The Tribute From Three Rivers

Duli town's industry is explained by its position. It lies where the South Canal, the Ziya River and the Daqing River meet, and the sources give that confluence as the reason a prosperous brewing and vinegar industry developed there: water for the process, and boats for the product. Vinegar making became an industry in the town in 1665, the fourth year of Kangxi, beginning with a single works called Lisan. It is not a picturesque origin story so much as a commercial one: a place with good water and a wharf can make a fermented product and sell it, and once it has a name the name travels with the barrels.

In the ninth month of the twenty-third year of Kangxi, 1684, the emperor's boat stopped at the town and he tasted the vinegar. He made it a tribute, to be sent to the capital every December. The sources record an alternative account that places the designation in 1776, in the forty-first year of Qianlong, and the two are best reported together rather than resolved. What follows the tribute is easier to document: a commercial survey of 1905, the General Commercial Survey of Zhili, records that the Duli vinegar shops of Jinghai County in Tianjin Prefecture sold in Tianjin, Henan and Shandong, which is a distribution map rather than a legend.

The vinegar's later routes followed the water and then left it. It travelled south along the South Canal to Linhe and Daokou in Henan and north to Tianjin and Beijing, and in the late Republic period it was sold as far as Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shanghai and exported abroad. In 1922 the president Li Yuanhong passed through Duli on his way south along the canal, visited the larger Laosanli works to watch the process, and wrote out its name board. The craft was placed on the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2021, and in the city's account of its cooking Duli vinegar is named with sweet flour paste and garlic chilli paste as one of the three seasonings that give Tianjin food its flavour.