I couldn’t have wished for better weather today, by which I mean it was around 23°C and cloudy. The ideal weather to be out and about!
Today’s first plan was to spend Sunday morning in the park… in People’s Park! I think every Chinese city has a People’s Park or People’s Square, and Chengdu’s is this giant green space in the middle of the city that is famous especially for being home to He Ming Teahouse, a traditional teahouse the kinds of which would have hosted Sichuan opera shows like the one we saw yesterday.
The first thing that impressed me upon walking into the park was the lush greenery: I love parks or squares where the trees grow so high or so dense that you can forget you’re in the middle of a teeming metropolis. (In my opinion, that is what Paris is missing, and what London does so well with squares like Russell Square, not to mention the proper parks themselves). Here the shrubbery and the trees made some corners feel like a jungle or a rainforest, and there’s also a beautiful lake with its requisite bridge and lotus flowers.
We soon came across He Ming Teahouse, and let me tell you, even though I’d seen pictures and even videos of it before, I wasn’t prepared for how HUGE it is in real life. What you see in this picture, just imagine it going on and on and on. I thought of maybe having some tea here to complete the experience, but to be honest in the moment it didn’t feel very inviting, because of how noisy and cramped it was, even though it was a cheerful kind of crowded with people playing cards, absent-mindedly eating sunflower seeds, or just people-watching us just like we were people-watching them.
Even more than the scenery, even more than the teahouse, the best part of visiting People’s Park in the morning was to immerse of ourselves in the mundane life of the people of Chengdu. There were groups of people practicing ballroom dancing, across the pond I saw an old man doing tai chi and a woman doing stretches, middle-aged women doing a complicated dance with rackets and balls, and my favorite, a group of four men and women of a certain age doing absolutely badass tai chi with swords! Two of them were so good that they seemed plucked right out of a martial arts movie where they would teach their young apprentice what’s what.
Another cool moment was that we happened to walk across a choir, a full-blown choir with a four-person orchestra giving a performance for those of us who were passing by. (The banner read something along the lines of “Chengdu People’s Park Joyful Sundays Choir”). People around me sometimes joined in, a sign that the songs were traditional or popular enough for random people to sing along.
At one point we also found ourselves in the Romance Area, a big space where parents hang their daughters’ CV to find suitable husbands for them. I’d heard about this but I was still surprised it still happens to this day.
This was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had all trip, because rather than a performance for tourists it was about us meeting people where they’re at, being a guest in their park. We definitely got a lot of stares, even though I saw several other Westerners milling about too, but people here look at us with amusement rather than mistrust or annoyance.
When we were satisfied of our stroll, we hopped on another Didi (Chengdu has a great metro network, by the way, which I think didn’t exist before 2014 but now has more kilometers than London’s, but because our hotel is way outside the center we haven’t got to use it at all) to go to Wenshu Monastery, in the north side of town.
I know a lot of people complain about getting “templed out” when traveling through Japan, Thailand or China; they say that once you’ve seen one Buddhist temple you’ve seen them all. I guess I get where they’re coming from, but for me the famous temples became famous because they have something unique about them and I enjoy seeing the variety.
In the case of Wenshu, its main characteristic on the outside is that it is surrounded by clean red walls with golden characters on them, which makes it a very photogenic spot. Clearly some of these characters are either viral or they mean something beneficial, because there were two long queues of people waiting to take their picture with them, while the characters right next to them were free.
The temple itself is also free to enter, by the way, and the inside is beautiful too. I have by now started to recognize the style of Chinese temples, as opposed to Korean or Japanese temples, and this one’s a great example, with its upturned eaves and the intricate details of the tiles and beams.
The temple is dedicated to the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri, although here too they have a statue of Guanyin with 36 arms (up from the 24 we’ve seen elsewhere; not even the incarnation of mercy is safe from inflation). The grounds were pretty quiet, with only a few people praying and about the same amount of tourists walking around.
After this short but interesting visit, we took off for lunch. I had it in my to-do list to eat at Mawangzi, a one Michelin star restaurant that a friend had recommended to me, but when we got there they said: sorry, no more tables. And I was like: okay? But what is the wait? Can we get in line? And they explained: no, they close at 14:00 (it was shortly past noon) and they already have all the customers they can serve in that time. As far as I know they do not take reservations, so that must mean that people came in person or via WeChat and took a number on the waiting list!
Thankfully, I have like a million saved restaurants in my Amap, enough to last me many trips over, so we walked just ten minutes to a weirdly space-themed grilled fish restaurant. Its most popular dish is an extra spicy fish that comes literally -and I do mean in the literal sense- covered in chili peppers. I admit I was curious, but knowing that in reality that recipe might send me to an early grave, I ordered the low spice one instead. It arrived in a big pan that continued cooking on a hot plate on our table, and it wasn’t covered in chili but in green and red peppers and garlic. It was delicious, although eating a full fish with chopsticks is still a challenge.
So that was our morning done! It was time now for the big plan of the day: the Panda Base! Like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, or the Terracotta Army, this is one of those attractions that get massively crowded so everyone tells you to be there at opening time (some people also say to go to the Panda Valley in Dujiangyan, but that’s way too far out for the time we have). So once again I decided to risk it all on my big scientific discovery of this trip: if all the group tours are there at 11, and all the Western tourists who watch YouTube videos are there at 8, who’s there in the afternoon?
Well… it was another success! When we arrived somewhere past two in the afternoon, the ticketing and queue area were completely empty, and once again we were able to walk right through the massive entrance without waiting in line for a single minute. I need to patent this strategy! Books have been written with less!
After getting inside, the next problem is that the Panda Base (whose full official name, by the way, is “Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base”, but I don’t have time to be calling it that) is MASSIVE. Each distinct area inside it would make a potential visit in and of itself, and there are like four or five such areas, so I can see how some people could arrive in the morning and stay all day.
I, on the other hand, didn’t really care about “beating the game” and getting to see all the nooks and crannies of the park. I wanted to see giant pandas, and I wanted to see red pandas, wherever they were!
In the end we stayed fully within the first area near the South Gate, but even that was quite a workout. There are different “villas” where one may (or may not) see pandas, depending on whether they’re outside eating or inside sleeping, but once you get to a villa it’s more of a series of five or six outdoors sections that you walk around.
I was afraid we might have come all this way and end up not seeing any pandas, but before I saw any I knew the pandas were there because of the crowds gathering wherever one might be visible. The first one I saw was a big pandas, sitting down, busy munching on a bamboo stick while we all looked.
It got hot and sunny somewhere along the way, but we soldiered on and took a detour whenever we saw a lot of people with their phones out, and saw more giant pandas, some lounging about, some lazily sleeping, some teaching their cubs how to climb trees!
Following the route to the Sun Nursery, where the youngest pandas can be seen, organically drew us closer to the red panda enclosure. I was also excited about this part, because I’d never seen a red panda in person.
Well, they are just as adorable in the flesh as they are in your Instagram feed. We saw some playing with a caretaker, one of them getting its head stuck inside a wicker basket, then several of them climbing bamboo trees or sneaking around the forest on ground level, their fluffy tails bouncing behind them. We even saw one just lounging nonchalantly on a bamboo branch, paying us no heed as we all took its picture.
We made it back to the South Gate shortly before closing time at 17:00. Someone who would want to visit the entire park would definitely not have time with my 1PM hack: we only saw one section and even then we didn’t have much time to spare. Myself, I wanted to see the pandas, and spend time looking at them, and get to see them eat or play or just go about their day, so for me this was the perfect visit. I would much rather allocate just a couple of hours for this and get to enjoy more of Chengdu in the morning than spend an entire day just on this visit.
Just one thing left to do: dinner! I had one ace left up my sleeve, which is that Ma Wang Zi, the Michelin star restaurant I tried for lunch, happens to have a second branch in a mall near the hotel. So I thought, let’s try that one, and if we also get turned away, at least we’ll be in a mall where there are sure to be a bunch of other restaurants around.
When the Didi dropped us off at an impossibly tasteful outdoors space and I saw several groups of people milling about looking at their phones, I feared the worst: they must all be waiting for a table! But lo and behold, when we asked if they had any free table, they waved us straight in!
The place is worth the hype: beautiful decor, a varied and affordable menu, attentive service… I ended up ordering mapo tofu again, but this one was completely different from the one at Mixun: this one had mala, or the numbing and spicy flavors. As with other times I’ve had mala in Tokyo, I start by thinking: will I even be able to tell the spices apart? And then I began to feel my tongue tingling, and then the tingling spread through my mouth like I had anesthesia at the dentist’s. It’s a very weird sensation, but enjoyable!
(It also was traditionally spicy, by the way. The moment I put the first cube of tofu in my mouth, my nose began to run)
Then, as if that wasn’t a cool enough send off for our time in Chengdu, on the way out we turned the corner and ran into the Twin Towers (technically the Tianfu Financial Center), two stylized towers that at night become illuminated with colorful animations, basically turning two skyscrapers into screens.
We’ve had traditional tea houses, ancient temples, pandas, world class cuisine, and sci-fi landscapes all in one day! What more could one ask for?
This Is A Lake 