By Jim Boyce | How much baijiu does China drink per year? The numbers are all over the board. Spirits Selection says 9 billion liters. Jiangji Distillery ups that to 13.6 billion. Other estimates range from 5.5 billion to 17 billion. I’m going with Zhao, Tang & Zhang, who describe baijiu as a “popular alcoholic beverage with over 10 billion liters consumed annually.”
Ten billion liters. It would take an hour for that much baijiu to flow over Niagara Falls. (Estimated rate of 168,000 cubic meters per minute.)
You could fill a 160-liter bathtub for each of the 65 million citizens of the United Kingdom. (Pro tip: don’t smoke in a bathtub tub full of high-proof alcohol.)
If you took that year’s worth of baijiu, poured it as shots and then stacked those tiny glasses, there would be enough to reach the moon. (Based on average distance from Earth of 239,000 miles or 385,000 kilometers.)
Or, if you prefer a more sporting example, that’s enough baijiu to fill 4,000 Olympic-sized pools.
And if you weighed that ten billion liters of baijiu, without packaging, it would total ten billion kilograms. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 Eiffel Towers. (Based on the tower weighing 10 million kilograms.)
In sum, Chinese drink a lot of baijiu.
World Baijiu Day is August 9. Follow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And check out my China wine site Grape Wall and nightlife site Beijing Boyce.
Founded in 2015, World Baijiu Day is held each August 9, with events in over 60 cities so far. Follow WBD on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And get in touch via spirit (at) worldbaijiuday.com.
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