The Chengdu Plain and the Dujiangyan Waters

The Chengdu Plain lies in the western Sichuan basin, where the Min river leaves the mountains of the Tibetan edge and spreads over a fan of flat, fertile land. The Dujiangyan irrigation works on the Min, built in the third century BC under Li Bing, the Qin governor of Shu, divide the river into channels that water the plain and carry off its flood. The system is still in use, and the plain it feeds has long been called the Land of Heavenly Abundance, a name Fuchsia Dunlop takes up in Land of Plenty for the province's cooking.

The waters of Dujiangyan turned the plain into one of the most reliably productive farmlands in China. Rice is the staple, and the fields yield in the same year rapeseed, wheat, vegetables, pigs and freshwater fish. The basin is ringed by mountains and shut off from the north and east, with a mild, damp and often overcast climate, and Dunlop ties the variety and depth of Sichuanese food to this combination of fertile land and enclosure. Rapeseed gives the cooking its fragrant oil, and the pressed oil of the plain is part of the flavour of the table. The same fields give the leaf mustards and stem vegetables that are salted and pickled in the household jar, and the broad beans that become doubanjiang. The best known chilli bean paste, Pixian doubanjiang, takes its name from Pixian, a district at the western edge of the plain, and exists as a registered Chinese Geographical Indication. Its making rests on broad beans and chillies fermented and matured in the open under sun and dew, and it is the seasoning on which much of the region's cooking depends, in dishes such as mapo doufu (麻婆豆腐) and twice-cooked pork. Sichuan pepper, Zanthoxylum bungeanum, grows in the hills around the basin and supplies the numbing quality that, together with chilli, makes the local taste known as mala. Chillies arrived in China from the Americas, and were taken up in Sichuan after the sixteenth century, so the heat of the cuisine is a later layer on an older base of pepper, ginger and fermented seasonings. The plain also supports the teahouse, where the people of Chengdu sit for hours over tea, and the markets and small restaurants that supply the city. The salt wells of Zigong, to the south of the plain, supplied the brine on which the basin's cooking, its preserving and its trade long depended. Water, soil and salt together explain why a province far from the sea became a cuisine of such range, and why its cooks are able to build flavour from the pantry as much as from the fresh ingredient.

At the table of the plain, the cooking is built on contrasts of oil, chilli, Sichuan pepper and fermented bean, and a meal is balanced by plain rice and by lighter dishes of vegetables and soup. The teahouse is the place where the plain's day is spent, with covered cups of tea served from a kettle, and the pickles, doubanjiang and pressed rapeseed oil of its farms underlie the household meal.