6-Day China Food Tour: Chengdu, Chongqing & Xi'an

Arrival — met at Chengdu
Your guide and driver meet you in the arrivals hall with a name sign and take you to a centrally located hotel. Chengdu has two airports - Tianfu, south-east of the city, and the older Shuangliu field to the southwest - and the transfer takes between forty minutes and an hour and a half depending on which you arrive at and the time of day. Leave the bags, take a shower, and then go out; this is a city that is at its best after dark and there is no reason to lose the first evening to the hotel. Pack a light layer for the evening: Chengdu is humid, and the courtyards of the old lanes hold a damp cool after the sun goes down.

Evening — the Kuanzhai Alleys
The Kuanzhai lanes - Wide Alley, Narrow Alley and Well Alley - are three parallel streets of grey-brick courtyard houses on the western side of the old city, laid out under the Qing as the residential quarter of the Manchu garrison and restored and reopened in 2008. They are the most visited lanes in Chengdu and, in the evening, the busiest; the compensation is that almost every local snack worth knowing is available along a few hundred metres. Your guide will steer you through the ones that matter: zhong shui jiao, dumplings in a sweet chilli oil; long chao shou, wontons in clear soup; san da pao, three sticky rice balls thrown into a tray of toasted soybean flour with a bang; dan dan noodles; and dan hong gao, the little copper-pan sponge cakes sold from street carts.

Evening — Sichuan opera and face-changing
The evening ends at the theatre. Sichuan opera is not a single performance but a collection of comic sketches, acrobatics and instrumental pieces, and the piece every visitor waits for is bian lian, face-changing, in which a performer swaps painted silk masks through a flick of the head faster than the eye can follow. Fire-spitting, shadow puppetry and a hand-shadow act usually round out the hour and a half. Seats are booked in advance; the front three rows are worth the supplement if you want to try to see how the masks are changed - you will not. The programmes change nightly and the dialogue is in Sichuan dialect, so your guide will explain what is coming before the curtain goes up; in the comic sketches, half the joke is in the audience anyway.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Breakfast (7:30–8:30 AM) — Chunxi Road
Start at this bustling breakfast street and try congee with preserved eggs or youtiao (fried dough sticks) at Lao Ma Guan, a classic Chengdu morning bite.

Morning (9:00–11:30 AM) — Hawker's Alley & People's Park
Sample iconic Chengdu snacks such as fuqi feipian, la zi ji (spicy chicken), and cui guo (fried rice cakes) at Hawker's Alley and the wider Chengdu Snack Street. Then relax in People's Park's tea houses, where locals play mahjong and sip tea, offering a true taste of the city's laid-back rhythm.

Lunch — while sampling snacks
Lunch is flexible, built around the snacks and bites sampled through the morning.

Afternoon (12:00–5:00 PM) — Sichuan Provincial Museum & Sichuan Opera
At the Sichuan Provincial Museum, learn about the region's history and see treasures such as the Zhouyi Jiang bronze rhino, a national-class artifact. Later, watch a live Sichuan opera performance, where face-changing (bian lian) and shadow puppetry showcase the province's theatrical flair.

Dinner — Chengdu Hot Pot
End the day with Chengdu hot pot, the city's fiery signature, cooked at your table with bubbling chili broth and an array of dipping ingredients.

Evening — at your leisure
The evening is yours to relax after a full day of food and culture.

Morning — the Panda Base, gates at 07:30
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding sits on Fushan hill north of the city and opens early, which matters: pandas eat in the cool of the morning and then sleep through most of the afternoon, so the difference between arriving at half past seven and arriving at ten is the difference between watching twelve animals strip bamboo and watching twelve animals lie on their backs. The base was founded in 1987 with six rescued animals and now holds well over two hundred, along with red pandas, whose enclosure most visitors walk straight past. The walk between the enclosures is gently uphill, mostly on paved paths and boardwalks; your guide will take it slowly and time the route so that you reach the nursery and the sub-adult yards while they are still active.

Late morning — the train east
You leave the base and go directly to Chengdu East station for a high-speed service to Chongqing, a run of roughly an hour and a half to two hours through the Sichuan basin. The two cities are ninety minutes apart but competitively obsessed with each other, and the line is the busiest intercity rail corridor in western China. Your Chongqing guide meets you at the station. Travel light: the luggage goes with you, the station is large, and there is a long walk from the taxi drop-off to the platforms, so your guide will hold the tickets and lead the way. There is a food hall upstairs if you want something for the journey - a box of cold rabbit or a bag of Sichuan peppercorns travels well.

Lunch
On arrival in Chongqing, a first bowl of Chongqing xiaomian - the breakfast noodles of the city, dressed with chilli oil, ground sesame, pickled vegetables and a spoonful of minced pork - because no one here would consider waiting until evening to start eating. Order it er liang - the standard two-ounce portion - and add a spoonful of the pea and minced pork topping if you are hungry. The chilli is not negotiable in the way you might expect, though a milder version can usually be arranged for visitors; it costs almost nothing, and it is the single most Chongqing thing you will eat all week.

Afternoon — the riverside city
Chongqing is built on a peninsula between the Yangtze and the Jialing, and the city is vertical in a way no other Chinese metropolis is: roads on eleven levels, escalators in place of pavements, and a monorail that runs through the eighth floor of a residential block. Start at Jiefangbei, the downtown square that grew up around the war memorial, then walk down through the lanes to Hongyadong, the eleven-storey timber stilt complex hanging over the Jialing, which is best seen from the Qiansimen bridge opposite as the lights come on. Allow an hour for the walk down, because the lanes between the two are steep, lined with shops, and full of the small businesses that make the city work: knife sharpeners, key cutters, and noodle shops with three tables and a queue.

Evening — the first hotpot
Chongqing hotpot is the local religion: a cauldron of beef tallow and chilli, divided by a nine-grid frame that works like a heat map, with the centre boiling hardest and the corners mildest, so that each ingredient goes where it belongs. Order tripe, duck intestine, aorta, beef slices, potato slices and lotus root; dip in nothing but sesame oil and raw garlic, which cools the chilli rather than diluting it. Beer, and a lot of it, is the customary accompaniment. Your guide will order for you and explain what to do with each plate, which is help worth having on a first night.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Chongqing.

Morning — Ciqi Kou Ancient Town
Step into Ciqi Kou, a 1,000-year-old riverside town of cobblestone alleys and Ming–Qing architecture. Browse stalls for Sichuan embroidery and porcelain, and sample snacks like maoxuewang (spicy blood-curd stew) or sticky rice cakes.

Afternoon — Liziba Monorail & Eling Park
At Liziba Station, watch the light rail pass directly through a residential high-rise—a famous feat of Chongqing's mountain-city design—from the viewing platform below. Then hike Eling Park for panoramas where the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers meet, amid gardens, pavilions, and WWII-era relics.

Evening — Hotpot Experience
Indulge in Chongqing's fiery mala hotpot, cooking duck intestine, beef tripe, and lotus root in a chili-and-Sichuan-peppercorn broth at a local favorite such as Decheng Hotpot—a quintessential culinary adventure.

Morning — breakfast on the street, then the vertical city
Breakfast is xiaomian again, and this time your guide takes you to a neighbourhood shop rather than a hotel dining room. Order it er liang - two ounces of noodles - which is the portion everyone eats and the portion the price is set for; the standard build is chilli oil, sesame, ground peanut, preserved vegetable, soy and a spoonful of pork or pea topping, and asking for it without chilli is a conversation you will have. After breakfast, ride the Yangtze River cableway across the river - a commuter crossing since 1987 as much as a sightseeing line - and then take Line 2 of the monorail to Liziba to watch it pass through the building.

Late morning — Eling Park and the ridge
Eling Park occupies a wooded ridge on the neck of the peninsula, and from the top of it you can see both rivers at once, with the city spilling down the slopes between them. It was laid out as a private garden in the late Qing and became public in the 1950s, and it is where Chongqing comes to drink tea in the morning and play cards in the afternoon. The walk down through it takes about forty minutes and passes the old observation pavilion, the remnants of the wartime villa district, and a hillside of camphor trees. At the summit there is a teahouse and a viewing terrace, and the park is quieter than the streets below by a wide margin; this is the stop most people remember from Chongqing.

Lunch
A last Chongqing meal before the train: cold dishes dressed with sesame and chilli, a plate of twice-cooked pork, and a bowl of soup; the city's cooking is bolder and rougher than Chengdu's, and this is the day to notice the difference. If you would rather keep it light before five hours on a train, ask for the cold dishes and a bowl of noodles instead; station food is adequate but not worth planning around. The restaurant your guide uses is one of the old ones near the river, with the cold dishes laid out on the counter so that you can point at what you want - a far better way to order here than working through a menu that assumes you already know what everything is.

Afternoon — north through the Qinling
The high-speed line from Chongqing to Xi'an runs for five to six hours and is one of the more interesting long rail journeys in the country, because it drives a tunnel-and-viaduct route straight through the Qinling range rather than around it - the mountains that have divided the Sichuan basin from the north since before there were roads. Watch the last hour on the Xi'an side: the landscape flattens abruptly into the Wei river plain, which is where Chinese imperial history actually happened, and the change in terrain explains a great deal of it. Your guide meets you at Xi'an North.

Evening — Yongxingfang
Xi'an's Shaanxi snack quarter sits behind the Zhongshan Gate on the old city wall, built in a compound of grey-brick lanes in the shape of a Tang ward. It is a curated collection of provincial snacks rather than a street market, but for a first night in Shaanxi it is efficient and good: Zichang pancakes rolled with vegetables, Hanzhong rice noodles served hot with chilli, cold liangpi noodles, grilled pork skewers, sour plum juice and the local custom of drinking a small bowl of rice wine and throwing the empty bowl into a wooden trough. Bring an appetite; the portions are small on purpose.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Xi'an.

Morning — Shajinqiao, where the city eats breakfast
Beiyuanmen, the street everyone calls the Muslim Quarter, is at its best in the evening and at its worst in the middle of the day. For breakfast your guide takes you instead to Shajinqiao, one street to the west, which is where Xi'an's Hui families actually eat. Order a bowl of hu la tang - a thick, peppery soup of beef meatballs, tofu, carrot and cellophane noodles, thickened with starch - and a meat sandwich made with slow-braised beef in a flat sesame bun. Then zeng gao, a slice of glutinous rice steamed with jujubes and beans and served cold, which is the oldest thing on the menu and the least sweet. Nothing on the table costs much; everything is good.

Late morning — the Great Mosque and the market streets
The Great Mosque of Xi'an stands at the end of Huajue Lane, off the main Beiyuanmen street. It was founded in 742, in the Tang dynasty, and has been rebuilt repeatedly since, which is why it looks nothing like a mosque and everything like a Chinese temple: four courtyards, a wooden gateway with painted eaves, a phoenix pavilion, and stone steles in Chinese and Arabic. It is still a working place of worship, so dress unhurried and quiet. Around it, the lanes sell everything the quarter is known for - cumin, Sichuan pepper, dried chillies, green tea and jasmine, walnut, jujube, dried apricot and beef jerky - and the smell of roasting meat and sesame starts before eleven.

Lunch — paomo
Lunch is yangrou paomo, the dish Xi'an is judged on: a plain, hard flatbread that you tear into the bowl yourself, piece by piece, with your fingers, before the kitchen pours over the mutton broth and adds sliced mutton, vermicelli and coriander. The tearing is not theatre - it is how the bread is broken to the size that will absorb the soup - and there is a local saying about how small the pieces should be. Do it yourself, take your time, and add chilli paste at the table. The bowl arrives with a side of pickled garlic, the correct accompaniment and not really optional for anyone who plans to spend the afternoon in a car.

Afternoon — the wall and the city
Xi'an still has its Ming city wall intact and complete: 13.7 kilometres of rammed earth faced in grey brick, built between 1370 and 1378 on the footprint of the Tang imperial enclosure, and wide enough on top to ride a bicycle around. You can walk a stretch or hire a bike for the full circuit, which takes about an hour and a half at an easy pace. From the wall you can see the whole shape of the old city, the drum and bell towers at its centre, and the Muslim quarter a block in from the western gate, which is a useful way to make sense of where you have spent the day.

Evening — the dumpling banquet, and departure
The last meal is a Shaanxi dumpling banquet: a sequence of steamed and boiled dumplings, each shaped and coloured to indicate its filling - duck, fish, pork, mushroom, vegetable, walnut, sometimes more than a hundred forms in the grandest versions - served with a clear broth and a plate of cold dishes. Then transfer to Xi'an Xianyang airport or Xi'an North railway station, roughly an hour from the city centre. Please tell us your onward departure when you book, so the banquet is scheduled to leave enough time. It is a set menu rather than an a la carte affair, and dietary requirements should be flagged two days ahead so that the kitchen can vary the fillings.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day ends on departure - no hotel night included.