Ya'an, Sichuan province, is where Westerners learned about the giant panda in March 1869. Jean Pierre Armand David (1826-1900), a French naturalist had been working in the Dengchigou Catholic Church in Baoxing, a mountainous county of Ya'an.

He was invited to tea at a local hunter's home, where he first saw the skin of a giant panda. He had the hunter capture a live panda, took samples and sent them to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The samples, which are still kept at the museum, aroused Westerners' interest.

China's fourth panda census, the results of which were released in 2015, tallied 1,864 wild pandas as of the end of 2013. Of those, 181 were in Baoxing, three-fourths of the county's land being in the core area for the bears' protection.

From 1957 to 1982, China sent 24 pandas as national gifts to nine countries. Sixteen of those animals were from Baoxing, according to Ya'an Daily.

With its mountainous terrain, Ya'an abounds with ingredients for Sichuan cuisine (one of the best-known food styles in China), including prickly ash, an important condiment. The elements all contributed to its selection as the site of the 5th World Sichuan Cuisine Conference, which will be held in Ya'an on Thursday and Friday.

During the two-day event, a Sichuan cuisine cooking skills competition and Sichuan snack competition will be held, and Ya'an prickly ash, fish, meat, bamboo shoots and rice will be featured.

In March 2018, the general office of the Sichuan provincial government issued the province's three-year action plan for promoting Sichuan cuisine to the Go Global (2018-20) initiative. The World Sichuan Cuisine Conference was born as a result.

Since September 2018, the conference has been held in the Shuangliu district of Chengdu, Ziyang and Meishan cities, the Pidu district of Chengdu and Ya'an in Sichuan.