Why these three belong on one day
They sit within a few kilometres of each other in the western part of the city, and they are three different answers to the same question - what does Chengdu remember? The first is a bronze-age capital that vanished so completely that its existence had to be rediscovered from the ground. The second is a thatched house a poet lived in for less than four years and which the city has been rebuilding for eleven centuries. The third is a temple that has been in continuous use for so long that its founding is a legend rather than a date. Taken in this order the day runs backwards through time, which is the way the archaeology is easiest to follow.
Morning - Jinsha
The Jinsha site was found in February 2001, on a building site, and it turned out to be the political centre of the Shu kingdom during the late Shang and Western Zhou periods - roughly the twelfth to the seventh century BC - spread over about five square kilometres. The excavation hall stands over the sacrificial area itself, where more than sixty separate deposits were uncovered, and the collection runs to over six thousand objects, among them ivory by the tonne and a great deal of gold. The museum opened in April 2007.
One object carries the day for most visitors. The Gold Sun and Immortal Birds ornament is a disc 12.53 centimetres across, 5.29 centimetres across the inner opening and two-tenths of a millimetre thick, cut with four birds circling a twelve-rayed sun. In 2005 it was adopted as the emblem of China's cultural heritage. We spend the morning on the gold, the jade and the ivory, and on the harder question the site raises: this is the same culture as Sanxingdui, forty kilometres north, and it has left no readable writing at all.
Lunch
A Chengdu lunch, kept simple so that the afternoon is unhurried.
Afternoon - the Du Fu Cottage
Du Fu came to Chengdu in the winter of 759, fleeing the An Lushan rebellion, and built a thatched house by the Huanhua Stream in the spring of the following year. He lived in it for three years and nine months and wrote more than two hundred and forty poems there, which is why a mud-and-thatch cottage is now a national monument. He left in 765; the house collapsed; a poet named Wei Zhuang found the site at the end of the Tang and rebuilt the cottage on it.
What you walk through now is the result of two great rebuilds, in 1500 and in 1811, which between them fixed the plan: screen wall, gate, the hall of officials, the hall of poetry, the wicker gate, the shrine. The cottage itself was reconstructed in 1997 on the evidence of the poems; a Tang-period dwelling site excavated in 2001 is displayed beside it. The Hall of Great Refinement holds the largest inlaid lacquer mural in China and twelve statues of poets - Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Wang Wei, Su Shi, Li Qingzhao, Lu You and others - and the garden is a fine example of the West Sichuan tradition, timber frame and all. Tickets 50 yuan.
Late afternoon - Qingyang Palace
Qingyang is a working Taoist temple, not a museum, and that is the reason to end the day here. The traditional account takes its origin back to the Zhou, to a meeting between Laozi and the keeper of the pass, Yin Xi; the documented story begins in 881, when the Tang emperor Xizong took refuge in Shu from the Huang Chao rebellion and used the place as a temporary palace, and in 883 it was formally renamed Qingyang Palace. The buildings you see were rebuilt between 1667 and 1671, after the Ming structures were destroyed.
Two things are worth your time. The Bagua Pavilion is the most complete and most elaborate structure on the site, built on the principle of a round heaven over a square earth, with eighty-one dragons carved on it for the eighty-one transformations of Laozi. And in the Hall of the Three Purities stand a pair of bronze goats, ninety centimetres long and sixty high. The single-horned one was given to the temple in 1723 by the scholar-official Zhang Penghe and is assembled out of the twelve zodiac animals - rat ears, ox body, tiger claws, rabbit back, dragon horn, snake tail, horse mouth, goat beard, monkey head, rooster eyes, dog belly, pig haunch. It is a piece of pure folk surrealism, and pilgrims queue to touch it.
The temple also holds the woodblocks of the Daozang Jiyao, the Essentials of the Taoist Canon, cut in 1906 - more than thirteen thousand blocks, the most complete surviving version. In 1983 the State Council designated Qingyang one of the national key Taoist temples.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
