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An interesting doco. This, mind, is one of the poorest areas of China. Watch through at least to the part where we see the new apartments of the villagers, at a cost of $450 per family member. They're not too bad! Especially versus the awful climb up the hill that they used to have to do a couple of times a day -- and some oldies still do. The climb, the steps, are frightening.
I've been to Sichuan several times, mainly to the big cities, Chengdu the capital and Chongqing when it was still part of Sichuan -- it's now a municipality reporting direct to Beijing, a bit like Washington DC, or Canberra. My first trip was in 1976 and I remember to this day my first taste, in Chengdu, of Dandan Mian 担担面 (aka Dan Dan Noodles) from a street stall. They were and remain... magic. I have a secret recipe for the soupy sauce, which makes the best DanDanMian in Southern China, or at least the best in Hong Kong.
I've always enjoyed trips to Sichuan. It's quite a place, and out west gets very wild and mountainous, explorers’ country.
I've always thought "Sichuan" (四川) meant "four rivers", since, well, "si" (四) means "four" and "chuan" (川) means "river" (you can even see the rivers in the ideograph 川). And it's what I was taught when I went there as a student in 1976. Silly me: going back to refresh my memory on the names of the four rivers, I find that there's an alternative explanation about the origin of the name "Sichuan". This alternative has a much more complex origin and is made up of multiple sources.
But I don't know. To assume the much more complex etymology on the basis of one book by one scholar seems to be stretching it a bit. I'm going to use Occam's Razor here and go with the simpler explanation being the one. So, for me at least, it continues to be "Four Rivers". The rivers, btw, are Jialing, Jinsha, Min and Tuo.
