A sauce-aroma baijiu named after a stretch of the Chishui.

Langjiu is a sauce-aroma (jiangxiang) baijiu from Erlang town in Gulin county, part of the city of Luzhou in southern Sichuan. Chinese Wikipedia says the liquor is named after the Lang spring water of Erlangtan, a stretch of the Chishui river, and that Langjiu is a Chinese geographical-indication product. The company’s 2012 website said the name Erlang refers to the Erlangtan ferry crossing, placed the town on the middle reaches of the Chishui, “adjacent to Maotai” across the provincial border in Guizhou, and noted that the Red Army had crossed the Chishui at the Erlangtan ferry.

The early history comes in two versions. Chinese Wikipedia says a workshop called Huichuan Caofang began trial distilling of “huisha” Langjiu in 1920, adopted Maotai methods in 1925 under the guidance of Zhang Zixing, a distiller from a Maotai workshop, closed in 1934 and reopened in 1938; it credits Lei Shaoqing’s Jiyi distillery, founded in 1933, with the first use of “Langjiu” as a trade name. The company’s own 2012 timeline begins instead with the Xuzhi distillery, which it says started making huisha Langjiu in 1898, and says the Huichuan workshop renamed its liquor Langjiu in 1933. Both versions place the brand’s beginnings in small workshops at Erlangtan rather than with a single founder.

The company also traces an older lineage, to a liquor called goujiang that it says was sent to the Han court and to a Song-dynasty “Fengqu” liquor; these are its own claims. Chinese Wikipedia adds that from 1972 the Langjiu plant was one of four sites in a state experiment to make Maotai-style liquor away from Maotai.

Two caves on Wugong cliff.

Langjiu’s best-known asset is storage. The company says its liquor is aged in two natural karst caves, Tianbao (“heavenly treasure”) and Dibao (“earthly treasure”), on Wugong cliff above the Chishui near Erlang. Its 2012 website said the caves together covered nearly 14,200 square metres and stayed at about 19°C all year. It also told how they came into use: in 1969 a factory accountant, Zou Zhaogui, found the Tianbao cave while gathering medicinal herbs on the cliff and proposed storing liquor there; the cave was in use by the early 1970s, and the factory moved its older stock inside, including liquor from the pre-1949 Huichuan workshop. From the 1980s, the company said, a cave keeper played recordings of birdsong and other natural sounds to the stored liquor.

The caves also appear in the ownership record. When the Baoguang Group took over Langjiu in 2002, the trade journal Tangjiu Kuaixun reported, the use rights to the Tianbao cave were left out of the transfer, together with the trademarks and other intangible assets.

The product range is organised under the Lang name. In 2011 chairman Wang Junlin told Knowledge at Wharton that the high-end Honghualang (“red-flower Lang”) was central to its range, and described a national marketing campaign built on “Chinese Lang,” a play on lang, which the interview glossed as “men.” On 15 July 2017, Yicai reported, Wang announced a new positioning for Qinghualang — qinghua is the Chinese term for blue-and-white porcelain — as a premium sauce-aroma baijiu. In 2021, according to an article published on the marketing site Digitaling, the line was repositioned around the “left bank of the Chishui” and “estate” sauce-aroma liquor, with an advertising film shot at the company’s Langjiu Estate. A 2024 report republished on China Daily’s Chinese-language site named six brewing areas on the Chishui’s left bank, from Erlangtan to Tianfu, the newest, in use from 2023.

Baijiu and its regions.

The seven brands in this group are all Chinese baijiu names: Jiannanchun, Xifeng, Langjiu, Gujing Gongjiu, Shui Jing Fang, Jiugui and Hongxing Erguotou. Four come from western China — Jiannanchun from Mianzhu and Shui Jing Fang from Chengdu, both in Sichuan; Langjiu from Erlang in Gulin County, also in Sichuan; and Xifeng from Fengxiang, near Baoji in Shaanxi. Gujing Gongjiu is made at Gujing, near Bozhou in Anhui; Jiugui comes from Jishou in western Hunan; and Hongxing Erguotou is a Beijing brand.

Baijiu is sorted into aroma styles, and the group spans several of them. Chinese Wikipedia classes Jiannanchun and Gujing Gongjiu as strong-aroma baijiu, Langjiu as sauce-aroma, Xifeng as the phoenix-aroma style, and Jiugui as a mixed-aroma spirit of its own fuyu type; Beijing Red Star describes its erguotou as light-aroma. Ownership varies just as widely. Shui Jing Fang’s Shanghai-listed company is controlled by Diageo; Jiugui’s Shenzhen-listed company sits within the state food group COFCO; Gujing’s company has been listed in Shenzhen since 1996; and Hongxing Erguotou’s maker is owned by Beijing state investors.

A baijiu brand’s identity is usually carried by a name, a place and a bottle rather than by a single logo, and the company behind the name may have been merged, listed or sold many times since the brand began. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its baijiu is distilled and bottled, and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From county enterprise to Wang Junlin’s group.

Langjiu was a state enterprise of Gulin county until the early 2000s. In November 2001, according to Tangjiu Kuaixun as republished by Sina Finance in May 2002, the Baoguang Group took over its management, and on 10 March 2002 the Langjiu Group formally merged into Baoguang, a step the journal called the first act of reform among Sichuan’s liquor companies. Baoguang was led by Wang Junlin, who had earlier turned around the Luzhou Medicine Factory and renamed it Bao Guang Group. Knowledge at Wharton reported in 2011 that he became Langjiu’s chairman and chief executive in 2001, later took part in a management buyout, and that Langjiu was privately owned.

The trademarks followed a separate path. According to a 2022 article on Jiemian, the Gulin county state-assets office transferred 133 trademarks, including the “Lang” mark, to a county-owned investment company, Jiusheng, in December 2009; Baoguang acquired 80% of Jiusheng in instalments between 2010 and 2012, and in November 2016 transferred that stake to the joint-stock company Langjiu Co. The same article says Langjiu Co. filed a listing prospectus with the China Securities Regulatory Commission in May 2020 and refiled in June 2021. In 2012 the group’s own website described it as also working in property development and energy.

For a design guide, Langjiu shows how a baijiu brand can build an identity on place — a river bank, a ferry town and a pair of caves — and on colour names in its product lines. Compare Moutai, the sauce-aroma baijiu made upstream on the same river, and Luzhou Laojiao, from the same Sichuan city. For this guide we use a deep porcelain blue, a lacquer red and warm cave stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Langjiu’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.