Four days in Chengdu: pandas before breakfast, then nowhere to be all afternoon
Three nights in the centre: teahouses and old lanes on arrival, the panda base at feeding time, the Three Kingdoms temple and a poet's garden, and a bronze age gold mask before you leave.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Chengdu
- Places
- 10 across 4 days
Chengdu has spent two thousand years being comfortable. The plain around it grows three crops a year, the weather is grey and mild, and the result is a city that treats sitting in a park with a lidded cup of tea as a serious activity rather than a break from one.
It is also the panda capital, which is why most people book the flight, and the food capital, which is why they extend the stay. Sichuan cooking here is not simply hot; it is numbing, sour, sweet and floral in turn, and the local version bears little resemblance to what is served abroad.
Four days is the right length. Two of them go to the things you came for, and the other two are the ones people remember, spent walking between temples and sitting down again.
Highlights
- The panda base between eight and ten in the morning, which is the only window when the animals are awake and eating
- Bamboo chairs, a lidded cup of green tea and an ear cleaner working the tables at the teahouse in People's Park
- Face changing at a Sichuan opera night, where masks are swapped faster than you can see it happen
- Wenshu Temple, still full of people burning incense rather than photographing it, and a cheap vegetarian canteen behind the halls
- A three thousand year old gold sun bird at Jinsha, dug out from under a housing development in 2001
Where to stay
Chengdu, three nights
Base yourself between Tianfu Square and People's Park. That puts the metro interchange, the teahouses and the old lanes within walking distance, and the panda base is a straight run north from there.
The Jinli and Wuhou area to the southwest is prettier and more touristy, with courtyard hotels behind the old street. It is a fine alternative if you would rather wake up somewhere quiet than somewhere central.
Day by day
Day 1 in Chengdu
The square, the park teahouse and the rebuilt Qing lanes
The first afternoon is for learning the pace, and there is no better teacher than an outdoor teahouse. Chengdu drinks tea the way other cities drink coffee, except that a cup lasts four hours and the refills are free.
Start at the square in the middle, walk ten minutes to the park, and then do nothing for as long as you can manage. Somebody will come round offering to clean your ears with a set of steel picks and a tuning fork. This is normal.
The old lanes west of the park are rebuilt rather than original, and they are still a good evening: snack stalls, tea, and a lot of people out enjoying themselves.
- 15:00
Tianfu Square
ArchitectureThe middle of the city, with a large Chairman Mao statue and the metro interchange underneath. A fountain show runs at noon and again at dusk, choreographed to music, and the whole square turns out for it.
- 16:30
People's Park
LeisureA landscaped park ten minutes west of the square, with lakes, paddle boats and the open air teahouse that is the point of coming. Take a table under the trees, order the cheapest green tea, and stay for two hours.
- 19:30
Kuanzhaixiangzi
LandmarkThree parallel lanes of late Qing courtyards, rebuilt and lined with teahouses, snack shops and bars. Touristy and expensive and worth an evening anyway, particularly once the lanterns come on.
With more time: Chunxi Road, east of the square, is where Chengdu shops and eats late, and it has hotpot buffets on every corner if you want to get the first one out of the way.
Day 2 in Chengdu
Pandas at feeding time, a working temple, and masks
Everything about the panda base depends on when you arrive. Get there for opening and the enclosures are full of animals eating bamboo with their arms wrapped around it. Arrive at midday and you get sixty sleeping bears in trees.
It is a twenty five minute drive north of the centre. Book the ticket the night before, take the first slot, and start at the far end of the site with the nursery and the cubs, then walk back.
The afternoon and evening stay in town: a temple people actually use, and then an opera show that is closer to variety theatre than to anything you would call opera.
- 08:00
Chengdu Panda Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
LeisureThe largest giant panda breeding centre in the world, home to around sixty of them plus red pandas and black necked cranes, laid out as a bamboo park you walk through. Go at opening. The enclosures nearest the entrance are the busiest, so start at the back.
- 14:00
Wenshu Temple
ReligiousA Tang foundation and the busiest Buddhist temple in the city, with more than four hundred and fifty Buddha figures across its halls and gardens. The vegetarian canteen at the back serves a good cheap lunch to a room of regulars.
- 20:00
Sichuan Opera
VisitAn evening of Sichuan variety theatre: shadow puppets, musicians, comedy, fire breathing and the face changing act, where performers swap painted silk masks in a fraction of a second and nobody has ever explained how.
With more time: The tea and snack stalls in the temple's outer courtyards are open all afternoon, and the incense sellers along the approach street are the cheapest place to buy some if you want to join in.
Day 3 in Chengdu
The Three Kingdoms, and the poet who came here to hide
Southwest of the centre, two sites a couple of kilometres apart hold most of Chengdu's claim on Chinese literature and legend, and between them sits the busiest old street in the city.
Wuhou honours a strategist, not an emperor, which tells you something about what the Chinese admire. Anyone who has read Romance of the Three Kingdoms will recognise half the names in the halls; anyone who has not will still enjoy the gardens.
Du Fu's garden is the quieter half of the day and the better one. He arrived here as a refugee from a rebellion and wrote some two hundred and forty poems in four years, most of them about being poor, ill and a long way from home.
- 09:00
Wuhouci Temple
ReligiousA temple and garden complex commemorating Zhuge Liang, the Shu chancellor who is the closest thing Chinese history has to a folk hero of strategy. The statue halls are dim and dusty; the gardens and the red walled corridor are the reason to come.
- 11:30
Jinli Ancient Street
LandmarkThe rebuilt old street that runs alongside Wuhou, hung with lanterns and packed with snack stalls. Eat here rather than sitting down for lunch: rabbit heads, three cannon rice balls, sweet water noodles, all in small portions.
- 14:30
Du Fu's Thatched Cottage
HistoricA walled garden of bamboo, ponds and Ming and Qing pavilions around a reconstruction of the hut where China's most revered poet lived from 760 to 765. Quiet, green, and about as far from the panda queue as the city gets.
With more time: Qingyang Temple, ten minutes north of the cottage, is the oldest Taoist temple in the area and has courtyards you can sit in for the price of a cup of tea.
Day 4 in Chengdu
Gold, ivory and a bronze age nobody knew about
In 2001 a construction crew west of the centre cut into a bank of earth and found ivory, jade and gold from a civilisation that left no written record and that no history had mentioned.
The site is preserved as it was dug, under a roof, with the excavation trench open and the finds displayed in a second building next door. The gold sun bird disc is now the emblem of Chinese cultural heritage and is small enough to fit in your palm.
It is twenty minutes from the centre on line 7, which makes it a good last morning before either of the two airports.
- 09:00
Jinsha Archaeological Site
HistoricA bronze age site three thousand years old, still open under its shelter, with a museum of gold masks, jade blades and elephant tusks alongside. Allow two hours, and start with the excavation hall so the objects make sense.
With more time: If you have a full day rather than a morning, Sanxingdui is forty kilometres north and holds the strange bronze heads with protruding eyes from the same lost culture, which are unlike anything else in Chinese art.
Before you go
Getting around
The metro is fast, cheap and bilingual, and lines 1 and 2 cross under Tianfu Square in the middle of everything. Pay through Alipay or WeChat Pay at the gate.
Taxis and DiDi are inexpensive and the traffic, while chaotic, moves slowly enough to be survivable. The panda base is the one trip where a car saves real time.
Central Chengdu is flat and most of the distances below are under three kilometres, so walking between the temples and the parks is realistic.
Eating in Sichuan
Hotpot is the local sport. A bubbling cauldron of chilli and Sichuan pepper arrives, you order raw ingredients and cook them yourself, and the numbing sensation that follows is the pepper rather than the chilli. Ask for a split pot if you want an escape route.
Away from hotpot, look for dan dan noodles, mapo tofu, twice cooked pork and sweet water noodles. A bowl of noodles from a shop with plastic stools costs a few yuan and is often better than dinner.
Breakfast is noodles or dumplings, not pastry, and it stops around nine. If you want to eat like the city does, get up for it.
Tickets and timing
Book the panda base online the day before and take the first entry slot. Feeding is early morning; by midday the pandas are asleep in trees and you are looking at a grey lump.
Sichuan opera shows are arranged through hotels and agencies and run most evenings. The full traditional performances are long, so the tourist version, an hour and a half of highlights, is the right one for most people.
Chengdu weather is famously overcast. Do not plan around views, because there usually are none, and pick indoor days when the drizzle sets in.
Most people arrive in Chengdu for the pandas and leave talking about the food, which is the right way round. But the thing that actually gets under your skin is neither.
It is the afternoon you meant to spend at a museum and spent in a bamboo chair instead, with a cup that kept being refilled and a card game going on at the next table. No other Chinese city makes that so easy.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- When should I go to the panda base?
- At opening, which is usually half past seven. Pandas eat in the early morning and sleep for most of the rest of the day, so arriving at eleven means looking at motionless fur high in a tree. Book the ticket online the previous day with your passport number.
- Is Chengdu food too spicy?
- It is hot, but the sensation people are not ready for is the numbing tingle of Sichuan pepper rather than the burn. Restaurants will make dishes mild if you ask, hotpot comes with a split pot so half is plain broth, and dishes like sweet water noodles and twice cooked pork are more fragrant than fiery.
- Is Chengdu a good base for the rest of Sichuan?
- It is the only base. Leshan's giant Buddha and Mount Emei are day trips or an overnight south, Sanxingdui is an hour north, and the road to the Tibetan plateau starts here. Add two or three nights if you want any of it.
- How do I get to Chengdu?
- Two international airports, and high speed trains from almost everywhere. Xi'an is three to four hours by train, Chongqing about ninety minutes, Kunming around six hours. From Shanghai or Beijing, fly.
- Can I change this plan?
- Yes. Copy it into the planner, add a night for Leshan, or swap the last morning for a longer day at Sanxingdui.