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]
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.[6] 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,[7] but there is no conclusive evidence whether Minjiang dialects are derived from Old Sichuanese or Southwestern Mandarin.
^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.
