Chengdu: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Chengdu has stood on this spot under this name for more than two thousand three hundred years — founded as the capital of the Shu kingdom around 311 BC, and one of very few Chinese cities never to have changed its name or moved. The reason it could is the Sichuan basin: ringed by mountains on every side, fed by an irrigation system built in 256 BC that still works, and so consistently overcast that the city is a national joke about not seeing the sun. The combination produced a particular culture — rich, enclosed, unhurried and famously fond of sitting down — and the institution that expresses it is the teahouse. Two hours, and the right way to do this walk is to allow an hour of it for sitting still in a bamboo chair.

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A short history of Chengdu

Chengdu was founded in the 4th century BC as the capital of the Shu kingdom. Around 256 BC the Dujiangyan irrigation system was built nearby; it still waters the Chengdu Plain today and made it an especially fertile region. In the early 11th century, under the Song dynasty, the world's first paper money was issued here. In 1987 a panda breeding centre was established in the city. In May 2008 an earthquake struck Sichuan province, north-west of the city, and about 70,000 people were killed.

The ten best sights in Chengdu

1
Wuhou Shrine
A ruler and his minister enshrined together — and the minister’s hall is the larger one
2
Jinsha Site Museum
Found in 2001 by construction workers inside the city; the gold sun-and-bird disc is the national heritage emblem
3
Sichuan Museum
Free and the largest provincial museum in the south-west; the Tibetan Buddhist gallery is the surprise
4
Chengdu Museum
Free, on Tianfu Square, five floors; the shadow puppet collection on the top floor is the best in China
5
Du Fu Thatched Cottage
Du Fu lived here for four years and wrote about 240 of his surviving poems in them
6
Wenshu Monastery
The largest working Buddhist monastery in the city; a vegetarian canteen, and monks rather than ticket staff
7
Qingyang Palace
The oldest Taoist temple in Chengdu, on a Tang foundation; two bronze goats and a working temple
8
Daci Temple
A Tang monastery now surrounded by the Taikoo Li luxury mall, which was built around it deliberately
9
Zhaojue Temple
A seventh-century monastery next to the zoo; the model for several temples in Japan
10
Yongling Mausoleum
The tomb of Wang Jian, who ruled Shu around 907; the carved musicians round the chamber are the only complete Tang orchestra

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Chengdu →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Chengdu:

Free walking tours in Chengdu

The teahouse city

People’s Park · The Heming teahouse by the lake here is the one every visitor is sent to and it deserves it: bamboo chairs on the ground, a covered gaiwan of jasmine tea refilled from a flask all afternoon for a few yuan, mahjong, and ear cleaners working the tables with a set of steel picks and a tuning fork — a genuine Chengdu trade that exists almost nowhere else. The park also has a monument to the Railway Protection Movement, which is the part nobody reads: in 1911 protests started here against the Qing nationalising the Sichuan railway, troops were pulled out of Hubei to put them down, and that is what made the Wuchang Uprising possible three weeks later — which ended the dynasty.
Kuanzhai Xiangzi · Three parallel lanes — the wide, the narrow and the well — that were built in 1718 as housing for the Manchu garrison that occupied Chengdu after the Qing conquest, which is why the layout is nothing like the rest of the old city. The quarter was derelict by the 1990s, restored between 2003 and 2008, and is now entirely commercial. The useful thing is the comparison: walk the Wide Alley, which is shops, then the Narrow Alley, which is courtyard bars, and then the Well Alley, which still has residents in it.
Qingyang Palace · The oldest Taoist temple in Chengdu, on a Tang foundation, and still a working one with resident priests and a vegetarian canteen. The name means the green goat palace and there are two bronze goats in the courtyard; one of them is a nineteenth-century oddity assembled from the parts of twelve different zodiac animals, so it has a mouse’s ears and a cow’s nose and an ox’s body. Taoism is not a minor presence in Sichuan — it was founded as an organised religion in this province.
Wenshu Monastery · The largest working Buddhist monastery in the city, founded in the Tang and rebuilt in 1697, and the one religious site here that is a religious site first. There are monks, there is chanting at the hours, and there is a vegetarian canteen at the back where a tray of food costs a few yuan and you queue with the congregation. The tea garden in the grounds is the other place in Chengdu to sit for an hour, and it is quieter than the park.
Tianfu Square · The exact centre of the city and it has been for two thousand years — the Shu royal palace stood here, then the imperial examination halls, and the Ming princely palace after that. The palace survived until 1968, when it was demolished to build the exhibition hall and put up the Mao statue that still stands facing south across the square. The square was rebuilt again in 2007 over the metro interchange. Two free museums, the Chengdu Museum and the science museum, are on it.
Anshun Bridge · A covered bridge across the Jin river, and Marco Polo described a great covered bridge at Chengdu in the thirteenth century which is usually taken to be a predecessor of this one. What stands now was built in 2003 to a Qing design, with a restaurant inside it. It is the city’s night photograph and it is worth the walk at nine, but the more interesting thing is the river itself: the Jin and the Fu were open sewers by the 1980s and a clean-up from 1993 won a UN habitat award.

Shu: the kingdom and the bronzes

There are two Shu stories here and they are twelve hundred years apart. The one everybody knows is the Three Kingdoms: after the Han collapsed, Liu Bei declared himself emperor of Shu Han in Chengdu in 221 AD, his chancellor Zhuge Liang ran the state and became the most admired administrator in Chinese history, and the whole episode was turned into a fourteenth-century novel that every Chinese person has read. The one almost nobody knows is older and stranger: a Bronze Age civilisation in this basin around 1200 BC that left enormous bronze masks, a four-metre bronze tree and not one written word, and that has no clear connection to the Yellow River culture that was supposed to be the single cradle of China. Half a day, and the Sanxingdui museum is forty kilometres out and needs its own trip.

Wuhou Shrine · This is the tomb compound of Liu Bei, emperor of Shu Han, and it contains a shrine to his chancellor Zhuge Liang — and the chancellor’s hall is bigger and more visited than the emperor’s. That arrangement exists nowhere else in China and it was not planned: the two were separate sites, and when they were merged in the early fifteenth century the Zhuge Liang shrine was already the famous one. Zhuge Liang is the model Chinese administrator — a strategist, an engineer credited with the wheelbarrow and the repeating crossbow, and the author of a memorial to his emperor that is memorised in schools.
Jinli · The lane beside the shrine, rebuilt in 2004 as a Qing-style snack street, and it is an entirely modern construction on a genuinely old name — Jinli was the brocade-weavers’ street of Shu, and Chengdu’s wealth for a thousand years came from Shu brocade, which is one of the four great Chinese brocades and was traded west along the southern Silk Road. The street is crowded and commercial and it is also the quickest place to eat eight Sichuan snacks in an hour.
Du Fu Thatched Cottage · Du Fu is one of the two greatest poets in Chinese and he came to Chengdu as a refugee in 759, fleeing the An Lushan rebellion with his family, and lived in a thatched cottage by a stream west of the city for about four years. He wrote roughly 240 of his surviving 1,400 poems there and they are the calmest work he did. The cottage is long gone; the compound is a Song-and-later memorial garden on the site, and the poem about the autumn wind tearing the thatch off the roof is set exactly here.
Jinsha Site Museum · In February 2001 a construction crew laying foundations for a housing block in west Chengdu cut into a layer of ivory and jade. What they had hit was the capital of the successor culture to Sanxingdui, around 1000 BC, inside the modern city — and the museum is built directly over the excavation with the pits open. The object to find is a gold foil disc about twelve centimetres across with a sun at its centre and four birds flying round it; it was adopted in 2005 as the national emblem of Chinese cultural heritage.
Sanxingdui Museum · Forty-one kilometres north, and it is the reason to make the trip. A farmer found jade here in 1929; the sacrificial pits were excavated from 1986 and six more were opened between 2019 and 2022. What came out does not look like anything else in Chinese archaeology: bronze masks up to 1.3 metres wide with protruding eyes and no known precedent, a standing figure 2.6 metres high, a bronze tree 3.95 metres tall, and gold foil. There is no writing at all, nobody knows what language they spoke or where they went, and the find forced Chinese archaeology to abandon the idea of a single cradle on the Yellow River.
Yongling Mausoleum · The tomb of Wang Jian, a former bandit who became a Tang general and then declared himself emperor of Former Shu in 907 when the Tang collapsed. The chamber is open and the reason to go down into it is carved round the base of the stone coffin platform: twenty-four musicians and two dancers in relief, each with a different instrument, which is the only complete depiction of a Tang court orchestra anywhere and the primary source for what Tang music was played on.

Dujiangyan and the mountains

Fifty-five kilometres north-west of the city, at the point where the Min river comes out of the mountains onto the plain, there is an engineering work begun in 256 BC that is still doing its job — and everything about Chengdu follows from it. Before it the Min flooded the plain every summer and left it dry in winter. Li Bing, the Qin governor of Shu, cut a channel through a spur of rock without gunpowder by heating and quenching it, built a levee shaped like a fish’s mouth to split the river, and added a spillway that automatically sends more water down the irrigation channel in drought and more down the river in flood. It has no dam. It irrigates something like 670,000 hectares, it is the oldest irrigation system in the world still in use, and it is why the Sichuan basin has been able to feed tens of millions of people for two millennia. A full day with the mountain, and the two are on one ticket route.

The fish mouth levee · The whole system is three works and this is the first: a long levee shaped like a fish’s mouth, built in the middle of the river, that splits the Min into an outer channel which carries the flood and an inner channel which carries the irrigation water. The proportion is not fixed by a gate but by the river bed, which is deeper on the inner side — so in the dry season when the water is low, about sixty per cent goes into the irrigation channel, and in flood, when the water is high, about sixty per cent goes out down the river. It does this without anybody doing anything.
The Bottle Neck channel · The second work, and the hard one: to get the irrigation water onto the plain Li Bing had to cut a twenty-metre channel through a rock spur of Mount Yulei, and gunpowder did not exist. His workers heated the rock with fires and quenched it with water until it cracked, and the cut took eight years. The channel is deliberately narrow — it is a throat, and it limits how much water can get through, which is the third safety device in the system. The name Dujiangyan means the dam that divides the river.
Erwang Temple · The temple of the two kings, on the hillside above the works, dedicated to Li Bing and his son — the local people deified the engineer, which is a very Chinese resolution. The temple holds the maintenance instructions carved in stone: the system requires the river bed to be dredged to a fixed depth every year, and the depth is marked by stone figures set in the channel. That annual dredging has been done for two thousand two hundred years. The temple was badly damaged in the 2008 earthquake, whose epicentre was about twenty kilometres from here, and rebuilt.
The 2008 earthquake · On 12 May 2008 a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck with its epicentre in Wenchuan, about eighty kilometres north-west of Chengdu, and killed around 87,000 people. Dujiangyan town lost thousands, and a large proportion of the dead across the region were schoolchildren in buildings that collapsed while older buildings next to them stood — which produced a public campaign by bereaved parents over construction standards that the state suppressed. The irrigation works themselves survived almost undamaged, which the local reaction took as the point.
Mount Qingcheng · Sixteen kilometres from the irrigation works and listed by UNESCO with it, because the two are one cultural landscape. In 142 AD a man named Zhang Daoling, living on this mountain, had a vision and founded the Way of the Celestial Masters — the first organised Taoist church, with a priesthood, a liturgy and a tax in rice. Taoism as an institution starts here. The front mountain is a two-hour climb past working temples with a cable car option; the back mountain is a full day and much emptier.
Dujiangyan Panda Base · Fifty-five kilometres from the city and the better of the two panda centres, for one reason: it was built after 2008 to take the animals evacuated from Wolong when the earthquake destroyed that reserve, and it is a rehabilitation and retirement centre rather than a public attraction, so the enclosures are larger and the visitor numbers are a fraction. Around eighteen hundred giant pandas live in the wild, about eighty per cent of them in Sichuan, and the whole species occupies six mountain ranges within a few hours of this spot.

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Getting to Chengdu and getting around

Tianfu International Airport · Fifty-four kilometres south-east, opened 2021; Chengdu is one of three mainland cities with two airports
Shuangliu Airport · The older airport sixteen kilometres south-west, now mostly domestic; the metro reaches both
Chengdu East Railway Station · The bullet trains: Xi’an in three and a half hours, Chongqing in one and a quarter
Chengdu Railway Station · The old north station; the sleeper to Lhasa leaves from here and takes about thirty-six hours
Tianfu Square Station · Lines 1 and 2 cross under the central square; the metro opened in 2010 and now runs about 600 kilometres
Xinnanmen Bus Station · The tourist bus station: Leshan, Emei, Jiuzhaigou and the ancient towns all leave from here
Chadianzi Bus Station · The north-west terminal and the one for Dujiangyan, Qingcheng and the panda reserves

Cheap eats in Chengdu

Sichuan food is not simply hot, and the distinction is the whole thing: there are two separate sensations and the local word for the combination is mala. La is chilli heat, which arrived from the Americas via the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and is therefore new. Ma is numbness, and it comes from Sichuan pepper — which is not a pepper at all but the dried husk of a prickly-ash berry, native to this region, and the compound in it makes the nerves in your lips fire at about fifty times a second. The numbing is the old half of the cuisine and the chilli is the recent addition. Ten to forty yuan a dish. If you cannot take it, the phrase is bu yao la.

Mapo doufu · Tofu in a dark chilli and bean sauce with minced beef; three dollars, and it must be numbing
Hotpot · A pot of beef tallow, chilli and Sichuan pepper; eight dollars a head, and the sesame dip is yours to mix
Chuanchuan xiang · Hotpot on skewers, paid for by the stick; two dollars a handful and it is the student version
Dan dan mian · A small bowl of noodles with minced pork, preserved vegetable and chilli oil; a dollar, and you mix it
Fuqi feipian · Cold sliced beef offal in chilli oil; three dollars, and the name means husband-and-wife slices
Zhong dumplings and Long chaoshou · Two century-old snack shops, both named after their founders; two dollars a plate
Tianshui mian · Thick noodles in sweet soy and chilli; a dollar, and the sweetness is the point
Bang bang chicken · Shredded cold chicken in sesame and chilli; the name is the stick used to beat the meat loose
Jianshe Road night market · The local food street in the east; it does not open before six and there is no English
Teahouse tea · A covered gaiwan of jasmine, refilled all afternoon for a few yuan; the real Chengdu institution

Museums in Chengdu

Chengdu has an unusual museum situation: the state museums are free and good, and two of the best are built directly over the holes the objects came out of — Jinsha inside the city and Sanxingdui forty kilometres north. Those two between them hold a Bronze Age civilisation nobody had heard of until 1986, with no writing and no clear ancestry, and they changed the official account of where Chinese civilisation began. Everything is booked and paid through apps now, which needs setting up before you fly, and most Western apps are blocked.

Sanxingdui Museum · Forty-one kilometres north; 72 yuan, pre-booking compulsory, and it needs its own half day
Jinsha Site Museum · Inside the city, found by builders in 2001; the museum is built over the open pits
Sichuan Museum · Free, by the Du Fu cottage; the Tibetan Buddhist and the Zhang Daqian galleries are the two to see
Chengdu Museum · Free, on Tianfu Square, and the shadow puppet collection on the top floor is the largest in China
Yongling Mausoleum · The only complete carved Tang court orchestra anywhere; twenty-four musicians round the coffin platform
Jianchuan Museum Cluster · Thirty private museums at Anren, forty-six kilometres out; the war and Cultural Revolution halls are unusual
Sichuan University Museum · A 1914 university collection; the Tibetan and Yi ethnographic rooms are the reason to go
Shu Brocade Museum · A working workshop on Qing-pattern looms; the weaving takes two people and a day for a few centimetres

Holy places in Chengdu

Taoism was founded as an organised religion in this province: in 142 AD a man on Mount Qingcheng, fifty kilometres from Chengdu, declared that he had received a revelation and set up a church with a priesthood, a liturgy and a tithe paid in rice. That is the Way of the Celestial Masters, and everything institutional in Taoism descends from it. Alongside it the city has Tang Buddhist monasteries that are genuinely working, a deified hydraulic engineer with his own temple, and the Chinese habit of enshrining useful people. Shoes stay on, incense is bought at the gate, and the vegetarian canteens are open to anyone.

Mount Qingcheng · Where Taoism became a religion in 142 AD; the front mountain is two hours and has a cable car
Qingyang Palace · The oldest Taoist temple in the city, with resident priests and a vegetarian canteen
Wenshu Monastery · The main working Buddhist monastery; chanting on the hour and a tray of food for a few yuan
Daci Temple · A Tang monastery inside a luxury mall; Xuanzang took his vows here before walking to India
Zhaojue Temple · A seventh-century monastery by the zoo, and the architectural model for several Japanese temples
Erwang Temple, Dujiangyan · The temple to the engineer who built the irrigation works; the maintenance rules are carved in its stones
Leshan Giant Buddha · Seventy-one metres, carved 713–803, at the confluence of three rivers; a boat gives the better view
Mount Emei · One of the four sacred Buddhist mountains, 3,099 metres; two days if you walk it

Nature and day trips near Chengdu

The Sichuan basin is a bowl about two hundred and fifty kilometres across, ringed by mountains on every side, and that shape is why Chengdu is what it is: the mountains trap humidity, so it is overcast most of the year and the city has one of the lowest sunshine totals in China; they also kept invaders out and species in. Within a few hours west the land rises to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and that gradient — from six hundred metres to over six thousand in a hundred kilometres — is the reason this is one of the most biodiverse temperate regions on earth, and the reason the pandas are here.

Giant Panda Breeding Base · Ten kilometres north; be there at seven thirty, because they sleep from about ten
Dujiangyan · The oldest irrigation system in the world still in use; begun 256 BC and it has no dam
Wolong Nature Reserve · Ninety-five kilometres north-west; the original panda reserve, wrecked in 2008 and rebuilt
Bifengxia · A hundred and eighteen kilometres; a waterfall gorge and the base the Wolong pandas were moved to
Qingcheng back mountain · A full day of waterfalls and ladders rather than temples; a tenth of the front mountain’s crowd
Tazishan Park · A hill park in the east with a nine-storey pagoda; free, local, and the one high point in the city

Things to do in Chengdu with kids

Chengdu is the easiest major Chinese city with children and the reason is obvious: the pandas. Beyond that it is flat, the metro is cheap and clean, and the parks are free and full of local families. Three things to plan around. The panda base must be done at opening, because the animals sleep from mid-morning. Payment is by phone app and needs setting up before you fly. And almost everything hot on a menu is genuinely hot — the phrase for no chilli is bu yao la, and plain noodles and dumplings are always available.

Panda Breeding Base · At opening, seven thirty; 55 yuan booked in your own name, and the shuttle bus inside is a further 30
Chengdu Zoo · Cheap, central and it also has pandas; the one that does not need booking weeks ahead
Global Center · The largest building in the world by floor area, with an indoor beach and an artificial sun
Sichuan Science and Technology Museum · Free, on Tianfu Square, hands-on and built for children; closed Mondays
Jiaozi Park · A lake and a greenway under the glass towers of the new district; bikes and space to run
Sansheng Flower Village · Twelve kilometres east; nurseries, farm restaurants and strawberry picking in spring

Nightlife in Chengdu

Chengdu has the strongest independent music scene in western China and a reputation as the most relaxed city in the country, and both show up at night. The scene is in the south — Yulin and Tongzilin, two low-rise neighbourhoods of 1980s housing blocks with bars and venues in the ground floors — rather than in the malls. There is also the Sichuan opera, which is worth one evening for one trick in it. The metro stops around eleven, taxis after that need an app, and the late food streets run to two or three.

Sichuan opera and face-changing · Go for bian lian, the face-changing; the method is a legally protected secret
Yulin · The city’s own music and bar neighbourhood; low-rise, cheap and nothing like the malls
Tongzilin · Next to Yulin; coffee by day, wine bars by night, and independent shops in between
Lan Kwai Fong · The riverside club strip, named after the Hong Kong original; loud, expensive and not local
Jianshe Road · The late night market; skewers, cold noodles and crayfish until two in the morning
Anshun Bridge at night · Lit from dusk and the city’s night photograph; walk the river from here to Hejiangting

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Frequently asked questions about Chengdu

What is there to see in Chengdu?

The top sights in Chengdu are Wuhou Shrine, Jinsha Site Museum and Sichuan Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Chengdu?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Chengdu without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Chengdu?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Chengdu, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The teahouse city.

How do you get to Chengdu and get around?

The main ways are Tianfu International Airport, Shuangliu Airport and Chengdu East Railway Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Chengdu, and for how much?

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