What Anren is
This is not a scenic old town. Anren is a small market town west of Chengdu that produced two of the most powerful men in early twentieth-century Sichuan, and it has ended up holding the densest concentration of museums in China: a republican-period street layout, a landed estate that is a national protected site, a private museum complex of forty-odd buildings founded by a single collector, and a tram linking them. In 2022 it was designated a 5A-level scenic area, and it calls itself - with some justification, since nobody else claims it - the country's museum town.
The estate
The Liu family manor is the reason the town was rich and the reason it is now protected. It is a walled complex of mansions, ancestral halls and outbuildings belonging to Liu Wencai, his brother the warlord Liu Wenhui, and their relatives: seventy thousand square metres of ground and twenty-one thousand square metres of building, in a hybrid style that mixes Sichuan courtyard planning with Western columns, arches and glazing. It was turned into a museum in 1958, and was designated a national key cultural relic in 1996. The display is not only about furniture and porcelain; the estate is also a document about land tenure and rural life in the republican period, and its best-known exhibit is a large clay sculpture group made in the 1960s depicting tenants paying rent. Your guide will handle that material carefully and honestly - it is a politically loaded exhibit, made in a particular decade for a particular purpose, and it is more interesting when treated as a historical object than as a verdict.
Jianchuan: the private museum complex
The second pillar is a museum cluster built by an entrepreneur and collector named Fan Jianchuan, who brought his holdings here and opened the first buildings in August 2005. It occupies 500 mu of ground with close to a hundred thousand square metres of building and is organised into four series - the war of resistance against Japan, folk life, the Mao era, and the 2008 earthquake. The way it works is unusual: rather than one encyclopedic building, dozens of separate halls each take a single subject, and several were designed by well-known architects, including Arata Isozaki and Zhang Yonghe, so the architecture is part of the collection. It is the largest private museum complex in China by investment, floor area and holdings.
We do not pretend the subject matter is comfortable. The war halls document the Japanese invasion of China in detail and without diplomacy, and the earthquake hall is a record of a disaster that is recent enough to be raw. Guests who would rather not spend the afternoon in that material can take the folk-life and architecture halls instead, and we will build the visit around your preference - but we think the honest thing is to tell you what the place is before you walk in, rather than after.
Lunch
Lunch in the town, at a restaurant doing the county's own cooking - duck, eel, and the cold dishes of the Chengdu plain.
Afternoon - the town itself
Between the estate and the museums sits the old street grid: three streets of republican shopfronts, more than twenty walled mansion compounds built by the same families in the 1930s and 1940s, and a tram that runs the length of the historic quarter on a 1.8-kilometre line with six stops, opened in 2011. We ride it once because it is the fastest way to see how the pieces fit together, and then walk the rest. The afternoon is unhurried; the point of Anren is not to see something enormous but to see a small place where a great deal was kept.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
