Wuhou Shrine, Jinli and Huaxiba

The Three Kingdoms in one walled garden: the only temple in China where a ruler and his minister are enshrined together (Liu Bei, founder of Shu Han, and Zhuge Liang, the strategist every Chinese schoolchild and every 'Dynasty Warriors' player knows), built beside Liu Bei's tomb (the Huiling, AD 223) and rebuilt in its present form in 1672. Halls of painted clay generals, the Tang stele of 809, the Three Loyalties temple, and the tomb mound under old cypresses, with the Jinli folk street the museum built along its east wall. ¥50, real-name tickets sold 14 days ahead on the museum's own site and WeChat official account, with passports explicitly accepted, and, in 2026, extended hours 8:30-18:30 from May to early October. If you know one Chinese story, it is this one; if you know none, the museum's English audio guide is the place to learn it.

The folk street the Wuhou Shrine Museum built along its own east wall and opened in October 2004: 550 metres of late-Qing-style shopfronts (an extension added in 2009) with lanterns, snack counters, a teahouse stage with face-changing, shadow puppets and the sugar-painters and 'three cannons' rice-ball throwers the museum lists as its intangible heritage. Free, open to the street, and the easiest place in the city to taste ten Sichuan snacks in an hour — at prices set for tourists, in a crowd from 10:30 to closing. 'Worship at Wuhou, soak in Jinli' is the museum's own slogan; do it in that order.

The free garden on the south bank of the Huanhua creek between Qingyang Palace and Wuhou Shrine, laid out around Sichuan-style bonsai: a ginkgo square, a bonsai garden, an osmanthus grove, boat pavilions — and Huiyuan, a rebuilt Chengdu courtyard house that recreates the childhood home of the novelist Ba Jin ('Family'), whose real house a few streets away is gone. Cross the river from Qintai Road and you are in it; walk south-east and Wuhou Shrine is fifteen minutes. A bridge between two districts more than a sight, and the city's best free bonsai.

The finest missionary-era campus in western China: West China Union University, founded in 1910 by five British, American and Canadian mission boards, laid out by the English Quaker architect Fred Rowntree in a Chinese-roofs-on-Western-plans style — the 1925 Clock Tower (the Coles memorial, rebuilt above its base in 1954) and a dozen halls now grouped as a national key heritage site (2013). Today it is Sichuan University's Huaxi campus and the West China Hospital complex, one of the largest hospitals in the country: an open, working campus and medical city rather than a museum, with the old buildings standing among it. Come for the architecture and the atmosphere of a university that produced China's first dental school; the museums inside need booking.

The 1941 mausoleum of Liu Xiang, the warlord-governor of Sichuan who died leading his armies against Japan in 1938, designed by the great Republican architect Yang Tingbao as a 130-mu axial garden — memorial arch, gate of loyalty, pavilions, twin halls and the tomb mound — and turned into the city's Nanjiao ('southern suburb') Park in 1953. Since 2003 it has been the Wuhou Shrine Museum's 'West Zone' but stays free and open as a park: a provincial heritage site (2007) where old men play cards under the cypresses next to the only Republican-era state mausoleum most visitors will ever see. Enter from the shrine's west side or from the First Ring Road.

The university museum at the east edge of the Tibetan quarter: four halls of the material culture of south-west China's minority peoples (a Tibetan religious-art hall, a Tibetan mask hall, a Gesar-epic hall and a south-west minorities hall), with over 10,000 objects from thirty-odd peoples of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Tibet and beyond. It is the museum version of the street outside, and the one place in the district that explains that Sichuan is Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and Hui as well as Han. Free, but open to the public only two afternoons a week (Tuesday and Thursday 14:00-17:00, register with ID at the door), closed weekends, holidays and vacations. Foreign visitors must be approved in advance by two university offices, so it is not a walk-in for a passport holder.

Two hundred metres from Jinli's south mouth the shop signs switch to Tibetan script: Wuhouci Hengjie and the streets around it are Chengdu's 'little Lhasa' — monastery-supply shops selling butter lamps, prayer flags and monks' robes, Khampa traders in felt hats, butter-tea and yak-meat restaurants, and the Tibet and Ganzi liaison offices that anchored the community here. Media put the quarter at 340-odd Tibetan-run businesses and over a million Tibetan visitors a year for medical care, family and errands. It is a living neighbourhood, not a sight: no gate, no tickets, no signage in English, and a camera etiquette that matters more than anywhere else in this district.