The beer is very good and comparable with lager and German-style beers, with Qingdao and Beijing the best known brands.
Wine made from grapes tends to be very sweet, although in places which have large numbers of foreign visitors dryer white wines (baisuan putaojiu) are available. Among the best are Dynasty and those sold under the Great Wail label, which like other names are of a quite acceptable quality but not outstanding. Red wine (horigsuan putaojiu) has a rather sweet taste. You can also get more expensive imported wines.
The usual accompaniment to many meals is heated rice wine, which has a high alcohol content. The Chinese prefer Shaoxing, the red wine (shao-xlngjiu); the driest is “Jiafan” rice wine.
Spirits The Chinese produce an enormous range of brandies and other spirits of
that type, but since the taste often differs from what Westerners are used to and they have a high alcoholic content you need to treat them with respect. Bailandi, the local brandy, is quite reasonable, and edeke, the Chinese vodka, is good. You would be wise to avoid their versions of whisky, rum and gin. Liqueurs and spirits in the eau de vie range are flavoured with many different ingredients. Maotai schnapps (maotaijiu), from Guizhou province, distilled from sorghum, goes down very well and is the usual toast at banquets. Other well-known brandies include Shanxi province’s fenjiu, also from sorghum, wuliangye, the five-grain schnapps from Sichuan province, and zheyeqing, made from bamboo leaves.
For travellers from North America direct flights to China include those from Vancouver in Canada and the West Coast of the USA, while some airlines operate flights via Tokyo and Hong Kong.
Coming from Australia and New Zealand there are scheduled flights into Beijing and Shanghai, stopping off at Tokyo, Manila or Hong Kong, from Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland by airlines such as Air New Zealand and Cathay Pacific, as well as the weekly flight by CAAC to Beijing from Sydney and Melbourne.
Chinese national travel Photo Gallery
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