Birth of Modern Wine Industry

In 1892, during the last years of the Qing Dynasty, overseas Chines Zhang Bi-shi established grape gardens and a wine company – Zhanyu Winery. He introduced good grape species and machinery production method from the West, replaced urns with oak barrels as wine storage containers. China’s wine making technique stepped on a new level from then on. Some places followed suit, such as Tsingtao, Beijing, Qingxu in Shanxi Province, Changbai Mountains, and Tonghua in Jilin Provence. They formed the embryo of the country’s wine making industry despite of their limited scales.

However, the consecutive warlord wars which followed, together with the oppression of the imperial powers and the bureaucratic capitalists' robbery, wine making as a national industry barely kept alive before the liberation.