Literati’s Morbid Fascination with Wine in Ancient China

The literati in ancient China universally had the morbid fascination with wine.The wine-fascinated people can be classified into three groups according to the differences in their realization of wine:the rational ones who drank in order to avoid disaster, the ones who drank in order to forget their sorrows and those who felt fascinated and stopped drinking halfway.There are the profound cultural connotations behind such morbid fascination, which include three aspects:symbol of their identities, the pursuit of their personality and death as a result.In essence, such fascination reflected the uncontrolled relationships between reality and illusion, namely, the mind had returned to the reality, but the body was still drunk.This showed contradiction of the ancient literati who were indulged in the illusion, but had the sober understanding of the reality.