Sichuan Culture & Language

Sichuanese culture is distinct enough within China to be immediately recognisable, and it is exported mainly through its food.

Teahouses

Not a heritage attraction but a functioning institution. Bamboo chairs, a lidded gaiwan cup refilled all afternoon, mahjong, and the caiershi ear-cleaners moving between tables with a kit of picks, tweezers and a tuning fork. The one in People’s Park in Chengdu is the best known and is used by locals.

Sichuan opera

Louder, faster and more comic than Peking opera, with fire-breathing, puppetry and above all bianlian — face-changing, in which a performer flicks through a sequence of painted silk masks faster than the eye can follow. The method is a state-protected secret passed within families and formally classed as a national secret.

Sanxingdui

The bronzes are among the strangest and most arresting objects in Chinese archaeology, and the museum at Guanghan is worth the trip from Chengdu.

Shadow puppets and bamboo weaving

Sichuan leather-shadow theatre, with figures cut from translucent hide and coloured, is one of the older Chinese regional traditions and is still performed. The bamboo weaving of Qingshen wraps porcelain in a mesh so fine the strands are barely thicker than a hair, which takes years to learn and is now made mostly for collectors.

Kham

Western Sichuan’s Tibetan culture: monasteries at Litang and Ganzi, horse festivals, and a reputation among Tibetans for independence of character.

Printing and paper money

Chengdu was the centre of Chinese printing in the Tang and Song periods, and the world’s first government-issued paper money — jiaozi — was issued here in the early eleventh century, several centuries before anything comparable in Europe. It grew out of merchants’ deposit receipts for iron coinage too heavy to carry, which is a very Sichuanese solution to a problem.

Brocade and lacquer

Chengdu’s Shu brocade is one of China’s four great silk traditions.

Mandarin is the official language and is universally understood, but the everyday speech of the basin is Sichuanese, a southwestern Mandarin dialect different enough in tone and vocabulary that speakers from Beijing struggle with it. It is widely spoken on television and in comedy, and Sichuanese are attached to it.

Tibetan, in the Kham dialect, is spoken across the western prefectures, and Yi — which has its own syllabic script — in the south.

English is limited outside Chengdu’s international hotels and the tourist sites. A translation app is genuinely necessary, and photographing menus to translate them is standard practice.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian for how much, bu yao la for no chilli, and mai dan to ask for the bill.