Chengdu
A city visited for one animal, and remembered for how slowly it lives
- When to go
- October 18° · 17 rainy days
- Per day
- €€price 2 of 5
- How many days
- 2days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 17 km Shuangliu · 53 km Tianfu
- Right now
People come to Chengdu for the pandas and there is no pretending otherwise: the breeding base costs €7, opens at eight, and the animals are only active while the morning is cool and the feeding lasts. Arrive at noon and you will be looking at sleeping fur.
The base is large, with an internal electric shuttle for about €4; walking to the far enclosures takes twenty minutes. The order that works: go straight to the end of the park, to the cubs, then drift back towards the entrance as the day warms — everyone else does the reverse and jams the first enclosures.
Sichuan cooking is not merely hot, it is numbing. Sichuan pepper does not burn but tingles the lips, and the combination is called ma la — numbing and fire. Nobody warns you, and the first mouthful reads like an allergic reaction. Hotpot is the civic sport, ordered in two pots, one mild and one fierce, even by brave company.
Chengdu is also the base for everything west of it: the Great Buddha at Leshan is forty minutes to an hour by high-speed train, depending on the service, and the roads to Tibet and the Sichuan mountains start here. Tibet needs a separate permit arranged weeks ahead — the conditions are on the China page.
What to see in Chengdu
The panda breeding base
€7, opens at eight. Go straight to the far end and work back towards the entrance — everyone else starts the other way.
Wenshu Monastery
A Buddhist monastery with a garden and a vegetarian canteen, in the middle of the city. Free, and the quietest place in Chengdu.
People's Park and its teahouse
Bamboo chairs, green tea and ear cleaners with metal tools. Nothing here to look at — you sit for three hours, and that is the point.
Hotpot
Two broths, one mild and one fierce, and a plate of raw meat and vegetables. Sichuan pepper numbs rather than burns — that is not an allergy.
- T
The Great Buddha at Leshan
An eighth-century figure cut into the cliff, 71 metres tall, forty minutes to an hour by high-speed train. Take an early train: the queue for the stairs runs to an hour and more.
Kuanzhai Xiangzi
Three restored lanes of courtyard houses. Touristy, but it works as an introduction to what the city looked like before the towers.
Two things you probably did not know
Chengdu has the largest giant panda breeding centre in the world. A panda is born pink, hairless and weighing about a hundred grams, roughly a thousandth of its mother's weight; no other placental mammal bears young so small relative to itself.
Sichuan pepper does not burn, it numbs. It contains a compound that irritates touch nerves, so it feels like a light current on the lips. The heat itself comes from chilli, which only reached China in the seventeenth century.
Ready for Chengdu?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Chengdu — day trips or weekends.
China
→A country the size of a continent, where the hard part is sorted out before you fly: payment, internet and tickets
Japan
→A country where a train five minutes late hands the passenger a written delay certificate
Vietnam
→A country sixteen hundred and fifty kilometres long, where north and south are never in season together
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
Front row for the next trip
Leave your email and we'll let you know when a new destination or story goes up.