Qingcheng · An afternoon, booked on its own
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.
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.
14:10Whose place this is
A private kitchen first · a designer by training
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.
14:30Directly behind the kitchen
Ninety seconds across · and it moves
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.
15:00You can go down
Cold water in August · snow in January
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.
15:30While you sit
Brought out to you · no menu to work through
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.
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.
“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
Half a day on its own. Tell us a date — weekends fill, so two weeks ahead if you can.
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