It is no secret that China’s Sichuan province is world-famous; chefs and personalities alike have touted its beautiful landscape, amazing culture, and above all, delightful food. Famous for (often blindingly) hot sauces and seasonings, Sichuan’s allure and notoriety have grown alongside the increasingly-popular pursuit of the hottest foods. The establishment of this blistering cuisine, however, is a lengthy and convoluted story featuring Sichuan’s status as an early central trade location. Alongside the trade routes that gave locals access to new ingredients, Sichuan’s location as a pseudo-Fertile Crescent allowed almost any ingredient introduced to its agricultural system to be successfully cultivated. It is solely thanks to those early foodways and a truly ideal geographic location that Sichuan has access to the ingredients that make it internationally renowned today.

Sichuan is located in the Sichuan Basin, a lush area supplied with water and soil by the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Though it is completely surrounded by mountain ranges such as the Longquan Mountains, the province is home to expansive and fertile flatlands, used to farm massive amounts of rice, wheat, and other major staples. Sichuan produces so many staples, in fact, that it is oft considered “the breadbasket of China.” The huge amounts of agricultural output would not be possible if not for the equally large number of workers and consumers, however– at many different points throughout China’s history, Sichuan was the most populated province, though it has since ceded its title to Guangdong.

These abundant lands are the birthplace of not only a prosperous economy and thriving culture, but also a globally recognized and celebrated cuisine. Sichuan food is adored worldwide; it has gained both fame and notoriety for its rich, complex flavors, but more importantly, for its spice. Heat is often seen as the central ingredient to Sichuan food– the province has even made a show of creating certain foods so spicy, travelers with no experience are warned away from even trying it.

This infamous heat is borne from two local ingredients. The first is the Sichuan peppercorn, which is not actually a kind of pepper at all. Instead, it is a type of seed husk that leaves the taster with a prickly, numbing feeling on their tongue– a unique sensation liberally used in Sichuan food to “combat” the genuine heat from Sichuan’s second signature ingredient– the chili pepper.  This spice is far more recognizable, and perhaps deserves more credit; where the Sichuan peppercorn is utilized for its physical sensation, the chili is embraced for both its heat and its rich flavor. It is the base seasoning of almost every popular Sichuan dish, from mapo tofu to the Sichuan hotpot to kung pao chicken.

These two spices have very different relationships with Sichuan in terms of geography and availability. The Sichuan peppercorn, unsurprisingly, is native to the Sichuan Basin, where it grows in the foothills of the neighboring mountains. The chili pepper, however, is not native to China at all, though it is often presented that way. In fact, the chili pepper is, “native to the southern Brazilian highlands and were already being consumed by humans almost 10,000 years ago” (Reeves), long before it appeared in records of Chinese cuisine. As travel to South America increased, so did the transport of new and exciting foods– and the chili pepper was a prime target. Chilis are “chemically addictive” (Reeves), producing an endorphin high not unlike that experienced with “runner’s high.” This created a demand that allowed the consumption of chilis to grow in a “wildfire spread” (Reeves). It was during this boom that chilis first came to China, although the route of their spread is unknown. Despite that lack of exact information, it is easy to extrapolate how they became rooted in Sichuan– both the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers operated as well-traveled trade routes, giving travelers access to a place where chilis, once introduced, would grow with abandon. Sichuan also housed what is probably the most important historically recorded trade route– the Silk Road. It started in Sichuan’s capital city, Chengdu, and stretched across Eurasia, linking otherwise unconnected trade hubs and creating the first steps towards a globalized economy. The Road put Chengdu within easy reach of places that were receiving chilis by the boatload, and the local climate could not have been more inclined to their growth.

Once the chilis established themselves in Sichuan, as well as other agricultural provinces, it comes as no surprise that the chili suddenly became omnipresent in Chinese cuisines, but the striking thing is the limited locality in which this phenomenon happened; while it is by no means a surprise to find chilis in any provincial cuisine, it is Sichuan where they truly took root. There is no one answer for why this happened– certainly the ease of availability played a role, as well as the chili’s natural inclination to grow in the Sichuan Basin. Beyond that, however, it is hypothesized that it is Sichuan’s climate that caused their boom in popularity; the province features, “a hot, humid climate” (Lipman), that is compounded in the winter by moderate snowfall and drafts from nearby mountain ranges. This creates a noticeably wet atmosphere that, in the winter months, is also bitterly cold. To combat the weather, locals turned to their newfound friend– the chili pepper, and its bright internal warmth. This explains the spice’s early presence in almost any feasible dish, which then morphed from a necessity to a cultural hallmark.

Like the early spread of the chili pepper, Sichuan cuisine is also growing like wildfire. It currently is marketed not only in its own provinces, but in Americanized versions of provincially-unspecified Chinese food. Kung Pao chicken is a staple at Panda Express, and generic “spicy chicken” dishes are not uncommon at mall Chinese outlets nationwide. People who have not or will not have the fortune of being world travelers now have the privilege of tasting dishes influenced by (though not quite representing) one of China’s most historically significant and storied provinces. While global foodways may not always lead to such prosperity, here, they gave China the chili pepper, and in turn, China is giving the chili pepper back to the world.

 

Sources

Reeves, Caroline. “How the chili pepper got to China.” World History Bulletin, Spring 2008, p. 18+. World History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A250579383/WHIC?u=va_s_007_0162&xid=66a5c88f. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.

Lipman, Jonathan. “Chinese Geography through Chinese Cuisine.” Social Education, no. 1, 2010, p. 17. EBSCOhost, libdata.lib.ua.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.219558115&site=eds-live&scope=site.