Wholesale Sichuan Tribute Pepper (Hanyuan Sichuan Pepper, Qingxi Gong Jiao)

If you are purchasing for a restaurant, contact us (via envelope icon in menu) to receive a wholesale discount. Also, please contact us first for large orders.

While we have always carried Hanyuan Sichuan pepper, we now have certified pepper from the mountain village of Qingxi, the best of the best Hanyuan pepper. It is also called gong jiao, or Tribute Pepper, because while Sichuan pepper is grown in many areas of China, this was the one the emperors favored and demanded as tribute. There is still much more demand than supply of gong jiao—you have to have connections to get it even in China—so we are privileged to be able to source and offer it here. Our buyer personally makes the trip from Chengdu to Qingxi each harvest to choose and secure our lot. 

Tribute Pepper has a quite different taste than Da Hong Pao, the other red Sichuan pepper that is popular in Sichuan in modern times, being brighter, lighter and more floral compared to da hong pao's warm, woodsy citrus. The peppercorns are slightly smaller and darker red than da hong pao, meaning they retain a small percentage of seeds, but they make up for that with their beguiling taste and fragrance and strong numbing power, making Qingxi Tribute Pepper the most storied Sichuan pepper in the land. 

(Go here for an introduction to Sichuan pepper, or hua jiao, in general and to our da hong pao variety.)

As with our other varieties, this hua jiao is particularly potent, as it has not undergone the once-required heat-treatment process that for so long robbed Sichuan pepper of some of its punch. 

The peppercorns are hand-picked and dried by the farmers before being machine-sorted once and hand-sorted twice, as only the top grades are. This insures mostly opened seed pods and no seeds, which appear in abundance in lower-quality Sichuan pepper.