What to do in Chengdu

Recently Katy has written a number of blogs about travelling in China and the difficulties we’ve been facing. I decided to instead of telling you more about that, it would make more sense to document some of our actual travels. The first stop on our Summer 2020 trip around China was to Chengdu. Chengdu is one of those cities everyone knows of in China (It’s quite famous for a number of things) but is a bit less commonly heard of outside of China. It’s arguably one of the oldest cities in China with settlements built here going back to the Neolithic age, but it has rarely been a true capital city. It’s too far inland and a bit too removed from either of the two great rivers to have that status.

Chengdu is a great city for getting around via public transit. The metro system is vast, perhaps larger than even Shanghais

It’s incredibly geometric and compose of several inner rings of serviced by enormous elevated highways. We spent 5 nights here and mostly got around by metro.

Chengdu is famous for a number of things, the biggest and most internationally renowned is probably the Giant Panda Breeding Center which is located about 10 km’s from the city center.

Lots of pandas. Basically in the 1980s when China was reopening to the outside world one of their top diplomatic commodities were these adorable (If not genetically a dead end) creatures. Big problem was that they were running out of them, so they started an intensive breeding campaign which has now resulted in China being able to effectively produce hundreds of Panda’s.

The center is one part science lab, one part zoo with most of the grounds visitors can access consisting of large outdoor pavilions wherein a dozen or so Panda’s are on display. You can also walk through a few indoor locations such as two different breeding rooms for the Giant Panda and also a much smaller pavilion for their less popular cousin the Red Panda. The little red panda’s enclosure has elevated walkways so that they can scamper above your head. I personally find them to be way cuter.

Ethically I suppose the goal here is to try and save the Panda’s. Breed enough that you can have a stable and genetically diverse body of Panda’s which you can then reintroduce into the Wild. Mind you they have nearly no natural territory left in the wild to live in since you know…farms. So unless the long term plan here is to plant tons of bamboo and kick people out of the Sichuan foothills, the whole project is long term just a stop gap measure. I have strong opinions of how utterly ridiculous the Panda is, so maybe I’m just biased. Still it was amazing to see so many Panda’s in one place and did make us feel a bit lucky to be stuck in China.

So after we visited the Panda’s we got a taxi ride to our next hotel. It was considerably more expensive than something we would normally stay in, a proper 5 star hotel.

Still it wasn’t anywhere near the price you’d pay in the UK, we got a suite with washing facilities built in and a very impressive balcony for about 70 GBP per night. The hotel also had a terrifying robot butler who served me warm beer.

Next we visited a fairly famous temple/functioning monastery in the middle of Chengdu. Unfortunately Hector became deeply enamored here with…pillars?

This went on for several minutes…visiting temples with Hector is usually a stressful occurrence in which he runs around screaming excitedly and confusing monks.

In the end we kind of gave up on the temple and went back to the hotel. Albeit not before checking out this cute little Pagoda Tower.

The next day we travelled by subway all the way to the Jinsha Ruins Site. This is a rather recent archaeological discovery made not even 20 years ago when they were trying to build a shopping mall (As is often the case in modern Chinese archaeology). A medium sized city from the Shang Era (About 3000 years ago) was uncovered along with a horde of gold, jade and…elephant tusks?

Thousands of elephant tusks dug up in sacrificial pits. Yes central China used to have elephants. I did not take too many photos here as I prefer to look at professional photographs in text books, which are often available at big sites like this. Luckily the site is apparently famous enough to validate the creation of an English version of their big photo/historical source book. Often the case in China is that museums and ancient sites will have a book shop filled with awesome books written of course, entirely in Chinese script. It’s always quite exciting to find something that’s been translated well.

I did take some photos though. Particularly of something Katy found most impressive/confusing. The Onyx Wood.

These are tree’s. Some of about 67 tree’s which have all been petrified and would have existed at the time of this civilizations Apex and before. So your looking at the trunks of 8-3,000 year old trees. Now fossilized forests are not unheard of. 15 years ago I visited one with my family in Australia. But the sheer height and quality of their preservation here is jarring. Also the fact that the park your walking in must have been submerged under so much mud and dirt just 20 years ago.

Later that evening we decided to do something risky. Take a toddler to an Opera well past his bed time!

But this wasn’t just opera it was Sichuan Opera. Sichuan is the province Chengdu is the capital of and also a term used to refer to anything unique to the region such as their food, music, dialect and most importantly their style of performing arts. Sichuan opera is known for a few things, having shows that are more narrative based with actual dialogue, conversations and not just endless singing (Like Beijing Opera). It’s also famous for the use of masks and face paint to help actors play multiple characters/roles. Typical plays depict famous war heroes, fantasy stories and sometimes a bit of both. Sichuan opera is also quite famous for it’s use of ‘face changing’ that is to say actors will in a blur of motion change the mask they’re wearing to depict a change in mood or a different character.

Hector seemed to enjoy it. What we saw was very clearly made for tourists. It had all the things you’d expect in Sichuan opera. Story, face changing, masks, fire spitting (Yes really) elaborate costumes, comedic clowns, but it also had puppet dancing, musical performances and lacked any real structure. It was more of a greatest hits of Sichuan Opera than an actual cohesive performance. Which was a bit disappointing.

See above apart of the performance…Katy seemed to really enjoy it too and Hector was shockingly well behaved. Probably because we bought him a giant bowl of fruit…though I did hear that he may have smashed a toilet while Katy had him in the women’s room.

The next day was my birthday. Which meant I could decide what we were going to do (Which…is usually the case anyway.) We started by going to the tomb complex of Liu Bei a very famous 3rd century Chinese King and quasi-Emperor. His two best friends are basically fictional characters now after 1200 years of opera’s and plays about their lives which became truly fictional when The Romance of Three Kingdoms was published 600 years ago. Still it’s always cool to visit the grave/temple of someone as famous as Liu Bei. There were awesome statues and sculptures through out the park!

We then went to get lunch at a Tibetan restaurant in the Tibetan quarter of Chengdu. Yep they have one. Chengdu is the closest major city to Tibet and the Himalaya’s can be seen in the distance from some parts of the province. There are something like 80,000 ethnic Tibetans living in Chengdu as for many of them it’s the ‘Big City’ they move to seeking out new opportunities.

I really should have taken more photo’s here as the food was excellent. Hector really enjoyed eating sugared bean, corn and peas.

Next we visited Wild West Brewing. Which was a bit of a hassle tracking down. They’re location on Google Maps (Unsurprisingly) was not accurate nor was it on Baidu! I in the end had to get the Wechat account of the owner from my Beer Group friends. We did manage to get there but found that the server/delivery man were the same thing and he was out delivering beer across the city. So we ended up waiting outside for him to return.

We did eventually get in and did some Chinese practice with the bar tender. I had a flight of their beers (though I chose to stick to just 4 mini beers and not the 15 you could technically order as one super long flight)

We then tried to make our way to one of the other lauded craft beer places. A Belgium place owned by an expat who makes his own beer. It…took awhile to get to on foot due to construction and when we got there…it wasn’t what I was expecting. Very loud and packed with people playing loud music and most of the beers on offer were just imported bottles. I guess it felt a bit anti-climatic after the excellence that was Wild West Brewing.

The following day we got on a train to Leshan to see a giant buddha and go up an even larger mountain. But that will have to wait for the next posting!