Realgar Wine
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A sealed jar of xionghuang (realgar) wine
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Realgar Wine (Simplified Chinese: 雄黄酒; Traditional Chinese: 雄黃酒; Pinyin: Xiónghuáng jiǔ) is Huangjiu or a clear spirit into which powdered realgar — an orange-red arsenic sulfide mineral — has been mixed. It is traditionally associated with the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节, Duanwu) on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Realgar contains arsenic, and realgar wine can contain dissolved arsenic compounds at levels far above safety limits for drinks, which is why modern health authorities and doctors discourage drinking it.[1][2] This page describes the tradition only.
Tradition
In traditional Chinese thought the fifth month was considered a dangerous time, when heat, insects, snakes and disease were feared. Realgar was believed to repel snakes, scorpions and other "poisonous creatures" and to drive away evil, so realgar solution was sprinkled around houses, adults drank a small amount of realgar wine, and children had the character 王 ("king", evoking the tiger) painted on their foreheads with the leftover paste. These were folk beliefs; they are described here as history, not as advice.[1][2]
Other Dragon Boat customs of the same day include eating Zongzi, racing dragon boats and hanging mugwort and calamus by the door. Later tradition also connected realgar with the poet Qu Yuan, whose drowning the festival commemorates.[1]
In literature: the White Snake
Realgar wine is central to the Legend of the White Snake (白蛇传), one of China's four great folk tales. In the story, the snake spirit Bai Suzhen, living as a woman and married to the scholar Xu Xian, is persuaded to drink realgar wine at the Dragon Boat Festival and reverts to her serpent form, frightening her husband. The episode is a staple of Chinese opera and film. It is a legend.[3]
Safety
Pure realgar dissolves poorly, but natural realgar and wine made with it often contain soluble inorganic arsenic compounds (arsenite and arsenate), and heating can convert realgar into highly toxic arsenic trioxide. Studies of realgar wine samples have found arsenic concentrations hundreds to thousands of times higher than allowed in commercial alcoholic drinks, and poisonings have been reported; arsenic can also be absorbed when realgar paste is painted on skin. For these reasons the custom has largely disappeared or been replaced by symbolic gestures, such as using ordinary wine or painting 王 with harmless colours.[1][2]