Walk into a Chinatown restaurant abroad, or peruse a Chinese takeout menu, and you are most likely to encounter two dominant regional styles: Cantonese and Sichuanese. To this day, dishes like kung pao chicken — associated with Sichuanese cuisine for its bright, spicy, and intense flavor — have become global shorthand for “Chinese food,” shaping impressions of Chinese cuisine for millions.

But if you go back a century in China, Sichuanese cuisine was still largely confined to its homeland. The inland province, ringed by mountains, was geographically isolated, and people and goods moved slowly in and out, limiting both the supply of ingredients and the market for the Sichuanese flavor. Even cities like Beijing counted only a handful of Sichuan restaurants at the time.

How did Sichuanese food go from hidden treasure to culinary mainstay? There was one crucial exception: Shanghai. Records show that even before the 1911 Revolution, there were Sichuanese eateries in the city, with several notable establishments listed by 1922 in the “Guide to Shanghai,” published by the Commercial Press.

The presence of Sichuanese cuisine in Shanghai would prove influential and may have come down to several factors. The city’s booming commerce and extensive river and land transport networks made Sichuanese cooking there possible to begin with. Meanwhile, Shanghai’s role as an immigrant hub — home to migrants from the interior, along with retired officials and intellectuals — helped fuel the cuisine’s rise. Wang Bing’en, a Sichuanese book collector who settled in Shanghai after the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), championed his hometown association and was rumored to have even helped establish the city’s Sichuanese dining scene.

Unlike the ubiquitous eateries known today, these early Sichuanese restaurants in Shanghai positioned themselves as refined, high-end venues. Politicians and literati treated them as private dining clubs adorned with paintings and calligraphy, where prices were at least 50% higher than those of other cuisines. In the 1922 “Guide to Shanghai,” Sichuanese cuisine ranked alongside Fujianese cuisine, from China’s eastern coast, as the most expensive style in town. Menus emphasized how the local ingredients all exuded an abundance of flavor in each delicacy. A 1924 article in the newspaper Shun Pao listed dishes like “cream fish lips,” “bamboo fungus soup,” and “Sichuan pickles.” A 1930 food column praised “vinegar fish,” describing it as having simmered so long that the bones melted away, leaving the flesh tender and richly flavored.

However, what stood out to diners then was not chili heat. In fact, Sichuan’s culinary tradition held that no formal banquet should include spicy dishes, and since the cuisine was mainly reserved for the city’s upper echelon, it rarely carried a kick. To Shanghai palates, Sichuanese food’s clarity, freshness, and rich flavor were its greatest virtues. Compared with the then-dominant Suzhou cuisine, which was seen as becoming somewhat conventional, Sichuanese cooking came as a breath of fresh air.

The outbreak of China’s War of Resistance against Japan Aggression in 1937 was a watershed moment — even for Sichuanese cuisine. Millions fled east-coast cities like Shanghai and Nanjing for Chongqing, the wartime capital right in the Sichuan Basin. Suddenly, this refined cuisine became everyday sustenance, and outside formal banquet settings, chili peppers dominated. Children born during those years grew up addicted to chili, joking that they “couldn’t eat without it.” This wartime migration cemented Sichuanese food’s place in China’s broader culinary culture.

Even so, the lighter “Shanghai style” of Sichuanese cuisine never entirely disappeared. Prestigious restaurants such as 1935’s Jinjiang Sichuan Cuisine Restaurant — later the Jinjiang Hotel — and 1937’s Shu Yu continued to emphasize freshness and delicacy, though they broadened their offerings and lowered their prices. Menus added more approachable dishes such as fresh stir-fried eel with green pepper, and braised frog with eggplant, without abandoning refinement. In 1938, the now-celebrated Mei Long Zhen restaurant opened to glowing reviews for its smooth, fresh, and rich flavors and became the flagship of “Shanghai-style Sichuanese cuisine,” attracting writers and artists, and even serving as a discreet meeting spot for resistance groups during the war.

Shanghai also served as a launchpad for Sichuanese cuisine’s journey to Hong Kong. Before WWII broke out, Cantonese food reigned supreme on the islands, but books like 1941’s “The Greater Hong Kong” detailed the growing popularity of Sichuanese restaurants, especially with Hong Kong serving as a popular destination for southbound refugees. They noted how locals and migrants alike enjoyed dishes such as spicy cubed chicken and shrimp with bamboo shoots. Some offerings, such as chicken stewed with cordyceps, echoed Cantonese sensibilities and helped win over southern diners, according to the book. Many restaurateurs themselves even had ties to Shanghai: Zhang Zhuping, owner of the famous Café de Chine, had a long career in Shanghai, while other establishments recruited war refugees arriving from Shanghai and the nearby Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces to serve distinguished guests, according to a newspaper article.

When the Sichuanese restaurant known as Gui Yuan took over the dining room of the Cecil Hotel, on northern Hong Kong’s Kowloon Peninsula, it was a milestone event. A Hong Kong Commercial News interview from 1941 featured the blunt headline: “Hong Kong Tastes Have Changed: Sichuanese Food Is the Most Fashionable Chinese Cuisine.” Gui Yuan’s manager, Mao Kangji, explained that compared with Cantonese cooking, Sichuanese cuisine better matched the city’s swelling, diverse population. Proudly, he stressed that Gui Yuan offered “authentic Sichuanese food,” with chefs brought in from both Sichuan and Shanghai. Once again, Shanghai had acted as the “aircraft carrier” for Sichuanese food’s expansion.

When the war ended in 1945, refugees streamed back from the southwest. Their taste for spice lingered, however, ensuring that Sichuanese food surged again — this time, with a sharper, more proletarian flavor. By the late 1940s, one writer even declared that “the essence of Sichuanese cuisine lies in spice; without chili, it is not Sichuan.” While refined banquets may have still eschewed spice, those who didn’t enjoy spicy food ended up as the unwilling victims at more popular, everyday Sichuanese restaurants. As the same writer jokingly put it, they had to “furrow their brows to join the group, then repeatedly demanded for dishes to be made ‘mildly spicy’ or ‘without spice’” — much like many do today.

As told to Cai Yineng.

Portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Muyi/VCG)