In recent years, a wealth of new scholarship on alcohol in East Asia has appeared, ranging from studies of the rapid rise of the beer industry in Japan to the evolving role of alcohol as an intoxicant used to demarcate new notions of modernity, gender, and class in Republican-era China and Manchuria. Hyunhee Park's Soju: A Global History adds to this growing literature by focusing on the clear, highly distilled liquor soju, which over the course of the twentieth century came to be known as the “National Liquor of Korea,” a beverage now recognized and consumed worldwide, thanks to its ubiquity in globally popular Korean media and cuisine.
While Park devotes considerable space to documenting the evolution of the modern soju industry as well as the beverage's newfound global popularity, her work differentiates itself from previous studies of alcohol in the region by forefronting premodern Afro-Eurasian exchanges and connections that contributed to the development of the forms of distilled liquors and soju familiar to consumers in more recent eras. Specifically, while pinpointing the origins of soju in Korea to the late fourteenth century, Park positions the beverage's history not only within the context of cross-cultural exchange between the Koryŏ (918–1392) dynasty in Korea and the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) in China, but also within a larger global history of distilling, one in which the Mongols played a pivotal role in technology transfer across Eurasia.
Park's efforts to trace the history of soju through eight centuries are aided by her decision to carefully blend several forms of historical inquiry into her narrative, a methodology that draws from the fields of food studies, Korean history, science and technology studies, and global history. Particularly effective is her decision to highlight the technological and material aspects of distilling: cogent explanations of Arab alembics, Punjabi distilling devices, and the portable stills of the Mongols aid the reader in appreciating the diversity of distilling methods and alcohol cultures extant in Eurasia prior to the ascendance of the Mongol Empire.
In chapter 1, Park argues that distilling methods developed along multiple paths across Eurasia, ranging from Greece and the Middle East to South Asia, Mongolia, and China. Reviewing decades of contentious debate about the origins of distillation in China, Park intervenes by focusing attention on the difference between distillation as a technical art and distilling as a popular industry. It was only with the rise of the Mongol court in China, she argues, that consumption of distilled alcohol boomed in China. Likewise, maritime trade routes with the Islamic Middle East produced a new type of distilled liquor called arak (transliterated in Chinese as aliqi), which, in turn, came to be used by Mongols and Chinese alike to refer to distilled liquor.
In chapters 2 and 3, Park draws from Koryŏ and early Chosŏn poems, informal writings, and other documentary sources, as well as a wealth of secondary literature produced by Japanese and Korean scholars in the twentieth century, to revise previous discussions of soju's origins in Korea. She suggests that political change resulting from the Mongol conquest led to considerable intermingling between Mongols and elites of the Koryŏ court through intermarriage and the travels of elite scholars, bureaucrats, and occupying armies. Within this broader context of Yuan–Koryŏ social exchange, Park argues that soju likely “developed in Korea, a possible product of a Chinese distillation tradition combined with West and South and Southeast Asian arak traditions” (p. 125).
Chapter 4 traces the expanding prominence of soju during the Chosŏn period (1392–1897). Here, documentation of the industry is much richer, and Park is able to pull from court chronicles, agricultural treatises, materia medica, and culinary writings to demonstrate the steadily growing popularity of soju as it became an increasingly important part of medicinal practice, daily socialization, and court rituals. Chapter 5 addresses the industrialization of the beverage, a process heavily promoted by Japanese alcohol companies during colonial rule (1910–45). “Traditional” home-brewed soju quickly became endangered as Japanese, and later Korean companies, used new distillation technology in the form of column stills, which rapidly turned out hundreds of gallons of cheap, almost pure ethanol alcohol.
The inclusion of the sixth and final chapter, a case study of distillation technology transfer in Japan and Mexico, distracts slightly from the overall flow of the book. While the chronological sequencing of previous chapters allowed Park to slowly and meticulously build her case, this chapter leaps backward and forward in time while skimming over centuries of Japanese and Mexican history to further demonstrate the extent of the dispersion of distilled spirits during Mongol rule, a point that Park's efforts in chapters 1–3 make redundant.
Nevertheless, Soju: A Global History lives up to its ambitious title, and it maintains an admirable balance between modern and premodern sources, and historiographical concerns. It will be of particular interest to students of Korean cultural and material history, historians of science and technology in East Asia, and scholars of food history interested in a global approach to the study of “local” products.
