Maotai town, about 150 kilometres southwest of Zunyi in the Chishui River valley, is one of the more unusual industrial tourism sites in China. The town essentially is the Kweichow Moutai distillery: a vast complex of fermentation workshops, warehouses, and bottling lines that occupies most of the valley floor and fills the surrounding air with the distinctive sweet-sour smell of fermenting sorghum. The baijiu produced here — a jiangxiang (sauce aroma) style, with a flavour profile that takes some adjustment if you come from whisky — is the most expensive and most fetishized spirit in China.
The Moutai Museum on the distillery grounds covers the history of the spirit from its early recorded mentions in 1704 through the Republican era near-destruction and Maoist-era reconstruction. The tasting room offers samples of various grades, from the standard bottling to aged editions that cost considerably more than the entry fee to get in. The town outside the distillery is a working river port with ferry crossings and modest restaurants serving the Guizhou staples of spicy tofu and sour fish soup. Whether or not you want to drink the liquor, the valley setting and the sheer industrial peculiarity of an economy built on a single ingredient make Maotai worth the journey from Zunyi.