What this walk is for
Chengdu has three historic quarters protected as a group - the alleys in the west, the monastery quarter in the north, and the temple-and-street district in the centre. The western one is the one everybody walks. The northern one is where the city still uses its heritage rather than displaying it, and that is the difference this day is built on.
The monastery
Wenshu was founded in the Sui dynasty, in the first years of the seventh century, under the name Xinxiang; it was enlarged under the Tang and the Song, and destroyed at the end of the Ming. What stands now was rebuilt from 1697 by a Chan master named Ciduhaiyue, who gave it the name it carries today. It occupies just over an acre and a half of ground with about eleven and a half thousand square metres of building, laid out on a single axis: the hall of the heavenly kings, the hall of the three bodhisattvas, the great hall, the preaching hall, and the scripture library behind. Alongside Baoguang and Zhaojue it is counted as one of the three great monasteries of Chengdu, and it is not a monument - there are services, there are resident monks, and there are people praying.
It holds a collection of over nine thousand objects, including more than five hundred paintings and calligraphies from the Tang and Song. We look at the buildings properly: the timber construction, the way the halls step up in height as you move through, the iron and bronze work, and the vegetarian kitchen, which is the reason the neighbourhood smells the way it does.
Lunch - the vegetarian kitchen
Lunch in the monastery's own vegetarian restaurant, ordering off a menu that uses no meat at all and is the reason many Chengdu residents come here regardless of religion. It is also the least expensive good meal in this part of the city.
Afternoon - the lanes around it
After lunch we walk out into the neighbourhood. The Wenshu quarter is built in the West Sichuan manner - grey tile, white walls, timber frames, courtyard after courtyard - and the streets that run off it have not been tidied into a shopping street. That means a market street where the produce is genuinely seasonal, an incense-and-paper shop that supplies the temple, a teahouse with chairs on the pavement, and the small workshops that keep the quarter alive as a place rather than an attraction. The area is used by more than five million people a year, which sounds like a crowd and is not: the visitors stay within two hundred metres of the gate, and the rest of it is ordinary.
We finish the afternoon at one of the quarter's teahouses over a covered-bowl tea, and we do it the local way - order once, sit as long as you like, and let the guide explain the ceremony, or the absence of it: this is not a performance, it is what people do on a Tuesday.
Walking and pace
Four to five kilometres, flat, mostly shaded, with the vehicle shadowing the route so that anyone who wants to stop can. This is the walk we recommend for guests who want a genuine half-day of city rather than a list of sights, and it works well on a first afternoon or a last morning.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
