A unique group of people known as the Tunpu people inhabit the countryside of Anshun, Guizhou, and are very different from the surrounding minority villages in language, costume, architecture and even marriage customs. In the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an army of 300,000 soldiers from several provinces south of the Yangtze River started an expedition to the Yunnan-Guizhou region, where they stationed troops locally after routing remnants of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) there. Since then, they have been in the region. The Tunpu people are the offspring of soldiers stationed there in the Ming Dynasty. As Guizhou province was a sparsely populated region, the army needed a kind of food that was easy to carry, could fend off cold and damp conditions, and be stored for a long time. After long-term exploration, they started to cook the free-range local chickens in the mountain area with red pepper, ginger, garlic and other spices.

As Jiuzhou is the birthplace of authentic "spicy chicken", the traditional cookery of spicy chicken in Jiuzhou was not lost, even after all these years. Even now, Tunpu people still stick to the old cooking method, from ingredient selection to manufacturing and storage. The taste has remained the same. Jiuzhou spicy chicken has become a unique local flavor that boasts a long history.