I'm translating a book!
Picking this blog back up after a looong time... One of my brewing interests is historical alcohol. I got pretty inspired by Magnus Hvalmagi's blog investigating viking-era Norse beer , which I had a swing at and was delicious, and between that and my interests in Chinese, I've been looking for alcohol recipes in old texts for a while. How I found this is a story for another time, but I came across the Qimin Yaoshu ( 齊民要術 ), a sixth-century CE farm manual whose name means something like "essential techniques for the welfare of the people." It's pretty long, and is cut into about 10 scrolls, which have about 8 or so "chapters" each. Each chapter has a title, but I think the scroll divisions are arbitrary. The best part is that the entire text is available on wikisource . It's pretty easy to read using my weak knowledge of literary Chinese and the dictionaries I have access to, I think mostly because it's a pretty dry technical manual a