A liquor bottle – whose label commemorates the 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing – made a months-long trip around the world and arrived in Hong Kong days before the 28th anniversary of the killings on Sunday and one year after it was produced in Chengdu, in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, The New York Times reports:
It was carried by hand, reportedly by a sympathetic Chinese official, from Chengdu to the Middle East and then by someone else to Paris, where it was mailed to Washington, arriving about four weeks ago, said Yang Jianli, a Chinese-born rights activist based in Washington who aided its passage around the world…..The liquor’s name, “Eight Liquor Six Four,” is a homophone for 89/6/4, the date of the massacre on June 4, 1989. The label features a modified drawing of the famous standoff between an unarmed man and a row of tanks near Tiananmen Square, and it boasts that the liquor was aged for 27 years. (Last year was the 27th anniversary of the crackdown.) The men advertised their product online and had sold perhaps several dozen bottles – charging 89.64 renminbi, about $13, for two – when the police detained them in May 2016.
