90 Second Narratives
Season 8: “Journeys”
Episode 1: “Soju: A Liquor’s Global Journey”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Welcome to a brand-new season of 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” I’m Sky Michael Johnston and this episode marks the beginning of Season 8 of the show.
I had a little fun with a couple of polls on Twitter over the last few days asking you to vote for a theme for Season 9, and you chose Friendship. I’m looking forward to inviting guests who can share some amazing stories about the history of friendship and bringing those to you down the road.
But now it’s my pleasure to introduce today’s storyteller, Dr. Hyunhee Park. Dr. Park is an Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Park’s story offers a wonderfully creative introduction to the theme of Season 8, which is Journeys. Here is Dr. Park with her story, “Soju: A Liquor’s Global Journey.”
Hyunhee Park:
For those who have not yet tasted soju, or heard about it, soju is the distinctive national spirit of Korea, a clear and colorless distilled liquor similar to vodka. It was only available inside Korea in the twentieth century, but soju is now one of the world’s most popular drinks, largely thanks to the phenomenon of Korean Wave (Hallyu). This is common knowledge. Less well known is soju’s long journey to become what it is today, a truly global journey. Before the mass-produced, industrial soju of the twentieth century, Koreans made soju using traditional distillation techniques, coming to Korea via broad Eurasian connections, along with Chinese distilled liquors and Mongol arak, during the era of Mongol dominance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The word soju is the Korean reading of Chinese shaojiu, “roast liquor,” “cooked liquor,” but another distilled liquor arriving in Korea about the same time, was called arak, arkhi in Mongolian, which is from the Arabic word ‘araq, “sweat” or “perspiration,” essential drops created by vapor during distillation.
Early Eurasian societies, including China and those of the Middle East, as well as the Mongols, had their own distilled liquors, adapting existing technologies to produce them. In the case of the Mongols, they produced their own variant arak easily spread throughout Eurasia and beyond using a portable technology. Shaojiu and arak came to Korea, along with many other things, during the period when Korea was connected to the Mongol empire and Mongol China as a “vassal” and “son-in-law” state. Once in its new Korean environment, soju, which was often identified with arak, went through localization. It became popular as hard liquor, but also for official gifts, in medicine, in ritual, taking advantage of soju’s preservability. After new transformations in the tumultuous twentieth and twenty-first centuries, soju started its global journey to a wider world.
Soju’s global history brilliantly demonstrates that, along with the people traveling cross-cultural networks, goods and ideas like distilled liquors and technology went too, with significant impact on lives. We continue to be amazed that so many things we enjoy have only developed after long historical transformations. We can enjoy various foods and liquors like soju only thanks to global journeys.
Sky Michael Johnston:
That was Dr. Hyunhee Park who just this year published the book, Soju: A Global History, with Cambridge University Press. You can click on a link to the publisher’s page to the book in the episode description.
And the story of soju’s journey is just the beginning of our journey into the past this season. Please subscribe to 90 Second Narratives now and join me and a different storyteller every Monday for a new episode. Thank you so much.
