Visited May 2019

I have visited only one component Shuijingjie Workshop (Shui Jing Fang Bo Wu Guan 水井坊博物馆) which is located in central part of Chengdu (metro line 2, DongMen Bridge, exit B). This is a regular museum that can be visited only as a part of guided tour. The first tour starts at around 10 am and even you’re the only person that wants to visit it, a museum guide will assist you, even if they do not speak English. My guide tried to do her best (using kind of a translator in her smartphone) to let me understand what I was looking at, but as I knew nothing about liquor making (baijiu), I think I missed almost 80% of her efforts. Some of the parts in the museum have English explanation boards – and that helped a bit.

This is the only liquor sites that have been fully excavated and renovated (it started in 1998). Here they ceased producing liquors (very expensive ones! Visit the shop after the tour.) just few years ago but they have kept all the instruments and tools and can arrange kind of a ‘show’ of traditional process of liquor making if you book in advance. (There are leaflets in English informing about this. You can read in this leaflet that this is the oldest liquor making workshop in the world – 600 years, in Ming dynasty, still operating, but the production was moved to new location and in here only the most valuable baijiu is produced.) The archaeological digs revealed some air-curing terraces, cooking and ash pits, distillatory base (photo), wooden columns and lots of white and blue porcelains.

At the end of the tour you’ll have a chance to see the collection of bottles and try some of liquors; they are really strong and taste very aromatized.