged properly and issued in limited quantities.