Sichuan

Overview

Sichuan is where lowland China ends and the Tibetan plateau begins, and a trip here is a choice between the two: the crowded, subtropical basin around Chengdu, or the high country to its west and north. The basin side is teahouses, pandas, the Buddhist mountain of Emei and the cliff Buddha at Leshan, all within an hour or two of the capital by train. The plateau side is Tibetan towns above 4,000 m, monasteries, grassland and the blue lake valleys of Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, and it takes days rather than hours.

The province is China’s fifth largest by area and fifth most populous, with 83.7 million people at the 2020 census, most of them packed into the basin. Everything west of the basin’s rim belongs to two Tibetan autonomous prefectures, Garze and Ngawa, and the Yi autonomous prefecture of Liangshan takes the south.

Five World Heritage sites sit inside the province: two alpine valleys in the north, the Emei and Leshan pair south of Chengdu, the Dujiangyan waterworks with Mount Qingcheng above them, and a belt of mountain reserves that holds more than 30% of the world’s wild giant pandas.

The food is the other reason people come. Sichuan cooking is one of the four great traditions of Chinese cuisine, built on chilli, fermented broad-bean paste and the numbing Sichuan peppercorn, and it is eaten here as ordinary daily food rather than a dare. The Tibetan west cooks differently, and the split in the kitchen matches the split in the landscape.

Two warnings up front. The basin has the lowest sunshine totals in China, so do not plan around blue skies in Chengdu. And the western roads and the northern valleys are high: Litang’s county town stands above 4,000 m, and altitude, not distance, is what sets the pace of any trip beyond the basin.

History & character

Shu and the bronze masks of Sanxingdui

Before the Chinese state reached the basin it belonged to the kingdom of Shu, a Bronze Age culture whose remains at Sanxingdui, north of Chengdu, came out of the ground from 1986 onward: bronze heads and masks with protruding eyes, gold foil, ivory hoards, around 3,000 to 3,300 years old and unlike anything from the Yellow River cultures of the same period. Qin armies had taken Shu and its neighbour Ba by 316 BC. Two years later Qin founded Langzhong county on the Jialing, which still keeps its old town. Li Bing’s Dujiangyan waterworks, finished around 256 BC, turned the Chengdu plain into farmland that has stayed in production ever since.

Shu Han and the Three Kingdoms

During the Three Kingdoms period (220 to 280) Liu Bei ruled the state of Shu Han from Chengdu. The stories of that court are still the province’s favourite legends, and one of its generals, Zhang Fei, has a temple in Langzhong that is the centre of the town’s Spring Festival fairs.

Tea for horses

For roughly a thousand years the province’s western edge was a border market. Brick tea from Ya’an was carried by porters over the mountains to Dartsedo, now Kangding, and traded for Tibetan ponies and wool; loads of 60 to 90 kg, often more than the porter’s own body weight, were normal, and the trade kept going into the Republican era.

The Tibetan side of that border was Kham, and it remains Tibetan today: Garze and Ngawa are autonomous prefectures with Tibetan and Qiang populations, and Liangshan in the south is Yi.

Emptied and refilled

The wars at the end of the Ming emptied much of the basin, and the Qing resettled it with migrants from Huguang, the provinces of the middle Yangtze. In 1997 Chongqing and its hinterland were split off as a separate municipality, taking roughly 40 million people with them.

12 May 2008

At 14:28 on 12 May 2008 the Longmenshan fault ruptured along more than 240 km of the basin’s western rim, with its epicentre in Wenchuan county about 80 km from Chengdu. The count reached 69,196 confirmed dead, 18,379 missing and at least 4.8 million people homeless. The old county seat of Beichuan was abandoned where it stood and is kept as an earthquake museum; the new railway north to Jiuzhaigou passes through Maoxian, in the same belt.

Two rhythms

The basin runs slow. Chengdu’s teahouse habit, an afternoon over a lidded cup and a mahjong table, is real and belongs on the city page; UNESCO named the city a City of Gastronomy in 2011. West of Kangding you are in a different country in all but name: Tibetan script on the shop fronts, monasteries on the hills, a police and military presence that thickens in tense years, and pictures of the Dalai Lama illegal.

See & do

The province’s five World Heritage listings came in three waves: Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong in 1992, Mount Emei with the Leshan Buddha in 1996, Qingcheng and Dujiangyan in 2000, and the Giant Panda Sanctuaries in 2006. The first two and the last are what the rest of this section is about; the Buddha and Dujiangyan have their own pages.

Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou is a Y-shaped set of valleys in the far north, between 2,000 and 4,500 m, where water runs over calcium-carbonate shoals and settles into lakes of an unlikely blue. Rize and Zechawa valleys are each 18 km long and Shuzheng 14.5 km; Nuorilang falls is 20 m high and 320 m wide, Pearl Shoal a 310 m curtain, and Long Lake, the highest and deepest, is 7.5 km long and 103 m deep. Seven of the nine Tibetan villages that gave the valley its name are still inhabited.

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake in August 2017 shut the park until 3 March 2018; it now admits up to 41,000 visitors a day and took 5.11 million in 2024, so book before you travel. Hours are 07:00 to 19:00 from 1 May to 15 November and 08:00 to 18:00 the rest of the year, nobody sleeps inside the park, and the shuttle bus (¥90 in peak season, ¥80 off-peak) is sold separately from admission and is not optional: the valleys are too long to walk.

Huanglong

Huanglong, 128 km by road from Jiuzhaigou’s gate, is a 3.6 km valley of travertine terraces in Songpan county, rising from 1,700 m towards the 5,588 m summit of Xuebaoding, the highest peak in the Min mountains. The main run of pools is 2.5 km long and 30 to 170 m wide, coloured yellow, green, blue and brown by the mineral content; the Multi-Coloured Pond at the top, at 3,576 m, holds 693 separate pools, with a Buddhist temple just below it. The top of the walk is above 3,500 m, so it hits harder than Jiuzhaigou does.

Emei Shan

Emei Shan is 3,099 m, the highest of China’s four sacred Buddhist mountains and the seat of the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Puxian in Chinese); tradition puts the first Buddhist temple in China here, in the 1st century. Seventy-six Ming and Qing monasteries survive on the slopes, Baoguo at the foot and Wannian on the way up among them; the pilgrim footpath is 50 km long and takes several days, and cable cars cut it to a long day. The Golden Summit at 3,077 m is the goal, and the Tibetan macaques on the middle stretch will take anything not zipped away.

Pandas in the wild

The Chengdu breeding base is the easy encounter and is on the city page. The wild population lives in the Qionglai and Jiajin mountains along the basin’s rim, and the place to get near it is Wolong, a reserve founded in 1963 and expanded to about 2,000 km² in 1975, with around 150 wild pandas at the last national survey. The China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda has worked here since 1980; after the 2008 earthquake its animals were moved out to Bifengxia, and since 2012 they have lived at the rebuilt Shenshuping centre. Wolong became part of the Giant Panda National Park in 2020. Seeing a wild panda is luck; the reserve’s snow leopards, red pandas, golden snub-nosed monkeys and white-lipped deer are the honest reason to go, and you will probably not see those either.

The road to Tibet

The G318 runs 5,476 km from Shanghai to Zhangmu on the Nepal border, and the Sichuan stretch west of Ya’an is the part people drive for: Ya’an at km 2,674, Kangding at km 2,886, Litang at km 3,174, Batang at km 3,345, then Tibet. A northern road through Garze and Dege is the quieter alternative. Foreigners can travel the Tibetan areas of Sichuan without permits or guides, unlike Tibet itself, but restrictions appear whenever the politics do.

Yading

Yading, in Daocheng county, is three peaks that Tibetan Buddhism reads as bodhisattvas, Chenrezig, Jampelyang and Chanadorje, the highest of them 6,032 m, and the 5th Dalai Lama sanctified the valley between them as a pilgrimage site. Pilgrims walk the circuit around the peaks; most visitors go for Milk Lake below them. The airport is 130 km away.

Larung Gar

Larung Gar, in Sertar county, was founded in 1980 by Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok and grew into a hillside city of red cabins with an official population of 10,000 by 2016; that year the authorities ordered it cut to 5,000, and by November about 3,000 monks and nuns had been evicted and 1,000 homes demolished. Movement, visitors and communication are restricted; do not build a trip around getting in.

Towns & cities

Chengdu

Chengdu is the capital, the transport hub and the only place in the province most visitors sleep for more than a night; its municipal population was 20.9 million at the 2020 census. The panda base, the teahouses and the restaurants are all on the city page. Treat it as the place you come back to between excursions.

Leshan and Emeishan

Leshan is the river town below the 71 m Buddha, carved during the 8th century into the cliff where the Min and Dadu rivers meet. Emeishan town, to the west, is the base for the mountain and has its own high-speed station, about an hour from Chengdu with trains roughly every two hours. Both are day-trip distance from the capital, but the mountain deserves a night.

Dujiangyan

Dujiangyan is the irrigation town at the basin’s western edge, with the Daoist Mount Qingcheng above it; the two share a World Heritage listing from 2000. The Wolong panda reserve lies in Wenchuan county, in the mountains beyond.

Kangding

Kangding sits at 2,560 m in a river valley about 210 km west of Chengdu, and for centuries it was the market where Han tea porters met Tibetan wool traders; its old name was Dartsedo, or Tachienlu in older English books. The Zheduo river runs through the middle, the Dentok monastery looks down from Paoma mountain, and the folk song Kangding Qingge is known across China. It is the first night on any road trip west and the sensible place to acclimatise before the passes. Tagong’s grasslands and monastery are 3 to 4 hours north by minibus or bus.

Litang

Litang’s county town stands at 4,014 m, about 400 m higher than Lhasa and among the highest towns anywhere. The Ganden Thubchen Choekhorling monastery on the northern edge was converted to the Gelug school by the 3rd Dalai Lama in 1580, and the 7th and 10th Dalai Lamas were born in the county. The horse festival, banned after the 2008 unrest, returned in 2018 and runs at the beginning of August. Prayer-flag-marked sky burial grounds are on the hills above town; if you go, go with someone local and stay well back.

Daocheng

Daocheng, at 3,750 m, is the small town for the Yading reserve, walkable end to end, with hot springs 4 km out and a square that fills with dancers every evening. The free-roaming dogs outside the villages are a real hazard.

Songpan

Songpan is the walled town on the road north, at 2,867 m, rebuilt under the Ming as a military post on a Tang foundation, with Tibetan, Qiang, Hui and Han residents and horse-trekking outfits on the edge of town that ride out among the yak herders. Huanglong is inside the county.

Langzhong

Langzhong, on the middle Jialing in the northeast, was founded as a Qin county in 314 BC and keeps one of the best-preserved old towns in China, laid out on feng shui principles with the military, trade and residential quarters each in an assigned position. Its condiments, prized for their sourness, are the thing to carry home.

Zigong

Zigong is the salt city. Brine has been pumped here since the Eastern Han, and in 1835 the Shenhai well became the first in the world to pass 1,000 m; it still works by the old pumping and boiling methods. The salt museum occupies a guildhall dating from 1736, and the dinosaur museum, opened in 1987 on the Dashanpu fossil beds 7 km from the centre, was the first specialised dinosaur museum in Asia. Zigong also claims to have originated the Chinese lantern festival.

Yibin

Yibin is where the Min meets the Jinsha and the combined river takes the name Yangtze. Its biggest employer is Wuliangye, the baijiu distiller, whose Ming and Qing fermentation cellars and museum are free to visit. The Shunan Bamboo Sea is 68 km to the southeast, ¥110 in high season and ¥60 in low.

Food & drink

Sichuan cooking is one of the Four Great Traditions of Chinese cuisine, with Shandong, Guangdong and Jiangsu, and its cooks reckon with seven basic tastes: sweet, sour, numbing, hot, bitter, aromatic and salty. The numbing one is what no other Chinese kitchen has. Sichuan pepper is the husk of a Zanthoxylum berry, not a true pepper, and what it does to the lips is a mild tingling paraesthesia rather than heat; older stock loses it, and the fresh harvest arrives in late summer.

The other pillar is Pixian doubanjiang, the fermented broad-bean and chilli paste from Pidu district on the edge of Chengdu, made with local erjingtiao chillies and left to ferment in the sun, often for more than three years; it carries geographical-indication protection and cooks call it the soul of the cuisine. It is what gives mapo tofu and twice-cooked pork their colour.

The dishes everyone knows are the ones to order first and judge the kitchen by: mapo tofu (soft tofu in a bean-paste and minced-meat sauce), kung pao chicken (diced chicken, peanuts, dried chilli), twice-cooked pork (belly boiled, then fried with the paste), dan dan noodles and fuqi feipian, the “husband and wife lung slices” that are in fact cold spiced beef offal. Hotpot is the social meal: a pot of chilli-oil broth on the table and raw slices of meat, tofu skin, lotus root and greens cooked in it by the diners, with a divided pot for anyone who wants a milder side.

West of Kangding the chilli stops. Tibetan Sichuan eats yak, butter tea, tsampa (roasted barley flour) and noodle soups, and restaurants in Litang and Daocheng cook for pilgrims and truck drivers rather than for gourmets; bring snacks if you are fussy.

The province’s drink is baijiu. Wuliangye, distilled from sorghum in Yibin, grew from 300 employees in 1977 to more than 20,000, and the town’s Ming and Qing fermentation cellars are part of its museum. Zigong’s salt, pumped from the same brine wells for two thousand years, is the seasoning under all of it.

Nature

Sichuan covers 485,000 km², and the basin at its heart accounts for 229,500 km² of that: a bowl of exposed red sandstone, hence the old name Red Basin, walled by the Daba, Longmen and Qionglai ranges and drained entirely by the Yangtze and its tributaries, the Min, Jialing and Dadu among them. The bowl feeds more than 100 million people and is known for its rice; the same ring of mountains that shelters it traps the fog.

The western rim is the Longmenshan, a thrust fault on the boundary between the Indian and Eurasian plates, which is why the basin’s edge shakes. Beyond it the ground climbs fast. Mount Gongga, in Kangding and Luding counties, is the highest point in the province at 7,509 m by the November 2023 survey, the easternmost and most isolated 7,000 m peak in the world, first climbed by Moore and Burdsall in October 1932 and with a death rate local media put above Everest’s. Its Hailuogou glacier runs 14.2 km down the eastern flank to 2,850 m and holds China’s largest icefall, which makes it the one big glacier in the country you can reach without mountaineering.

Mount Siguniang, the Four Sisters, is the trekking massif of the Qionglai range: the eldest sister, Yaomei Feng, is 6,250 m, the youngest, Daguniang Feng, is a walking peak, and three valleys (Changping, Haizi and Shuangqiao) give the routes.

The Giant Panda Sanctuaries listing covers 9,245 km² of the Qionglai and Jiajin mountains, eight nature reserves and nine scenic parks including Wolong, Fengtongzhai and Siguniang, and it is one of the botanically richest places on earth, with 5,000 to 6,000 plant species and forest that resembles the tropical forests of the Paleogene. Red panda, snow leopard and clouded leopard share the range.

At the far northwest the plateau proper begins, subalpine and alpine country where winter temperatures fall to -30°C.

Climate

Chengdu gets about 1,006 hours of sunshine a year at 80% relative humidity, with a January mean of 5.9°C and July and August around 25°C, which are also the wettest months. The mountains around the basin keep the cloud and, in winter, the smog in place, so a grey week is the norm rather than bad luck. Pack for damp rather than cold in the basin, and for rain from June to August.

Climb out of the basin and the numbers change completely. Litang’s January mean is -4.4°C with nights at -11.4°C, and even July averages only 11.3°C with nights at 7.2°C. Daocheng drops to -20°C in winter, most guesthouses there have no heating or hot water in those months, and the electricity fails often.

Emei Shan’s summit runs from -5.7°C in January to 11.6°C in July, so a summer climb ends in winter clothing whatever the valley was doing. Jiuzhaigou’s high point is 4,700 m but the walking is between 1,980 and 3,100 m, cold enough in winter to freeze the waterfalls solid. The sun at these altitudes burns fast; sunscreen matters in Kangding in a way it never does in Chengdu.

When to go

Late September to early November is the window for Jiuzhaigou, when the forest above the lakes goes yellow, orange and red. Peak-season admission (¥220) runs from 1 April to 15 November; from 16 November to 31 March it drops to ¥80, with a ¥20 second-day ticket if bought on the first, and the frozen waterfalls are the compensation for the cold. Whatever the season, the daily cap means booking, and the first week of October, the national holiday, is the week the cap bites.

Summer is the plateau’s season: Litang’s warmest month still averages only 11°C, but it is the only time the high country is reliably open and green. The trade-off is that the basin is at its wettest and stickiest in July and August.

Spring Festival is the time for the two old towns of the northeast and south: Langzhong’s temple fairs gather around the Zhang Fei Temple, and Zigong, which claims to have invented the lantern festival, lights up. Everything else about travelling in China at New Year applies, and is on the country page. Winter on the plateau, with Daocheng at -20°C and no heating, is for the committed only.

Getting there

Chengdu Tianfu International Airport (TFU) took its first commercial flight on 27 June 2021, 51 km southeast of the centre, and has since taken over most international routes; it handled 44.8 million passengers in 2023, fifth in China, while the older Shuangliu (CTU) concentrates on domestic flights. Check which airport your ticket says; they are on opposite sides of the city.

By rail, Xi’an is under three hours away on the 510 km line opened in December 2017, which bores through the Qinling on 127 km of tunnels. Chongqing is one hour on the 307 km intercity line since 350 km/h trains started in December 2020. Longer routes from Beijing and Shanghai are a full day; the China page covers the booking system.

The northern valleys now have a railway. The Chengdu to Huanglongjiuzhai section of the Sichuan to Qinghai line opened on 30 August 2024, with stations at Maoxian, Zhenjiangguan, Songpan and Huanglongjiuzhai; trains run at up to 174 km/h through the mountains, and the whole line to Lanzhou is due to open in 2026. Huanglongjiuzhai station is about 90 minutes by road from Jiuzhaigou itself.

The plateau airports are the fast way in and the fast way to get sick. Daocheng Yading, at 4,411 m, is the highest civilian airport in the world; it opened on 16 September 2013 with an Air China flight from Chengdu, and Air China and Sichuan Airlines now fly from Shuangliu, Tianfu and Chongqing. Kangding’s airport, opened in 2008 at 4,280 m, is the third highest. Jiuzhai Huanglong airport sits on a mountainside at 3,448 m, 88 km from the Jiuzhaigou gate. Flying from the basin at 500 m straight to 4,400 m skips every acclimatisation step the road gives you.

By road, the G318 continues from Batang into Tibet, where the permit rules of the country page take over.

Getting around

Inside the basin the high-speed network does the work. Emeishan is about an hour from Chengdu, ¥56 to 66, with trains roughly every two hours, and a slower train to the older Emei station takes 2 to 3 hours. Leshan and Dujiangyan connections are on their own pages, and the Chengdu metro is on the city page.

West is a different proposition. Buses to Kangding leave Chengdu between 07:00 and 13:00, cost ¥141 and take 8 to 11 hours, now partly on the G4218 expressway from Ya’an. From Kangding, Tagong is 4 hours and ¥40 by bus, or about 3 hours by chartered minibus from Xinshidian street at around ¥45 a head; Litang is 9 hours and ¥81; Mugecuo lake, 21 km out at 3,200 m, is ¥120 plus ¥100 for its internal bus, 08:00 to 17:00. Litang to Daocheng is 3 hours by bus, or ¥300 to 400 to hire a seven-seat minibus; the direct Kangding to Daocheng bus is about 12 hours.

Most people who want the whole G318 hire a car and driver from Chengdu or Kangding for a week or more rather than chaining buses, which lets you stop at the passes and, more importantly, lets you stop climbing when the altitude says so. Daocheng’s airport is 50 km north of the town and 130 km from the Yading gate, so even flying in leaves a long transfer. Daocheng itself is small enough to walk, with ¥10 taxi rides and hire scooters.

For the north, the train to Huanglongjiuzhai takes about 2 hours from Chengdu East and is followed by a 2 hour bus to Jiuzhaigou; the old direct bus still runs, 7 to 11 hours for ¥110 to 145; and from Jiuzhai Huanglong airport the shuttle is ¥50 against ¥260 for a daytime taxi.