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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: which province is famous for their spicy food?
I just spent an hour at dinner, trying to figure out which province they were talking about.....I know the provinces.
Hunan and Yunnan ...(Sichuan doesn't do it).... but trying to figure out which one they were saying baffles me. It was a delicious dinner.
my tonal recognition sucks.. so does theirs for that matter ... wooonan, whooonan.... yunan.... hunan......hoonan...etc. etc.
nice red hot chili peppers in every one of nine dishes.... try telling them the the Portuguese brought these peppers to Asia and China. ... Originally from the Americas..GOOD LUCK.!
Perhaps they were saying FUnan in the vernacular of Hunan locals??
Some provinces have alternate names. I've never heard of Yunnan as being famous for its spicy food.
After a little search, I found this relevant quote:.
"
Sichuan Cuisine, sometimes referred to as Chuan Cuisine, is one of the eight great cuisine "schools" of China. Sichuan Cuisine is often compared to Hunan Cuisine, since the dishes of both of these cuisine schools tend toward the spicy-hot, but where the spicy-hot dishes of Sichuan Cuisine are said to be "dry hot", a term that is not easily grasped by outsiders or by those not keenly familiar with the cuisine traditions of these two provinces. We will attempt an explanation here based on a parallel to red wines…
The spicy-hotness of Hunan Cuisine, it is said, rests chiefly on its generous use of fresh chilies, whereas the spicy-hotness of Sichuan Cuisine stems from its special mix of dry ingredients (crushed peppercorns and finely-ground red, or cayenne, pepper and dried chilies as well as the now homegrown Sichuan pepper, huajiao ("flower pepper" from the prickly ash tree, Zanthoxylum bungeanum) which has an instantaneous numbing effect on the tongue). The latter form of spicy-hotness, or dry hotness, is said to leave a spicy-hot sensation in one's mouth that lingers on and on, whereas dishes that are marked by wet hotness, if one may call it that, tend to be of a flash-in-the-pan character."
So - to answer your question - they could have either been saying "Hunan", or "Chuan"!
Hotwater:
Some Yunnan food is very spicy, some not. Lots of minority influences and it borders Sichuan.
hubei has very spicy food as well, they could have been talking about "wuhan" the capital of hubei province?
In China, Sichuan's food is considered as the most spicy. As Hotwater said: "Some Yunnan food is very spicy and it borders Sichuan."
Hunan. Since the "yun" in Yunnan sounds completely different. That u has two dots above it in pinyin and almost like the "ou" sound in French.
I've never heard of people saying Yunnan food is spicy. I'm sure they have spicy dishes, but the cuisine on a whole certainly isn't regarded as spicy. Sichuan and Hunan are considered to be spicy cuisines. Regardless of whether you agree or not, that's the general consensus in China, so it has to be Hunan.
Hunan is right... the wife and I did it all over again with a map, yes, a map, with a Chinese woman....she showed me HUNAN.
and she scoffed at me.... Yunnan and Hunan do not sound at all alike she says.... and proved it to me. I have already forgotten the difference
It's Hunan. Famous for food second only to Sichuan for spiciness. Yunnan has some spicy dishes but the cuisine in general is not that spicy. Also as xunliang pointed out, if Yunnan is pronounced correctly then it doesn't actually sound similar to Hunan at all.