Surfing around aimlessly today I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Szechuan cooking
And came upon this sentence
I’m curious if anyone knows what it is refrencing? It are just talking about Black pepper or Long pepper, or are there non Chili family spicy peppers that have eluded me all these years?
Yes, black pepper, and sichuan pepper which is a whole different thing than either red or black pepper.
I considered that but sichuan pepper hasn’t been replaced, it still used all over the place in the food.
Authentic Sichuan cuisine uses Capsicum Chinense aka the Hot Paper Lantern. It’s a habanero varietal and is extremely, extremely hot.
Americanized Sichuan dishes like gong bao (kung pao) chicken use much milder Tianjin peppers (aka Chinese Red Peppers), partly because up until very recently it would be difficult to get habaneros, and mostly because the dish would be too spicy to eat. 
Ancient pepper is the black pepper, etc, of the genus piper - the very ancient one which is found in the middle east in ancient times… They should probably refer to the middle east of eg Ancient Egypt, etc
which presumably was available to china from ancient times, original import date unknown.
Sichuan (East China and Taiwan ) pepper is Zanthoxylum simulan, a tree native to the North East of China area.
American pepper is genus capsicum which was only available to China after Columbus etc visiting the Americas.
The sichuan cuisine article says that Capsicum replaces ancient (piper) pepper, but Zanthoxylum pepper is still used .
So before they used black pepper and Zanthoxylum , and now they use Capsicum and Zanthoxylum .
For the Chinese, there would also be cubeb, or Java pepper.
There are a whole host of other peppers beside those, though - you’re familiar with Long Pepper, but there’s also Grains of Paradise, Alligator Pepper and West African Pepper (Some of which were familiar in the Medieval West, so possibly China too…
I grew my own habaneros and serranos in China because there was no other way to get them. There were lots and lots and lots of chiles (most weren’t spicy, though).
I spent a lot of time in Chongqing and Sichuan (mostly Chongqing), and by far the most common chile was the red pepper, both fresh and dried. And of course, the non-chile Sichuan peppers are absolutely necessary to add the ma to the la. And trust me, I sought out local food in Chongqing as much as possible, because I normally lived in Nanjing where the local food is tasteless, under-seasoned, and boring.
Funny, mala means awesome delicious food in Chinese, and “bad” for Mexican food.
Except that this comes from the Americas and therefore dates from 1492 at the earliest, likely much later. Not particularly ancient.
I can’t imagine anyone who has the two to compare thinking anything from the capsicum family, no matter how hot, or not, is a replacement for Sichuan Pepper.
Zanthoxylum simulan - the husks from the seeds - forms a quite unique taste. It has a characteristic slight numbing tingling on the lips. And the flavour is closer to black pepper than a chilli. But really it is quite unique. It isn’t an insane burning hot flavour. Just hot.
Not chili-hot so much, more like a mild electric shock, plus citrus notes and some astringency. And the numbing effect above all.
Long pepper is a close relative of black pepper, but is said to be hotter. It was cheaper than black pepper in the Middle Ages and imported by Europeans then. When the price of black pepper came down, they forgot about long pepper. Its flavor is nothing at all like the piney herbal bite of black pepper. It has a powerfully cloying sweet-spicy essence that reeks like a Moluccan’s armpits and drawers. Long pepper is the original spice that was named पिप्पलि *pippali *in Sanskrit, from which the word pepper derives.
Tellicherry pepper is badass. It’s a varietal of black pepper with an extra-hot zing. Its price too has recently come down, so grab some.
The effect of hydroxy alpha sanshool.
It’s like simultaneously having someone slightly numb your mouth along with something similar to the sensation of putting your tongue on a 9v battery, but milder.
Is that a variant of the “standard” Sichuan “pepper”? They standard ones are hot at all; you get the “la” from actual chile peppers. The Sichuan peppers provide the “ma,” that is the numbing sensation in the mouth that standard chiles are nominally incapable of (although, trust me, enough of them will make you numb, too).
In Chinese food – nationally – chiles give you “la,” that is, spicy in the hot chile sense. Hunan food does really, really awesome “la.” It really, really takes the Sichuan peppers to give the uniquely Chongqing/Sichuan “ma” to the repertoire; hence you end up with “mala.” (Chongqing is really Sichuan, but politically it’s a different area and there are small variations, thus my combined use.)
Sansho-ol refers to the Japanese version of the spice, sansho, also called “Japanese pepper,” with a more or less similar taste to its relative Sichuan pepper, except it’s sour. I think it’s one of the ingredients in shichimi togarashi. Or is that nanami togarashi?