A different way into a place everybody has heard of
The three lanes in the west of the city are visited by crowds every day, and what they are is almost never explained. They are the surviving fragment of a garrison town - a separate walled city built inside Chengdu by the Qing for Manchu and Mongol banner troops - and once you know that, the shape of the streets, the width of the lanes and the reason the houses look the way they do all become legible. That is what this day is about. We walk the lanes, but the subject is urban form.
The city inside the city
Chengdu was laid out in the Qin dynasty with a large eastern city and a smaller western one; the smaller was called Shaocheng, the lesser city, and the name has lasted two thousand years. In 1718 the Qing walled the western quarter off again, posted Manchu and Mongol bannermen inside it, and made a city within a city. The wall ran four and a half li around, with five gates, and the boundary with the Chinese city was absolute - at one crossing the two sides were separated by an iron grille across the canal, which a local poet turned into a line about a bridge half in the lesser city and half in the greater.
Inside, the layout was military. There were eight streets for officers and forty-two alleys for soldiers, all hung off a single spine running north to south, with the general's headquarters at its southern end so that the alleys fanned out from it like the legs of a centipede. Two of those alleys and a third beside them are what you can still walk. One was called the alley of benevolence, one the alley of peace, and the third took its name from a well that is still there; the names are northern, the way the whole quarter was, and they survive in the local speech today.
Morning - the lanes, read as architecture
We start early, before the shops open, and walk the three lanes in order. You will look at the gateways rather than the shopfronts: the stepped stone thresholds, the carved lintels and the screens that stop you seeing straight into a courtyard, which is the basic grammar of a Sichuan house. One courtyard on the wide lane is the best-known example in the city of a brick arch with a Chinese inscription cut into it and a Western plan behind it; another is a fully restored official residence. Your guide will point out which buildings are original fabric and which are reconstruction - the quarter was repaired on a 'repair as old' principle between 2005 and its reopening in 2008, with forty-five courtyards restored and more than seventy per cent of the old structures reinforced rather than replaced - and that honesty is worth having, because it is the difference between reading a street and being sold one.
Lunch
Chengdu lunch in the quarter, with a table discussion of what the alley widths tell you about the rank of the households that lived on them.
Afternoon - the wider grid
After lunch we leave the lanes and follow the street pattern they belonged to: the north-south spine, the line of the old general's headquarters, and the small streets behind the commercial frontage where the city is doing ordinary things. There is a hospital, a primary school and a wet market all sitting on the old garrison grid, and seeing them there is the point. We finish at the third lane, which is the shortest of the three and carries a long wall built from old bricks collected from demolitions across the city - each one stamped with the name of the kiln and the year it was fired, which makes it a public archive of Chengdu's building history laid out at waist height.
Walking and pace
Four to six kilometres, entirely flat, with a long stop in the middle. The lanes are the busiest part and we do them before the crowd arrives; the afternoon is quiet. Good for guests who have already seen the headline sights and want the city explained instead.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
