When the Bubble Burst

We stumbled upon China’s soda pop history via an unlikely source: a newspaper article about one of China’s oldest and largest steel manufacturers. Shougang Steel was once the biggest work unit in southwestern Beijing, but its operations were relocated in 2005, leaving these sooty smokestacks and blast furnaces to fall into disuse. In 2015, it was announced that the rusting campus would be renovated into a recreational site and art zone. “We also plan to start making Shougang soda pop again,” said one developer.

Naturally, we wondered what sugary drinks had to do with a socialist steel mill.

This is what we discovered: Starting in the 1950s, each worker at Shougang Steel was issued three 250ml bottles of factory-branded soda per day. The steelworkers’ spirits may have been sustained by the glory of building the motherland, but bodies sweating profusely in the heat of the furnaces needed to replenish lost electrolytes. Consequently, the formula for Shougang Cola included salt and extra sugar—an industrial-strength recipe for the heroes of heavy industry.

This led us down a rabbit hole of research, where we learned about China’s long history of proudly regional fizzy drinks.

The process of carbonating beverages was introduced to China in the late 19th century by Westerners. As early as 1887, Shanghai vendors were selling fizzy “Dutch water” (荷兰水 helan shui)—a refreshing minty beverage stored in clay basins covered with a lid. This bubbly drink was referenced in a Qing dynasty-era Shanghai travel guide as a regional treat: "In summer, there is Dutch water and lemonade, which have been filled by machines into bottles with water and gas. Upon opening, the corks can burst out, so take care not to get hit in the face. Drink them whenever you want to relieve the summer heat."

With their zeal for reverse-engineering imported technology, enterprising Chinese locals soon began creating their own brands and flavors of carbonated drinks. By following the recipes printed in the newspapers, any kitchen chemist could infuse water with bubbles—and for a time, “roadside sodas” became all the rage. But these small vendors couldn’t help cutting corners, and consumers eventually turned towards manufacturers that could vouchsafe the purity of their water supply and ingredients.

It’s not an accident that the two pioneering domestic brands—Aquarius and Shanhaiguan—originated in the treaty ports of Shanghai and Tianjin, respectively. These drinks initially targeted the foreign expat community, who had the disposable income to splash out on pricey beverages, and whose consumption habits were eagerly emulated by affluent local Chinese.

“In summer, there is Dutch water and lemonade, which have been filled by machines into bottles with water and gas. Upon opening, the corks can burst out, so take care not to get hit in the face. ”

In 1927, Coca-Cola—the American heavyweight—made its debut in Shanghai. Nobody knows who first transliterated Coca-Cola into Chinese as “Tadpole Gnaws Wax” 蝌蝌啃蜡 (keke kenla), but that mistake was quickly jettisoned in favor of “Allow Mouth Joy” 可口可乐 (kekou kele). With its resources and global experience, Coca-Cola quickly came to dominate the market by positioning itself as a luxury brand, but Aquarius and Shanhaiguan did alright for themselves. In fact, the latter established a production and sales partnership with Coca-Cola, and even secured the right to use Coca-Cola glass bottles for their own drinks.

All of these brands remained popular during the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s. A few production lines suffered setbacks as a result of the Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war, but for the most part, the factories kept on bottling.

Then came 1949 and the founding of New China. Coca-Cola was banished, alongside all other foreign companies and the decadent capitalist idea of consumables as sophisticated status symbols. The carbonated drinks themselves were not bourgeois—after all, the hard-working proletariat was entitled to refreshment as well—but these beverages would henceforth be manufactured by the people for the people. Bottling plants were nationalized, renamed Beverage Factory No. 1, No. 2, etc., and integrated into the centralized food processing system.

During the collectivist years of China’s Communist era, food factories in every locality were responsible for processing and manufacturing staples such as steamed bread, noodles, tofu, and soy sauce—and yes, sweet fizzy drinks to keep thirsty workers’ brigades hydrated during hot and humid summers. The vast majority of these locally produced sodas were orange-flavored and nameless. [However, there were exceptions. To see a sampling of their labels, click here.]

In the late 1970s, the Politburo green-lit reforms to reintroduce free-market incentives into the planned economy. Among other policies, state-owned enterprises were now encouraged to take a more entrepreneurial approach with their operations. Certain carbonated beverage manufacturers were well-positioned to grow their market share—they were located in China’s biggest cities, and they had a venerable pre-Communist brand history to draw upon.

Over the next decade, they created jingles and slogans, expanded their distribution networks to neighboring provinces, and began to price their soda a bit higher than the generic alternatives. It did not take long for soda pop to regain its status as a prized commodity—a treat for special occasions. Children knew that a good test score would be rewarded with a cold bottle of pop, and bringing a case of soda to a Lunar New Year visit to family or friends had once again become a lavish gift that signaled personal prosperity.

Meanwhile, the Western powers had returned.

In December of 1978, China re-established formal diplomatic relations with the United States—within a day, the Coca-Cola Company officially announced its return to China. Pepsi followed suit in 1981. These American brands would become known as “The Two Colas” (两乐 liang le). The original agreement limited their sale to Friendship Stores and designated hotels—in other words, the foreign sodas were meant for the mouths of foreign guests only. But this only awakened an intense curiosity in Chinese consumers about Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Human nature being what it is, history quickly repeated itself. These exotic imports once again became coveted trophy goods—shared out at banquets and important meetings like expensive cigarettes.

In the 1990s, The Two Colas began courting China’s domestic brands. In nearly every aspect of business—manufacturing, management, and marketing—Chinese companies were burdened with outdated practices; surely they needed an experienced partner to help them modernize their supply chain and scale up operations? Joint ventures and memorandums of cooperation were proposed, hands were shaken, and contracts were signed. Chinese sodas had stepped up for the next big test of reform and opening-up: Could domestic state-run brands learn to compete against the big global conglomerates? It was time to find out.

These joint ventures were a crash course in capitalism. The Chinese companies received a visceral, firsthand education in “killer acquisitions,” in which a larger company buys a smaller one expressly to shut it down. The Western multinationals had never viewed the Chinese brands as partner or protégé—only a competitor to be smothered. Their corporate maneuverings sidelined the Chinese sodas, most of which eventually disappeared from store shelves.

The sense of nationalist betrayal ran deep. In China’s business circles, that era is still referred to as “The Two Colas Drowning the Seven Armies,” a reference to a famous episode from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in which General Guan Yu eliminated several threats at once by flooding the valleys.

The state-owned enterprises had failed to remember the quintessential lesson of that historical epic: In a melee, all alliances are temporary. Perseverance wins battles, but so does perfidy. The Mandate of Heaven can be claimed with a bloodless coup, and once the dominant position is gained, it is difficult to be dislodged.

Foreign capital understood the marketplace. They knew these rules. They knew all the tricks too.

But Chinese history also contains tales of revivals, restorations, and plucky underdogs. And on the battlefield of consumer sentiment, nostalgia turns out to be a powerful weapon.

Here are the tales of China’s vintage sodas.

AQUARIUS • 正广和

Worldly Aquarius was an early joint venture, a love-child that capitalized on its mixed parentage. The Shanghai aerated drinks company was launched in 1893 by a British businessman, George Smith, who would go on to introduce several innovative retail strategies to China. The soft drinks were packaged in embossed glass bottles and branded bottle openers were given away. Customers who weren’t afraid of being electrocuted by the newfangled telephone could place their order that way; eventually, a clip-clop-jingling outside their door would announce the arrival of Aquarius’ horse-drawn carriage. Starting in 1923, the company’s fleet of imported cars took over delivery duties.

Originally intended for expats only, Aquarius caught on wildly among cosmopolitan Shanghainese. The soft drinks (lemonade, tomato juice beer and pineapple water) were aspirationally exotic, like jazz, tennis, swimming costumes and marcelled hair. By 1930, Aquarius had the biggest bottling plant in China; for the next decade, it dominated the domestic soft drink market. The drinks were even exported to Britain and Australia.

Unlike most of the other big Chinese soda brands of the 1980s, Aquarius did not get entangled in a joint venture with either of the Two Colas—but they did not escape unscathed either. In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola realized that the Shanghai company had never registered the trademark for their product in English and thus applied for the exclusive right to use the trademark "AQUARIUS," hoping to force the company to recall all soda bottles bearing the name. The tactic eventually failed, but refuting the frivolous claim had cost Aquarius time and money.

Nowadays, Aquarius specializes in bottled drinking water, but it still offers Shanghai consumers two carbonated products: orange soda and salted soda water.

SHANHAIGUAN • 山海关

Shanhaiguan soda, born in 1902, was another qing dynasty trailblazer. This was feudal fizzy, guzzled by guys with queues and sipped by damsels with bound feet.

The drink was named after a national landmark, the eastern terminus of the Great Wall, where the crenellated fortress wades into the sea for a hundred meters or so. The sodaworks were located in nearby Tianjin, the cosmopolitan treaty port. It was served to foreign guests at the 1922 wedding reception of Emperor Puyi (aka the Last Emperor).

The Tianjin Museum’s collection includes what may be China’s earliest soft-drink advertisement: a small fabric flag printed with the words: "Please drink Shanhaiguan premium soda" (“请饮山海关上等汽水”). The beverage even got a shout-out in a famous crosstalk comedy routine, “Soup Kitchen,” in which a blowhard brags about his generosity. Not only does every beggar receive a hundred zongzi, he claims, but they’re also presented with “a plate each of black and white mulberries, a bag each of sweet and mountain cherries, four boxes of cakes and rose biscuits, five taels of wisteria biscuits, and two dozen bottles of Shanhaiguan soda … each!” To get a sense of what a big deal it was for a soft drink brand to be mentioned by a famous Chinese comedian, just imagine if “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” the famous American hobo wishlist ditty, had name-checked Dr. Pepper.

Perhaps harboring fond memories of their pre-war collaboration with Coca-Cola, Shanhaiguan partnered again with the American beverage giant in 1987. This time around, however, their relationship was much rockier. By the year 2000, quality control issues had caused Shanhaiguan soda to be withdrawn from the market. It took them about a decade to regroup, but they successfully relaunched in 2014. Shanhaiguan’s flavors now include lychee peach and sea salt grapefruit.

BAWANGSI • 八王寺

Of all China’s vintage soda factories, the story of Bawangsi is most consistently phrased in terms of nationalist pride and the need to fend off foreign aggressors. Perhaps this is because its birthtown Shenyang is still a little haunted by its history as the flashpoint for Japanese aggression. The local government’s capitulation helped earn China the nickname of “the sick man of Asia.”

But let’s start at the beginning. The Bawangsi bottling works were set up in 1922 near the Eight Kings Temple because of the area’s legendarily sweet spring water. According to local lore, a mysterious immortal had rewarded a virtuous girl for her charity by offering to grant any wish. Altruistic to the core, the girl asked for good water for the villagers – and a spring sprang up. Later on, Emperor Qianlong even asked for barrels of the water to be brought to the imperial palace.

Bawangsi soda had a good few years in the 1920s as the go-to soft drink for Shenyang residents, but the story quickly turns dark. Having its factory commandeered by the Japanese army in 1931 as part of the larger occupation of China’s Northeast was only the first of Bawangsi’s struggles. In the 1960s, the factory was damaged during the Cultural Revolution. But it was the alliance with a foreign company in the 1990s that accomplished what Japanese and the Red Guards could not: Coca-Cola brought the Bawangsi brand to the edge of extinction by squeezing its market share and appropriating the trademark for 10 years.

No wonder, then, that in Bawangsi’s press materials, the company’s struggle to reclaim the name and rebuild the brand is equated with the restoration of national health and honor. In 2003, when former employees returned to the original factory after a decade of disuse, they found everything coated in dust a centimeter thick.

They’ve since rebounded. Once again, the people of China’s Northeast happily quench their thirst with Bawangsi—which is now offered in pineapple, orange, fruit honey, lychee, pear, and salt flavors.

BEIBINGYANG • 北冰洋 • ARCTIC OCEAN

Beibingyang began life as an ice factory in 1936 a few miles outside Beijing, but there is a tantalizing anecdote of how it made the leap into soda production. In 1949, when all foreign enterprises were kicked out of China, it’s said that Zhou Enlai gave orders for the entire production line from Coca-Cola’s massive bottling factory in Shanghai to be shipped to Beijing. There, allegedly, it became the first production line for Beibingyang’s orange soda. With godparents like that, how could it not succeed?

As the local drink of the capital of New China, no other beverage was better positioned to slake the thirst of supreme leaders and foreign dignitaries. Beibingyang was enjoyed by Communist war heroes at state banquets; it was the designated beverage when Mao Zedong and Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk surveyed the crowds from Tiananmen Gate on May Day of 1975; it was served during Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 visit to China.

In 1994, Beibingyang formed a joint venture with Pepsi, only to find themselves crowded out as their traditional sales channels were appropriated to promote Pepsi products. Behind the scenes, PepsiCo gradually gained a controlling interest of voting shares. Within a few years, production of Beibingyang sodas had halted completely.

It took Beibingyang four years to negotiate the return of the trademark. The quest to revive the brand took nearly as long. One loyal company man rounded up former co-workers and searched hard for the original varietal of tangerine that had given the drink its distinctive zing. Beibingyang’s three flavors—"red, yellow and black" (waxberry, tangerine and plum)—had always drawn on seasonally sourced juice.

They approached the octogenarian ex-employee who knew the recipe; for years, he had refused everybody who’d offered to buy the secret from him. Once he was convinced that these seekers were legit, he divulged the recipe and refused to take a cent. But the recipe did get a few tweaks to accommodate modern consumers: no more saccharin, no artificial coloring, and no more floating orange puree.

When Beibingyang soda was relaunched in 2011, it was sold in glass bottles only. Customers could grab one to go (and fork over a deposit), or drink it on the spot—just like old times. It was a quirky nostalgia play, but it worked: Within two months, the company began to turn a profit. Nowadays, cans of Beibingyang can be found in the following flavors: orange, tangerine, and smoky sour plum.

ICE PEAK • 冰峰

In the alleyways of Xi’an, the default combo meal is roujiamo (shredded meat sandwich) + liangpi (spicy flat noodles) + a can of Ice Peak (citrus-flavored fizzy) to wash it all down. Locals joke that this set meal is the truest Shaanxi cuisine, worthy of a UNESCO nod.

Legend has it that in 1953, one Mr. Li planned to haul soda factory equipment from Tianjin to Xinjiang but a snowstorm stranded him in Xi’an, so he built the factory there. Originally, the drink was meant to prevent sunstroke, but the city eventually embraced the orange-flavored soda wholeheartedly.

In that era of rationing, Ice Peak cost 20 cents per bottle (with an 8-cent bottle deposit), which made it a rare treat. Among the playground set, drinking Ice Peak gave you a lot of face. One Xi’an resident remembers DIY versions made from cooled boiled water, baking soda, and food coloring. Kids would mix it up when their parents were out. The joke was that if you were too impatient to cool boiled water, you could just use tap water and skip the food coloring.

It’s hard to overstate the affection that Xi’an folks feel for their hometown soda, but Ice Peak’s success in fending off the Two Colas perhaps says it all. Not only did this brand never withdraw from the market, it’s safe to say that the soda-swilling population of Xi’an would never have allowed such a thing to happen.

Aside from its classic orange flavor, Ice Peak now also offers white peach soda, sour plum soda, and apple soda.

LAOSHAN COLA • 崂山可乐

Laoshan Cola was the wholesome one, the goody two-shoes. It drew its water from its namesake mountain in Shandong province, specifically the famous mineral springs that had been discovered by a German hiker who saw hedgehogs lapping up the bubbly water.

Laoshan Cola was created in 1953 quite explicitly as a Chinese replacement for foreign colas. Brimming with tonifying herbs, it was marketed as a chilly, fizzy version of the age-old Chinese medicinal decoctions that are brewed every summer to clear internal heat and relieve toxicity. The cola’s ingredient list included black dates, galangal, cloves, angelica, brown cardamom, and six other healing herbs. Personally, we wonder how the cola’s icy temperature could possibly have earned the approval of TCM physicians, but clearly, it was doing something right. Around 1985, at Laoshan Cola’s peak, it had 80% of the market within its hometown of Qingdao, and 20% of the national market share.

Laoshan was acquired—and eclipsed—by Coca-Cola in the 1990s, then finally made its comeback in 2004. Even in its relaunch, its brand story has remained rootsy and purist. Laoshan Cola stayed faithful to its original livery—red and silver—even though some now snigger, believing that they copied it from Coca-Cola. Then again, Laoshan’s marketing was never focused on frivolous indulgence. One of their slogans was: “He’s not drinking cola, he’s drinking health.” The appeal to nostalgia appears to be working.

TIANFU COLA • 天府可乐

In 1980, the Chongqing municipal beverage plant collaborated with the Sichuan Chinese Medicine Research Institute to create a cola recipe that would keep consumers hale and hearty even as it quenched their thirst. Ingredients included white peony root and rehmannia root. It went through three years of testing before it received the imprimatur of the Ministry of Health. They called it Tianfu Cola.

Within five years of Tianfu’s launch, it was being served at state banquets. Three years after that, it claimed 75% of cola sales nationwide. Soon they had 108 bottling plants, including in Moscow and in Japan. It’s no wonder that PepsiCo was so keen to sweet-talk Tianfu into a joint venture.

Signing on the dotted line in 1994 should have ushered in a new era of prosperity for Tianfu Cola. Instead, they suffered 12 straight years of losses. By 2007, it languished with 0.5% market share. Tianfu’s glory days were a distant memory. The new generation of children only had eyes for Pepsi.

But never count out the feisty Sichuanese! Tianfu Cola dragged PepsiCo to court, battling to dissolve the partnership that had effectively strangled their brand. It took years of legal wrangling, but PepsiCo was forced to return their formula, the ownership rights to the production process, and finally, their trademark. Tianfu Cola made its official comeback in 2016.

When Tianfu began diversifying their product line, they turned heads by debuting a white peach herbal “cola.” Essentially, they’ve added peach flavoring to their core recipe while stripping it of the traditional dark color. Can a cola be pale pink? Tianfu certainly seems to think so.

ASIA SARSAE • 亚洲沙士

Unlike the other fizzy drinks on this list, Asia Sarsae is neither fruit-flavored nor a cola. Its soda lineage is more obscure but just as venerable: It’s a sarsaparilla, a carbonated drink perhaps best described as a sharply herbal root beer. Because the drink is so strongly associated with the cowboys and saloons of America’s Wild West, people are usually surprised to learn that it lives on nowadays primarily in the “sarsi" sodas of Southeast Asia.

In southern China, at least, that popularity is linked to the drink’s “heat-clearing” properties. When Asia Sarsae was founded in Guangzhou in 1946, its recipe included extracts of plum-leaved holly, a plant used by TCM practitioners to treat conditions related to excessive yang energy. It quickly became a hit among the residents of Guangzhou (and further afield in Southeast Asia) as a way to deal with the humid summer heat in the days before air conditioning.

Asia Sarsae’s unhappy marriage to PepsiCo began in 1993 and lasted less than a decade. The relaunch of the classic dark sarsaparilla in 2011 quickly reestablished the brand as a going concern, but Asia Sarsae has not rested on its laurels. Not only has the company diversified with a lineup of fruity sodas (lemon, lime, orange, pineapple, lychee, pomelo), but it has also leaned into the functional beverage market with some truly unusual offerings.

For example, their “red-flower oil soda” references a traditional analgesic liquid (红花油honghuayou) that is usually rubbed on sore muscles and derives its warming pungency from essential oils of wintergreen, cinnamon leaf, pine, clove, and camphor. The Asia Sarsae soda version tickles the nostrils with a similar bouquet. The company has also introduced a 油柑 (yougan) soda flavored with extracts of amla (aka Indian gooseberry), an astringent South Asian fruit with folk medicine benefits.

This article is a companion piece to “Label Me Nostalgic.”

A version of this article was originally published in Issue 7 of The Cleaver Quarterly

Banner image: Ru Brown