Lychee Wine

Lychee Wine

　　Specialty products are unique or particularly famous items from a certain place, often carrying deep historical and cultural significance. Shenzhen, as a modern and youthful city, is highly integrated and contemporary, with relatively few historic specialties. As such, lychees and lychee wine—regarded as local specialties—are even more precious.

　　 The history of lychee cultivation is very long, dating back over two thousand years. As early as the Tang Dynasty, there was the true depiction: “A rider kicks up a cloud of dust, the imperial concubine smiles—no one knows it’s lychees arriving.” Lychees became tribute to the imperial court and were known as one of the “Four Great Fruits of the South” along with bananas, pineapples, and longans. Ancient people even praised bayberries as the “duke,” grapes as the “earl,” and ranked lychees as the supreme “king.” The title “King of Fruits” is well-deserved for lychees, and they also represent a flagship local specialty of Shenzhen.

　　 The nutritional value of lychees is widely known—their flesh is soft, juicy, and sweet, containing a variety of trace elements, as well as rich sugars, vitamin C, and protein. They help enhance disease resistance and can make the skin smoother, making them a highly beneficial fruit for health.

　　 Lychees are mainly produced in the Lingnan region, especially abundant in Shenzhen. Thousands of years ago, people began using lychees as raw material to brew lychee wine, which has a delicious taste and offers benefits such as boosting vitality, strengthening yang energy, nourishing the brain and body, treating miasma, and stimulating appetite and spleen function. Gao Lishi once served lychee wine to Yang Guifei, giving rise to the enduring tale of the “Drunken Concubine,” who after drinking lychee wine, couldn’t get enough of the “Rainbow Feather Dress Dance.” Lychee wine was thus regarded as tribute wine and is also the finest calling card among “Shenzhen Specialties.”