Sichuanese people in a
Taoist religious procession. Reliefs from the Taoist Temple of Saints
Erzhu [
zh] and
Yang Xiong (Temple of West Mountain),
Mianyang, 7th–10th century. Photographs by
Victor Segalen, mission archéologique en Chine, 1914.
Beginning from the 9th century BC,
Shu (on the
Chengdu Plain) and
Ba (which had its first capital at
Enshi City in
Hubei and controlled part of the
Han Valley) emerged as cultural and administrative centers where two rival kingdoms were established. Although eventually the
Qin dynasty destroyed the kingdoms of Shu and Ba, the Qin government accelerated the technological and agricultural advancements of Sichuan making it comparable to that of the
Yellow River Valley. The now-extinct
Ba–Shu language was derived from Qin-era settlers and represents the earliest documented division from
Middle Chinese.
South Sichuan was also inhabited by the
Dai people who formed the
serfs class. They were later thoroughly sinicized, adopting the local language of speech. Large numbers of foreigner merchant families from
Sogdia,
Persia and other countries immigrated to Sichuan.
During the
Yuan and
Ming dynasties, the population of Sichuan, Chongqing had been reduced due to immigration, deportation and flight of refugees fleeing war and plague, new or returning settlers from modern
Hunan,
Hubei,
Guangdong and
Jiangxi, replacing the earlier spoken language with different languages they adopted from the former regions to form a new standard language off communication.[3][4][5]
The
cult for supernatural forces and entities is a long-established tradition among the Sichuanese people, tracing its roots back to the ancient
Ba–
Shu era.
Taoism played a major role since the late antiquity with the emergence of the
Way of the Celestial Master movement.[6] The cultural characteristics of the Sichuanese people were described in the 2014 book All about Sichuan as "a 'heretical biography' that deviated from Confucian orthodoxy, a free-spirited cultural group that opposed, despised and subverted Confucian ethics and imperial autocracy."[7]
Recent history
Many migrant workers from rural Sichuan have migrated to other parts of the country, where they often face
discrimination in employment, housing etc.[8] This is due to China's household registration policy and other parts of people from midwest China face the same problem.
The Sichuanese once spoke their own variety of spoken Chinese called
Ba–Shu Chinese, or Old Sichuanese before it became extinct during the Ming dynasty. Now most of them speak
Sichuanese Mandarin. The
Minjiang dialects are thought by some linguists to be a bona fide descendant of Old Sichuanese due to many characteristics of Ba–Shu Chinese phonology and vocabulary being found in the dialects,[9] but there is no conclusive evidence whether Minjiang dialects are derived from Old Sichuanese or Southwestern Mandarin.
^Chinese: 四川人;
pinyin: Sìchuān rén or 川渝人; Chuānyú rén, sometimes shortened to 川人;
Sichuanese Pinyin: Si4cuan1ren2; former romanization: Szechwanese people
References
^Li, Hsing-jung; Fêng, Ming-i; Yü, Chih-yung (1 November 2014).
導遊實訓課程 (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Taipei: E-culture. p. 331.
ISBN9789865650346.
^James B. Parsons (1957). "The Culmination of a Chinese Peasant Rebellion: Chang Hsien-chung in Szechwan, 1644–46". The Journal of Asian Studies. 16 (3): 387–400.
doi:
10.2307/2941233.
JSTOR2941233.