Sichuan
Discover Sichuan
Introduction
Sichuan is a vast fertile basin ringed by mountains, and the ring is what made it: cut off from the rest of China by the Yangtze gorges and the Tibetan plateau, it developed its own dialect, its own opera and by far the most assertive cooking in the country.
The basin is misty, humid and intensively farmed, and it has been irrigated since 256 BC by the Dujiangyan system, which diverts the Min river without a dam and is still in use — a UNESCO site and a piece of working infrastructure at the same time. Chengdu, the capital, is the most relaxed major Chinese city, built around teahouses, mahjong and the breeding centre where most of the world’s captive giant pandas come from.
West of the basin the land rises abruptly onto the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau: Kham, culturally Tibetan, with monasteries, grassland and roads over passes above four thousand metres. North of it lie the terraced blue-green pools of Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong. Emei Shan, a sacred Buddhist mountain, and the seventy-one-metre Leshan Buddha carved out of a cliff in the eighth century are both a few hours from Chengdu. The Sichuan pepper that numbs the mouth grows here and is the reason the food tastes like nothing else.