Shang. The people of Shang had followed the example of their sovereign, and drunkenness, with its attendant immoralities, characterised both the highest and lowest classes of society. One of Făng's most difficult tasks in his administration would be, to correct this evil habit, and he is called in this Book to the undertaking. He is instructed in the proper use and the allowable uses of spirits; the disastrous consequences of drunkenness are set forth; and he is summoned to roll back the flood of its desolation from his officers and people.
I have divided the Book into two chapters:—the one preliminary, showing the original use and the permissible uses of ardent spirits; the other, showing how drunkenness had proved the ruin of the Shang dynasty, and how they of Kâu, and particularly Făng in Wei, should turn the lesson to account.
The title might be translated—'The Announcement about Spirits,' but the cursory reader would most readily suppose that the discourse was about Spiritual Beings. The Chinese term Kiû, that is here employed, is often translated by wine, but it denotes, it seems to me, ardent spirits. As Gaubil says, 'We have here to do with le vin du riz, the art of which was discovered, according to most writers, in the time of Yü, the founder of the first dynasty. The grape was not introduced to China till that of the first Han.'
[Since the above sentences were in manuscript, the Rev. Dr. Edkins of Pekin has stated at a meeting of the North-China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in a letter to myself (April 24th), that he has lately investigated the question whether the Kiû of the ancient Chinese was spirits or not, and found that distillation was first known in China in the Mongol or Yüan dynasty (A.D. 1280–1367), so that the Arabs must have the credit of the invention; that the process in making Kiû was brewing, or nearly so, but, as the term beer is inadmissible in a translation of the classics, he would prefer to use the term wine; and that Kiû with Shâo ('fired,' 'ardent') before it, means spirits, but without Shâo, it means wine.
If the whole process of Dr. Edkins' investigation were before me, I should be glad to consider it, and not hesitate to alter my own view, if I saw reason to do so. Meanwhile, what he says makes me glad that I adopted 'the Announcement about Drunkenness' as the title of this chapter. It is drunkenness, by whatever liquor occasioned, that the king of Kâu condemns and denounces.
