This is mainly because many Xiang-speaking immigrants from Hunan moved to Sichuan during the great wave of immigration during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, so Xiang does not have such a close relationship with other southwestern varieties of Chinese, such as those spoken in Yunnan, Guangxi or Hubei.
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The vocabulary of Sichuanese has three main origins: Bashu (or Ancient Sichuanese), Middle Chinese and the languages of the immigrants, including Proto-Mandarin from Hubei, Xiang, Gan and Hakka, which were brought to Sichuan during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
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In the "old" Minjiang dialect, the stop consonants for checked-tone syllables in Middle Chinese have developed into tense vowels to create a phonemical contrast, and in several cities and counties the tense vowels are followed by a glottal stop to emphasize the contrast.
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The Sichuanese dialect of the city of Leshan is a variety of Minjiang, which preserves old southern (Ba-Shu) features lost in other Sichuanese dialects and is very different from the dialects of most other cities in the province of Sichuan, which are more typically Mandarin.
The phonological aspects of Ba-Shu Chinese are still largely preserved in the Minjiang dialect of Sichuanese Mandarin.