Ba–Shu country still numbs tongues and shelters giant pandas
Sichuan holds about 83 million people in the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau fringe, with Chengdu as capital. Qin absorbed Ba and Shu around 316 BC; Liu Bei’s Shu Han ruled from here in the Three Kingdoms. 2021 GDP hit CN¥5,385 billion—larger than Turkey’s that year.
The Baodun culture of the Chengdu Plain, around 2700 to 1750 BC, is the earliest excavated in the basin, whose civilisations date back at least to the fifteenth century BC. A farmer found jade at Sanxingdui in Guanghan in 1929, and in 1986 archaeologists opened two sacrificial pits full of bronzes, gold and jade from what is thought to be an ancient Shu city. Ba ran down the Jialing to Chongqing, while Shu held the Min valley around Chengdu.
After Qin finished its conquest in 316 BC, Li Bing built the Dujiangyan system, whose adjustable weirs tamed the Min River for irrigation and flood control. Liu Bei founded Shu Han with its capital at Chengdu in 221, and Cao Wei conquered it in 263. Zhang Xianzhong’s revolt and the Manchu conquest ravaged the region in the seventeenth century, yet it was again among China’s most productive by the nineteenth.
Folk etymology hears “four rivers” in the name—Jialing, Jinsha/Yangtze, Wu, Min, or Tuo among candidates—though historical geographers debate. The historical geographer Tan Qixiang rejected that reading, tracing the name to the Northern Song split of a circuit into four. Shu and Chuan both still serve as short names for the province. Distinct Sichuanese Mandarin dialects mark identity after seventeenth-century devastation and resettlement.
Sichuan pepper’s tingling heat defines Kung Pao chicken and mapo tofu abroad. Panda breeding centers including Chengdu’s research base brand soft power beside chili oil. It ranks fifth among provincial economies and first in western and inland China, and as a country it would be the world’s eighteenth largest economy.
Source: Sichuan
