The chili pepper arrived in China from the Americas around 1590, yet Sichuan is so synonymous with spice that the question “what was Sichuan food before the chili?” comes up constantly. The video answers it in two surprising steps. First, the question is almost nonsensical: none of today’s iconic Sichuan dishes (Mapo Tofu, Chongqing hotpot, Laziji) predate the chili, because Sichuanese culture as we know it only coalesced around 1700 — after the near-total depopulation of the province during the Ming-Qing transition, dominated by the atrocities of Zhang Xianzhong, and the subsequent “Huguang Fills Sichuan” resettlement that brought the chili in from Hunan. Second, the better question — what was spicy Chinese food before the chili? — is answerable: Ming Dynasty China got its heat (xin, 辛) from alliums, black and white pepper, ginger, Sichuan pepper, yellow mustard, long pepper, and zhuyu. The video then cooks two spicy dishes from a 1504 collection of Song Xu’s mother’s recipes: a black-pepper “spicy fried chicken” and a mustard-dressed “cooked mixed pig” cold salad.
Sichuan is so identified with chilies that its people are called spicy, but the chili is a New World plant that arrived in China around 1590 — while Sichuan has been part of the Chinese world since the fall of Ba-Shu around 300 BCE. The catch: every iconic Sichuan dish is recent (Mapo Tofu and Chongqing hotpot in the late 19th century, Laziji in the 1980s), and the chili pepper reached China before Sichuanese culture as we know it formed around 1700. Food is culture, and culture is people — so the story of pre-chili Sichuan food is really the story of how today’s Sichuanese came to exist.
The speaker dislikes the sanitized word “transition”: for those alive it was a rupture, “the times of monsters” (a poetic reading of Gramsci). The 1600s brought the Little Ice Age, crop failures, and famines that shook China, Europe, and Japan. Alongside the Manchu threat in the northeast, peasant rebellions grew in Shaanxi — not ideological, but survival dynamics where famine turns men into bandits and bands into armies with dynastic ambitions. The two largest leaders were Li Zicheng (who took Beijing and briefly founded the Shun dynasty) and Zhang Xianzhong, who went south, took Chongqing and Chengdu, and proclaimed the Great Western (Da Xi) dynasty.
The accounts of Zhang’s atrocities are voluminous, if possibly embellished or Qing propaganda, but unignorable: massacres of whole cities (Suizhou, Kuizhou, Maozhou, Chongqing), lured-and-slaughtered refugees, curfews punishable by death, monks and examination scholars summoned and killed, flayed skin as palace decor, rewards paid per severed body part, and matching severed arms for couples. He confided that he was sad on days without killing, and on January 8, 1646 resolved to exterminate the population of Sichuan — Chengdu put to the sword, the Jin River clogged with bodies. He abandoned Chengdu and was killed by Qing forces in 1647.
Ming Sichuan held perhaps 5 million people; Qing census figures later recorded 16,000 taxable adult males. The video cautions against clean arithmetic: it’s easier to count people when there’s order, some revisionists view Zhang as a proto-revolutionary and blame Ming and Qing forces, and Sichuan’s suffering began decades before with the She-An rebellion and continued after, all against famine. A 1672 eyewitness account from the clerk Wang Yun describes Chengdu as sacked, weed-covered, with wild deer on the streets, earthen mounds of bones, and survivors in grass huts from Shaanxi. The conclusion stands: there wasn’t much of a Sichuan left.
Cai Yurong’s redevelopment advice became imperial policy: free paddy and dry land, years of tax exemption, citizenship for previously floating populations, and sometimes free cattle. Pioneers came down the Yangtze gorges, and by the 19th century the province was repopulated from Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, and beyond. The intermingling produced the Sichuan dialect (a koine), mixed festivals — and, in food, the sweet potato from Fujian and the chili from Hunan. Pre-chili Sichuan food survives only in fragments: dish names like “Chengdu steamed chicken”, plus salt, huajiao, and a sugar industry that hints Ming Sichuan might have been as associated with sweetness as the Yangtze Delta is today.
Reframing the question to “what was spicy Chinese food before the chili”, the answer is well documented under the character xin (辛): alliums (raw garlic), black and white pepper (piperine), ginger (gingerol), and Sichuan peppercorns all feel familiar — but Ming sources also list yellow mustard (now so rare in China that 95% of people would read the characters as wasabi), long pepper, wild betel leaf, and zhuyu, a fragrant Sichuan-pepper relative. Ming cooking was recognizably Chinese yet strangely exotic: thyme and dill were common herbs, rubing (an acid-set cheese) a common protein, and beef-eating was taboo or regulated until the 19th century.
The recipes come from Song Xu’s 1504 collection of his mother’s recipes — not Sichuanese, but spice-loving. The host explains his philosophy: historical recipes omit “obvious” steps, so they must be interpreted like a friend’s spoken gumbo recipe; he’s a food person first, happy to modernize while staying true to the spirit. The terse original (chunked chicken, stir-fried, water, fermented sauce, pepper, Sichuan pepper, scallion white, optional chestnuts/mushrooms/dried squid/bird’s nest) is reconstructed: the pepper is likely black, the fermented sauce like modern dadoujiang. The modern version marinates the chicken, fries it in lard with generous scallion whites, adds whole Sichuan peppercorns, fries the diluted fermented soybean paste in the oil, simmers ~20 minutes, and finishes with fresh shiitake and another tranche of black pepper (4 teaspoons, freshly ground, total). Verdict: very good, reminiscent of Cantonese black pepper sauce.
The second dish is a liangban cold salad — pork slivers, blanched lotus root and Chinese chives, egg strips — whose dressing showcases Ming-era yellow mustard plus a “five-spice vinegar” that recurs throughout the book: scallion whites, Sichuan and black peppercorns, ginger, and sha ren (a strong, nutmeg-like spice, sensibly dosed at 1/8 teaspoon rather than the listed three whole pieces). The mustard itself follows Gao Lian’s 1591 Zunsheng Bajian: ground yellow mustard seed and vinegar, strained, then “cuo”-ed — rubbed — to release the heat, covered overnight. Dressed at 3.5 parts mustard to 2 parts five-spice vinegar, it tasted like an older-style liangban — and the video notes yellow mustard survives in China’s culinary pockets, famously in some Sichuan liangmian cold noodles, and deserves a comeback over the “shitty wasabi tube”.
For the Zhang Xianzhong history, the host recommends Kenneth Swope’s academic-but-engaging book on the topic (used heavily for that section), with a link in the description.