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.
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 foreign merchant families from Sogdia, Persia and other Central Asian countries immigrated to Sichuan.[4] A Sogdian temple is attested in Chengdu.[5]
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.[6][7][8]
Many migrant workers from rural Sichuan have migrated to other parts of the country, where they often face discrimination in employment, housing etc.[9] This is due to China's household registration policy and other parts of people from midwest China face the same problem.
The cult for supernatural forces and entities is a long-established tradition among the Sichuanese people, tracing its roots back to the ancientBa–Shu era. Taoism played a major role since the late antiquity with the emergence of the Way of the Celestial Master movement.[10]Confucianism had relatively little influence, because of Ba–Shu's remoteness from the Zhongyuan region (perceived as the birthplace of the Chinese civilization) and the Qilu region (birthplace of Confucius and the center of Confucianism).[11] The cultural characteristics of the Sichuanese people were described in the 2014 book All about Sichuan as "a 'heretical biography' that deviated from Confucian orthodoxy, a free-spirited cultural group that opposed, despised and subverted Confucian ethics and imperial autocracy."[12]
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,[13] but there is no conclusive evidence whether Minjiang dialects are derived from Old Sichuanese or Southwestern Mandarin.
^Chinese: 四川人; pinyin: Sìchuān rénor川渝人; Chuānyú rén, sometimes shortened to 川人; Sichuanese Pinyin: Si4cuan1ren2; former romanization: Szechwanese people
^Yao, Chongxin (2011).『中古时期巴蜀地区的粟特人踪迹』[Traces of the Sogdians in Medieval Sichuan]. 中古艺术宗教与西域历史论稿 [Papers on Art, History and Religion of the Western Regions during the Medieval Period] (in Simplified Chinese). Beijing: The Commercial Press. p. 281. ISBN978-7-100-07691-3.
^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.
