Sichuan food was not always spicy. Chilli peppers only reached China by sea in the late Ming, so for more than a thousand years before that Sichuan cooks got their heat from Sichuan pepper, ginger and prickly ash — the numbing-and-hot style everyone knows today only settled in once chillies spread during the Qing. The phrase "Eight Great Cuisines" is younger than it sounds too: it took its modern form in the 20th century, expanded from an older "Four Great Cuisines" of Shandong, Sichuan, Cantonese and Jiangsu. Four of the eight (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Anhui) are packed into the lower Yangtze and the southeast coast, and each cuisine splits again into three or four sub-schools — Cantonese into Guangzhou, Chaozhou and Hakka; Jiangsu into Huaiyang, Nanjing, Suzhou-Wuxi and Xuzhou. Chengdu (2010), Shunde (2014), Macao (2017), Yangzhou (2019) and Huai'an (2021) have all been named UNESCO Cities of Gastronomy, covering the Sichuan, Cantonese and Huaiyang traditions.