Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Chengdu, and its population stands at 83 million. Sichuan neighbors Qinghai and Gansu to the north, Shaanxi and Chongqing to the east, Guizhou and Yunnan to the south, and Tibet to the west.
The Di (Chinese: 氐; pinyin: Dī; Wade–Giles: Ti1; < Eastern Han Chinese *tei < Old Chinese (B-S): *tˤij) were an ancient ethnic group that lived in western China, and are best known as one of the non-Han Chinese peoples known as the Five Barbarians that seized power in northern China during the Sixteen Kingdoms period. This ethnic group should not be confused with the earlier Dí (狄), which refers to unrelated nomadic peoples in northern China during the earlier Zhou dynasty. The Ba-Di (巴氐) were a branch of the Di that intermixed with another ethnic group known as the Cong people (賨).
Zhang Xianzhong, courtesy name Bingwu (秉吾), art name Jingxuan (敬軒), was a Chinese peasant leader who led a peasant rebellion from Yan'an wei, Shaanxi during the Ming-Qing transition. He conquered Sichuan in 1644, and named himself king and later emperor of the Xi dynasty. His rule in Sichuan was brief, and he was killed by the invading Qing army. He is commonly associated with the massacres in Sichuan that depopulated the region. However, the extent of his killings is disputed.
Bazhong is a prefecture-level city in north-eastern Sichuan province, China. Its population was 2,712,894 at the 2020 census whom 1,064,766 lived in Bazhou and Enyang urban districts. As of the end of 2022, the resident population of Bazhong City was 2,658,800 people.
Sichuanese, also called Sichuanese Mandarin, is a branch of Southwestern Mandarin spoken mainly in Sichuan and Chongqing, which was part of Sichuan Province until 1997, and the adjacent regions of their neighboring provinces, such as Hubei, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Shaanxi. Although "Sichuanese" is often synonymous with the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, there is still a great amount of diversity among the Sichuanese dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible with each other. In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language.
Chang Qu (291–361), courtesy name Daojiang, was a Chinese historian of the Cheng-Han dynasty during the Sixteen Kingdoms period and the Jin dynasty (266–420). Chang Qu is best known for his magnum opus, the Chronicles of Huayang or Records of the States South of Mount Hua that he compiled between 348 and 354, the oldest extant regional history of China about his native region of Yizhou, or the modern-day Sichuan province.
Southwestern Mandarin, also known as Upper Yangtze Mandarin, is a Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in much of Southwestern China, including in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, most parts of Hubei, the northwestern part of Hunan, the northern part of Guangxi and some southern parts of Shaanxi and Gansu.
The Bo people are an ancient extinct people from the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of Southwestern China. They are famous for their hanging coffins. They were one of the various now extinct peoples from Southern China known collectively in Chinese records as the Baipu.
Jiange County is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of Guangyuan city. The history of Jiange County as a county division goes back around 1700 years. The county has historically been a junction between the north and south of Western China, through the Jianmen Pass. It is a popular tourist destination in Sichuan.
Differing literary and colloquial readings for certain Chinese characters are a common feature of many Chinese varieties, and the reading distinctions for these linguistic doublets often typify a dialect group. Literary readings are usually used in loanwords, geographic and personal names, literary works such as poetry, and in formal contexts, while colloquial readings are used in everyday vernacular speech.
Sichuanese Pinyin (Si4cuan1hua4 Pin1yin1; simplified Chinese: 四川话拼音; traditional Chinese: 四川話拼音; pinyin: Sìchuānhuà pīnyīn), is a romanization system specifically designed for the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese. It is mostly used in selected Sichuanese dictionaries, such as the Sichuan Dialect Dictionary, Sichuan Dialect's Vocabulary Explanation, and the Chengdu Dialect Dictionary. Sichuanese Pinyin is based on Hanyu Pinyin, the only Chinese romanization system officially instructed within the People's Republic of China, for convenience amongst users. However, Hanyu Pinyin is unable to match the phonology of Sichuanese with complete precision, especially in the case for the Minjiang dialect, as there are many differences between Sichuanese and Standard Chinese in phonology.
The Minjiang dialect is a branch of Sichuanese, spoken mainly in the Min River (Mínjiāng) valley or along the Yangtze in the southern and western parts of the Sichuan Basin in China. There is also a language island of the Minjiang dialect located in the center of the Sichuan Basin covering several counties, including all of Xichong, Yanting, and Shehong Counties, and part of Jiange, Cangxi, Nanbu, Langzhong and Bazhong. The Minjiang dialect is also referred to as the Nanlu dialect by some scholars.
Ba–Shu Chinese (Chinese: 巴蜀語; pinyin: Bāshǔyǔ; Wade–Giles: Ba1 Shu3 Yü3; Sichuanese Pinyin: Ba¹su²yu³; IPA:[pa˥su˨˩y˥˧]), or simply Shu Chinese (Chinese: 蜀語), also known as Old Sichuanese, is an extinct Chinese language formerly spoken in what is now Sichuan and Chongqing, China.
The Leshan dialect (simplified Chinese: 乐山话; traditional Chinese: 樂山話; pinyin: Lèshānhuà; Sichuanese Standard Chinese: No2san1hua4; local pronunciation:[nʊʔ3sã55xuɑ224]) is the Sichuanese dialect of the city of Leshan and is a variety of Minjiang. It preserves old southern (Ba-Shu) features lost in other Sichuanese dialects and is very different from the dialects of most other cities in the province of Sichuan, which are more typically Mandarin.
Chengdu-Chongqing dialect or Cheng–Yu is the most widely used branch of Southwestern Mandarin, with about 90 million speakers. It is named after Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan, and Chongqing, which was split from Sichuan in 1997. It is spoken mainly in northern and eastern Sichuan, the northeastern part of the Chengdu Plain, several cities or counties in southwestern Sichuan, southern Shaanxi and western Hubei.
Sichuanese characters (Chinese: 四川方言字; Sichuanese Pinyin: Si4cuan1 fang1yan2zi4; pinyin: Sìchuān fāngyánzì; Wade–Giles: Szŭ4-ch'uan1 fang1-yen2-tzŭ4) are those Chinese characters used only in written Sichuanese. Sichuanese characters are often created as ideogrammatic compound characters (会意字) or phono-semantic compound characters (形声字).
Ba-Shu culture refers to a regional culture centered around Sichuan province and Chongqing city, also encompassing parts of Yunnan, Guizhou, southwestern Shaanxi and neighboring regions which speak Southwestern Mandarin. Historically centered around the Yangtze River, it emerged as an amalgamation of the cultures of the Shu and Ba kingdoms after their conquest by the state of Qin in 316 BC.
Sichuan embroidery or Shu embroidery, is a style of embroidery folk art native to Sichuan and Chongqing, particularly renowned for its brocade fabrics known as Shu brocade. This technique of embroidery originates from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, during the time of the Ancient Kingdom of Shu. An excavation of four tombs dating back to the Western Han dynasty, on Mount Laoguan located in Tianhui Town, Chengdu, has confirmed the use of patterning looms for weaving warp-faced compounds in that period.
Islam is a minority religion in the Chinese province of Sichuan. The total number of Muslims are 112,478 according to a 2004 census conducted by the Islamic Association of China, the majority are ethnic Hui. Chengdu, the provincial capital, and Xichang, capital of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, are the two cities with high concentration and long history of the Hui communities. According to a 1990 census, 23,288 Muslims resided in Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of western Sichuan, with about 40 mosques catering to their religious needs. Counties with highest number of Muslims in this region are Ma'o, Ngawa, Quqên, Sirza Degu, Sungqu, Tsanlha, and Zoigê.
Zoroastrianism in Sichuan refers to the historical presence of Zoroastrianism in modern-day Sichuan province, that forms part of southwestern China. The Japanese professor Kiichirō Kanda was the first scholar to notice the Zoroastrian presence in medieval Sichuan, or Yizhou as it was officially known from late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, but commonly referred to as Shu, after the realm's first polity, the ancient kingdom of Shu. He believed that Zoroastrianism was popular in the region during the Tang dynasty (618–907), after learning of the festival songs of the magi present in the yuefu folk music of Kuizhou, and reading an entry titled "The Princess [of Shu]" from the 16th-century encyclopedia Extended Investigations of the Mountain Hall, in 1928. Fifty years later, the Hong Kong scholar Jao Tsung-I confirmed the existence of Zoroastrian temples in Sichuan during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in his article "Investigation of the Festival Songs of the Magi". Contemporary scholars such as Li Guotao and Hou Hui have researched the links between certain Zoroastrian deities and Erlang Shen, otherwise known as the Lord of Sichuan; as well as Yao Chongxin's more comprehensive research on the topic.
