1. The earliest sugar should be the utilization of honey. Judging from the ethnological materials, both the Lhoba and Yi peoples had the custom of obtaining honey under primitive production conditions, and similar conditions were also available in the primitive society of the ancients on the mainland. Honey from the use of wild honey to the domestication of domesticated domestic bees in the Wei and Jin dynasties, the yield has been rising, has been used to this day, the classic passage is Yuan Shu's "only blood water, an there is honey water".
2. The second should be the reprocessed from food crops, that is, maltose. The "Commentaries on the Interpretation of Texts" records that "Rao, rice and rice are fried", that is, the sprouted grain is boiled into dumplings, and in the pre-Qin and Han Dynasties, honey became the two most important sweet spices. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, the process continued to progress, and it was able to make maltose in white, black, amber and other colors, which was used in the Song Dynasty as a rubber tooth for the sacrifice of the king of the stove, and the Tang Dynasty also appeared. In the Ming Dynasty, mixed sugars of maltose and sucrose appeared.
3. Then there is the famous sucrose. "Chu Ci Summoning Souls" has "turtle cannon lambs, there are garnet pulp." "Garnet is cane, and garnet pulp is sugarcane juice, indicating that in the late Spring and Autumn Period, China's Yangtze River Basin used sugarcane juice as a sweet seasoning in barbecue meat." During the Three Kingdoms period, there are records of Cao Pi giving Sun Quan stone honey, which is an imported product from Central Asia and Vietnam, which may be original sucrose, or it is said to be a lactose.
The Tang Dynasty introduced the sugar-making method of the Magadha Kingdom (the core area is in the middle and lower reaches of the present-day Ganges), which was able to produce yellowish granulated sugar, but the production was limited, medicinal than edible, and began to produce small amounts of sugar frosting (naturally crystallized rock sugar). The value of sugar and frosting is very different, sugar is based on fine particles, white color is the top, frosting is adhesion into pieces or even shaped like a rockery, the color is dark purple.
The rise in sugar production in the Song Dynasty made sugar finally a seasoning; the production of frosting also rose rapidly; milk was added to sugar to make craft commodity sugar in the shape of animal utensils.
The Yuan Dynasty introduced the sugar making method in the Central Asian river basin, which can use grass and wood ash to absorb impurities in sugarcane juice, and the light yellow in sugar can be further shallowened.
In the Ming Dynasty, sugar trucks that could squeeze sugarcane juice with the help of animal power appeared, and the impurities in the sugarcane juice were absorbed by using yellow mud water with special utensils to absorb the impurities in the sugarcane juice, so that the sugar became completely white; the frosting manufacturing method also improved, greatly shortening the time for the crystallization of the frosting.
In this article, I define the "ancient sugar industry" as manual and simple mechanical production of sugar, and roughly sort out the framework of sugar production in a traditional Chinese society. If the sugar industry is defined as sugar entering the commodity economy and market circulation, it may be as late as the Song Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, areas specialized in the production of sugar had initially emerged, and a large amount of sugar entered the international market. After jiajing was successfully created, it was used to exchange rice and copper with Japan. Since the 17th century, Europeans have changed their living habits and like to drink sugar-sweetened black tea and coffee, but the British monopolized the production of sugar in Europe, and China also seized a wind outlet from it, selling sugar to the European continent, until the emergence of French sugar beet and industrial sugar after the 1880s, China's traditional sugar industry has gone downhill, losing the international and domestic markets.