To me, it is a city of almosts. I had intended to visit Chengdu twenty-one years ago, during a meandering bout of hard travel throughout southwest China. I can't recall now exactly why I gave it a skip, but I do remember leaving behind the Big Buddhas in Leshan and taking a night bus to Chongqing, nowhere near the 30 million it hosts today, but even then shaped like a massive stadium, the houses and buildings rising up all four hillsides away from the Yangtze at the bottom. The bus left me off beside those waters, and if memory serves, within 30 minutes of arriving, I was shuffled aboard a boat that pulled away toward the pre-flooded Three Gorges. Chengdu, a mere hundred kilometers away, was left behind.
And I nearly missed it this time too. A week before my direct flight was to depart, Kansai Airport was left both flooded and isolated by a massive typhoon. A reroute through Nagoya and Singapore did get me there finally, where my first action was to down a sumptuous and fiery meal in the Ritz, as the sommelier plied me with the fruits of China's burgeoning wine industry, most of it complimentary, as reward for my oenological enthusiasm. I was a long way from my backpacker roots.
When one thinks of Chengdu, one thinks of pandas, and that indeed was our first focus the following morning. I'd intended to visit the Dujiangyan Breeding Center which was about an hour from town, partly because it sat at the foot of Qingcheng Shan, supposed birthplace of Taoism, and partly to avoid the Chengdu Panda Base which is swamped with 40,000 visitors a day. But the guide we'd hired said that it would be an all day affair and we'd have no time to see any other sights in the city proper. So we compromised with a early morning visit just as the local center was opening, which proved fairly quiet.
Being China, I wasn't expecting much in the way of habitat, but each animal had lavish grounds, green and spacious. It turns out that pandas are odd animals, with extremely finicky eating and mating habits, and as they are prone to cannibalizing their young, it is a wonder that they still survive at all. These centers not only ensure this survival, but almost seem to train them for an eventual release into the wild. Weird creatures, whose newborns are adorable, laying five to a crib and splayed out on their bellies like drunken kittens.
Due to the early start we could navigate the city at a leisurely pace, under skies claustrophobically representative of a perpetually drizzly city. The weather cut us off somehow, and as on the flights in and out, I got no look at the surroundings. I knew there were mountains around, but I never saw them. It was like being in a snowglobe, albeit one with murky glass.
Being ethnically Chinese herself, LYL has little interest in the religion, so I limited our stops to one Buddhist and Taoist temple each. And both Wenshu Temple and Wuhouci proved to be what they usually are, all jagged angles in black and red, with ornate trellis work, spiraling incense cones hanging from the rafters, and circular doorways through earthen walls towered over by bamboo. I was surprised by the large number of worshipers, far more than I saw in 1997, when the scars of the Cultural Revolution still gaped wide.
Wuhouci had nice grounds for strolling, which fed eventually onto the picturesque Zhangwu street, lined with shops preparing food or traditional crafts. I enjoyed it for it fulfilled by fantasies of Qing Dynasty familiar to me from old kung fu films. (But in hindsight I feel a bit hypocritical, for it was as much a museum piece as Kyoto, a point of contention I have with the latter city. And both places were equally overrun with the burgeoning Chinese middle-class.) We wandered the maze of streets, eyeing the steaming stalls, and though I am usually pretty adventurous when it comes to food, I couldn't bring myself to try skewered centipede or scorpion, or gnaw upon a grilled rabbit head. (Little wonder that after my 1997 visit, I turned vegetarian for the next seven years.) I deferred to LYL to choose our lunch, which we enjoyed upon benches in front of Chengdu's first craft beer joint.
Besides the food, another facet of Chinese culture that my wife is interested in is literature. The grounds of T'ang poet Tu Fu were lush and green, his old cottage completely surrounded by jungle and ponds. Wandering the paths, it was easy to understand the role of nature in his poems, a trait he shares with Basho, with whom he is often compared. At one corner of the gardens is a hall of literature, with life-size figures representing a literary tradition that in itself is larger than life.
Our final stop, the paired Kuan and Zhai Alleys were a bit too far gone along the tourist track, with little of the fake "authenticity" of the earlier Zhangwu. Too many flashy shops, too many western cafes, the money here spent in larger quantities. It was then that I thought it was a shame I hadn't seen this place twenty years before, when it probably had been authentic. I had also lost out on visiting a restaurant that I'd long wanted to visit since hearing about it in 1997. Upon entering, a doctor would take your pulse then tell the waiter what it was you'd dine upon, as a means of remedying out-of-whack qi. I was coached that it was best not to know what you'd be eating until after you finished, as it was literally parts unknown. Sadly, such places don't appear to exist anymore in the modern China.
But what I did get this visit was time in an attractive city, along wide boulevards not overly crowded and lined with copious green. The residents were dressed more brightly than they had been in 1997, and adorned with the usual ubiquitous accessories and gadgets. They were walking much more quickly too, beneath billboards and signs for the usual suspects of international logos. This no-nonsense approach to rapid growth was best represented by the pen and notepad sitting beside the toilet of our hotel room. One never knew where next the money-making idea might come from, so best be prepared for when it did.
The heights of our room also revealed a skyline of art-deco high-rises straight out of Manhattan, standing alongside the brownstones of Brooklyn. This condensed tribute to New York was betrayed only by the white marble statue of Mao towering above the city's central square. Beyond the chairman was the University, its complicated geometry of traditional Chinese buildings uniquely built of brick, though topped with the usual octagonal tiled roofs. I found Chengdu to be the most attractive of China's cities.
The Chinese government has designated Chengdu to be a Beijing of the west, and as such it is growing apace. But unlike an earlier Shanghai, this wasn't accompanied by a forest of cranes, and it was only after dark that you'd notice the hulking shells of as-yet unfinished towers. Such a far cry from twenty years ago, with the bustle, and the filth, and the noise, and every man over a certain age still in a Mao suit. Today's Chengdu hardly felt like China at all.
On the turntable: Jefferson Airplane, "Live at the Fillmore East"
On the nighttable: W. Somerset Maugham, "In Human Bondage"
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