All for a bottle of Beijing beer...

How Beijing got a local brew...and how that beer played a part in starting the Second Sino-Japanese War

One of the lesser-known impacts of WWI on Beijing was that beer, before then mostly imported from Germany or Japan, became very hard to find.

Taking advantage of the dwindling supply of imported booze, an entrepreneurial Beijinger and his Czech partner brought supplies of barley from Hebei and began brewing their own.

By 1916 Five Star Beer, Beijing's first home-brand, was in production at the Shuang He Sheng Brewery. The building has since been demolished, but used to be located near the labyrinthine Beijing West Railway Station.

This same beer allegedly played a part in the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on the 7th of July 1937, when a Japanese soldier stationed near Marco Polo Bridge was reported missing.

Japanese troops demanded a search of the area, then known as Wanping Village, but were refused access by the local KMT. An artillery and tank bombardment ensued in what is now known as the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident’, followed soon after by a full-scale invasion of China.

The connection with beer? According to M. Aldrich in The Search for a Vanishing Beijing, the missing soldier was eventually found happily chugging Five Star in a local bar.

Shuang He Sheng Brewery: Guang'an men zhan jie, near Beijing West Railway Station. Start of the Japanese invasion: Lugo Qiao (Marco Polo Bridge), Fengtai District.

Sonya Hallett