Chengdu's back garden
Qingcheng has a second name locals use and brochures don't: Chengdu's back garden. The air up here is measurably better than the city's. Chengdu officials buy houses on this mountain and come up to sit out the summer; so does everyone else who can. After 2020 the guesthouses and the outdoor tea places multiplied, and the outer mountain quietly became the good half.
An afternoon, and what you actually get out of it
A private ravine behind a three-hundred-year-old suspension bridge on Qingcheng's outer mountain: old-tree tea, pastries brought to wherever you sit, and a stream you are allowed to stand in.
- The oldest suspension bridge on Qingcheng, right behind the kitchen
- A ravine with a stream running through it, reachable on foot
- The spot CCTV chose over Dujiangyan for its Chengdu city film
- In winter, the same ravine under snow
- Old-tree tea, brought out to wherever you have decided to sit
- Pastries alongside — nothing to order, nothing to time
- Water cold enough in August to be the entire point
- Why the host stopped selling food and started selling the setting
- That the teacher whose 2015 resignation letter went viral came here first
- Almost nothing else — that is the product
- An afternoon where nobody asked you to be anywhere
- Photographs from a bridge that is genuinely three hundred years old
- Children who spent four hours in a stream and slept in the car
What the afternoon is made of
溪谷 · 茶桌 · 老树茶 · 空气
How it unfolds
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The person who runs it is a friend of ours who trained in natural aesthetics and started out doing a private-kitchen restaurant here. Then he looked at what was behind his own building and worked out that the food was not the product. His words, roughly: fine — then I'll sell the setting. Pastries and old-tree tea are what he serves in it.
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Qingcheng's oldest suspension bridge crosses the ravine right at the back of the property. It moves, in the way these always do. It is also, unsurprisingly, the single most photographed thing anyone does here — which is fine, because the crossing takes about ninety seconds and then you have the other side to yourself.
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The bridge and the ravine are one place — you cross, and you can climb down to the water. In summer that is the entire point: children in the stream, adults with their feet in it, nobody hurrying anyone. In winter the same ravine takes snow, and is arguably better.
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Tea from old trees, and pastries, brought out to wherever you have decided to sit. There is nothing to order and nothing to time. If you have come off the mountain from a morning at the temple, this is deliberately the opposite shape of afternoon.
State television came to film Chengdu and picked this ravine
Not our claim — theirs
When CCTV made its Chengdu city film, it did not shoot Dujiangyan and it did not shoot the front mountain. It came here, and put the actress Cecilia Yip — Xu Xian in The Legend of the White Snake — on camera in this ravine.
And in 2015, when a teacher's resignation letter — the world is big and I want to see it — went viral across China, this was the first place she went.
We have looked, and we cannot find anyone selling the same afternoon. That is unusual enough in this market to be worth saying plainly.
What a family did with it
“They flew in from Amsterdam with the kids, end of July, the worst of the heat. The only thing they asked for was: not in the sun, and nothing to think about. They spent the whole afternoon in the stream and went back to Chengdu happy. That request comes up more than any other and almost nobody has an answer for it.”
Recounted by the Chengdu team
Good to know
Included
- The setting, old-tree tea and pastries
The same mountain, and no queue in any of it
Qingcheng, the way most people do it
- Sightseeing bus, then cable car, then a climb anyway
- In summer you queue against the whole of holiday China
- The front mountain tops out at 1,050 m — hot, and no shade in the line
- Lunch means queueing again
- By four o'clock you are finished, and not in a good way
This afternoon
- Driven in, then nothing further is asked of you
- No cable car to fight for, no table to wait for
- Shade, moving water, and a bridge that is three hundred years old
- Children can be in the stream all afternoon
- Back in Chengdu rested instead of wrecked
Book the afternoon
Half a day on its own. Tell us a date — weekends fill, so two weeks ahead if you can.
Start planning- An afternoon
- A 300-year bridge
- Old-tree tea and pastries
- No queue in any of it
