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PASSAGE: Chengdu

China · 8 stories · Two days

Sichuan taken slowly: bamboo chairs and ear cleaners in People's Park, hukou status pinned to an umbrella, a Hakka town resettled here three centuries ago, and the Sichuan end of the Tea Horse Road.

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Stories along the way

  1. 1. Bamboo Chairs and Hot WaterHeming is Chengdu's answer to the Temple of Heaven: an entire social world held in bamboo chairs under the trees. Tea gets topped up from a long-spouted kettle, ear-cleaning…
  2. 2. Résumés on UmbrellasA few minutes from the teahouse, parents hang their adult children's details on open umbrellas and lengths of string: age, height, income, education — and hukou status, the…
  3. 3. Golden Hour on Old WallsThree restored Qing-dynasty lanes, best walked as the light drops and the day crowds thin out. The grey brick takes the low sun beautifully, lanterns come on one by one, and the…
  4. 4. People and Nature, Woven TogetherArrive at opening and the pandas are actually awake — feeding, climbing, tumbling off things — before the crowds and the heat settle in. The wider story here is not just the…
  5. 5. Incense and TeaWenshu is a working Buddhist monastery, not a museum: incense smoke drifts across the courtyards, elderly worshippers bow at each hall in turn, and monks move through on their own…
  6. 6. Three Hundred Years of HakkaLuodai was founded by Hakka families resettled into Sichuan under the Qing-era Huguang Tian Sichuan programme, when the province was repopulated after war and famine emptied it.…
  7. 7. Where the Family Histories LiveStep off the restored main street and the town changes character within about fifty metres. Residential lanes, courtyard houses, washing lines, an old couple shelling beans in a…
  8. 8. The Tea Horse RoadBeside the Wuhou Shrine runs the Sichuan end of the ancient Tea Horse Road — the caravan network that carried compressed tea west into Tibet and brought horses back the other way.…