Du Fu Cottage, Huanhuaxi and Jinsha

The garden-shrine to China's most loved poet: Du Fu fled the An Lushan rebellion and lived on this creek bank from 759 to 765, in a thatched hut a friend helped him build, and wrote some 240 poems here — the ones about the spring rain, the hut's roof torn off by the autumn wind, the wish for 'ten thousand rooms to shelter the poor scholars of the world'. What stands is a Ming-and-Qing memorial garden of halls, bamboo, red-walled paths and a reconstructed hut on 300 mu, run as a national first-grade museum. ¥50 (¥25 for students and children), real-name tickets 14 days ahead on the museum's WeChat official account with a ticket window for anyone without a Chinese ID card, free Chinese / English audio on its WeChat official account, paid English audio from ¥18 and human guides in foreign languages. For a visitor who has never read Du Fu it is a beautiful garden; read three poems on the train and it becomes the reason you came.

The provincial museum, free, on the edge of Huanhuaxi Park a few minutes from Du Fu Cottage: Han-dynasty picture bricks and the pottery of Sichuan's tomb culture, a Tibetan Buddhist hall, and Zhang Daqian's Dunhuang copies — the painter's 1940s facsimiles of the cave murals, the museum's signature. Free with a real-name booking up to seven days ahead on the museum's WeChat official account, capped at 10,000 a day, closed Mondays; the museum's website loads only intermittently from outside China, and the caps and cancellation terms here come from local listings. The natural indoor hour between the cottage and the park.

The city's brocade museum in the old Chengdu Brocade Factory on the creek east of Du Fu Cottage: two floors on Shu brocade and Shu embroidery — the weaving that gave the city its name 'Brocade City' and Zhuge Liang his war chest — with a working weaving hall where the metre-high Qing-style wooden 'great flower-tower' looms are operated by hand, two weavers to a loom, one on top pulling the pattern threads. Free, but since 1 July 2025 by booking on the museum's WeChat official account (museum notice); open daily 9:30-18:30 (museum website), with a shop that is the reliable place to buy the real thing.

The big free park outside Du Fu Cottage's north gate (444 mu, billed at its 2003 opening as the largest free park inside the Second Ring), laid out in 2003 around a lake (Canglang), a wooded hill (Wanshu) and an egret island (Bailuzhou), with the 'Poetry Avenue' of engraved verses running down its spine and the creek that gave the poet his best lines along its edge. Open early to late (the listings say 6:00-22:00), no gate procedure, and the Sichuan Museum on its north-east corner. It is the 'walk after the poems' — and, for anyone who will not pay ¥50 for the cottage, the free version of the same landscape.

Where Chengdu's story starts: a 3,000-year-old capital of the ancient Shu kingdom found under a building site in 2001, with the gold Sun-Bird disc that became China's cultural-heritage emblem and the city's own logo. It is also the one big museum in Chengdu you cannot visit this year: the whole site — park, excavation hall and exhibition hall — is closed from 5 December 2025 to 30 April 2027 for its first full renovation since opening (museum notice). The ancient-Shu story is at Sanxingdui, 40 km north, until then. This entry exists so you do not cross town to a locked gate.

The biggest antiques-and-curios market in south-west China, on the creek between Qingyang Palace and Du Fu Cottage, across the road from the Sichuan Museum. It is an arcade of dealers' shops open daily — porcelain, jade, coins, Tibetan pieces, Cultural Revolution paper, brushes and ink — with the street market on Sundays (and a Wednesday-and-Sunday old-books-and-paintings fair) when the stalls spill onto the pavements. Free to wander, priced to haggle, and mostly reproductions unless you know what you are looking at. The pleasure is the browsing; the rule is to assume nothing is old until proven, and to ask whether anything you buy needs an export permit.

A whole city block turned into one building: Liu Jiakun's 2015 West Village is a five-storey ring of concrete and bamboo around a courtyard the size of several football pitches, with a running track that climbs the roof and public ramps you can walk from street to sky. In 2025 Liu became the second Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, after Wang Shu in 2012, and the jury's citation — 'a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape and a remarkable public space' — reads like a description of this place. Free, open-sided, full of cafés, sports courts and studios: for anyone who cares about architecture it is the first stop in Chengdu; for everyone else it is a good hour of walking on a roof.

The one above-ground imperial tomb in China you can walk into: Wang Jian, a soldier who made himself emperor of Former Shu, died in 918 and was buried in a brick-vaulted chamber built above ground under a mound, excavated in 1942-43 and open since. You stand inside the vault, in front of the stone coffin platform whose sides carry the 24 musicians (the only complete carved orchestra of the Tang court, every instrument identifiable), and the seated statue of Wang Jian himself, the only surviving portrait sculpture of a Chinese emperor. ¥20 for the tomb, the garden around it free and open early to late. Almost no foreign visitor has heard of it; Metro Line 2 stops 700 m away.