Shǔ

The Shǔ culture is the regional culture of the Sichuan Basin, forged from the ancient Ba and Shu kingdoms. Qin conquered both in 316 BCE and merged them into the Ba-Shu civilisation, remembered for the bronze masks of Sanxingdui and Jinsha. The southern districts around Luzhou and Yibin long kept the most conservative forms of the old Shu speech.

In the fourteenth century the basin led a separate existence under the rebel Ming Xia, founded at Chongqing by Ming Yuzhen in 1362. A Ming army extinguished the regime in 1371.

Far worse followed in the mid-seventeenth century, when Zhang Xianzhong's Daxi regime of 1644 and the wars of the Ming-Qing transition emptied Sichuan; perhaps a third of the people died and many more fled. The Qing refilled the basin with settlers from Huguang and other provinces, whose speech developed into Southwestern Mandarin, while the Minjiang dialects of the south preserved words and sounds of the lost Ba-Shu language.