🇨🇳 Chengdu - Sichuan Cuisine and Pandas

I can't feel my face when I'm with 油

I came to Chengdu to get a taste of Sichuan cuisine, known for its use of Sichuan pepper that numbs your mouth. This was mostly motivated by Facing Heaven in London being one of my favourite restaurants, which is a Sichuan vegan restaurant.

As to this post’s subtitle, 油 means “oil” and is pronounced like “you”. I’m feeling smug about it.

Chengdu is also famous for its research base for giant panda breeding. While I’m not a fan of seeing animals in captivity, this centre is a non-profit and seemed ethical. It’s mostly concerned with the research and breeding of pandas and other rare animals. I also paid it a visit.

Chengdu is nearly 2,000km away from Shanghai, and most people opt to fly that distance. I decided to take the sleeper bullet train instead and was really happy with my decision. There was no hassle with airport security; I didn’t have to travel out of town for the airport, and it was cheaper and better for the environment than a flight. Travelling by rail here is blissful.

Food

I started my stay in Chengdu with a food tour. There’s a company that only does them in Chengdu and has good reviews, so I went with them. I ended up in a tiny group with 3 other people, 2 of them being a Polish couple. My Polish has been tested a surprising amount in Asia compared to anywhere else I’ve been.

The tour was great, and we tried a bunch of Sichuan specialities. I was glad I came to Chengdu despite other places in China also offering Sichuan cuisine - they put the peppercorns in everything here. The spice was also much more prominent than I’ve ever had it before, often feeling tingly and almost like popping candy. Personally, I really liked it.

The highlight of the tour for me were dan dan noodles, easily the best ones I’ve ever had. We also had a century egg, which I was really happy to try. People have mixed opinions on those, but I really liked them. As a little encore, we also each ate a rabbit’s head. Rabbit is very popular in Sichuan Province, with 300 million rabbits consumed annually. Breaking the head up felt very primal and a bit of a stretch for my usually plant-based self, but I’m all for new cultural experiences (within some limits).

Qin Shan Zhai (Health Benefit Restaurant)

Qin Shan Zhai is a restaurant in which every dish on the menu is designed with the benefits of Chinese medicine in mind. I was curious about the mysticism of it all, so I popped in.

They presented me with the biggest menu I’ve ever seen in a restaurant. Asian restaurants often have long menus, but this one was going for a world record. It was hard-backed and about 2 centimetres thick.

At this point, I think, a lot of the allure of Chinese medicine has faded. Just about everything on the menu was backed up with claims about how it would improve my spirits and energy, including the triple-fried pork belly.

Overwhelmed, and with the waiters not speaking English, I went for two dishes that would grant me 3 wishes and let me levitate or something. I ended up with cucumbers in transparent warm goop and Chicken in Sichuan pepper oil.

The food was fine, but it’s hard to recommend for the price. I wish I had eaten dan dan noodles in an alleyway with Chinese uncles smoking and playing mahjong around me. Maybe I would have gotten more health benefits by going with what my soul really wanted - the panda swimming in ice jelly.

Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding

I went to the research base as it opened, and I’m really glad I did. There were barely any people around then, and the pandas were very active. They were having breakfast, and some seemed to be posing for the audience by sitting on their backs and getting their bellies out.

There were also some baby giant pandas and red pandas. The red pandas were running around a bit before retreating somewhere cooler to avoid the 30-degree summer heat. The animals seemed happy and well looked after, which was great to see.

By around 10 AM, the centre got really busy, and any visible pandas had a few rows of excited kids around them trying to get a glimpse. The park provided a WeChat program that tracked how busy the enclosures were, and at this time, they were pretty much all at max capacity. The park is gargantuan and mostly empty, maybe to split the massive crowds. Being a tourist in China requires some serious forethought; I’m glad I didn’t visit on the weekend.

Sightseeing

I didn’t do much sightseeing here, as I’ve just been to 2 other Chinese cities, and Chengdu offered much of the same. The city had a few small shrines and buildings that lit up at night. I also popped into the Sichuan History Museum only to find that most exhibits don’t have English translations, similar to other Chinese museums I’ve been to. I don’t understand why, if they’re giving every 10th exhibit an English translation, they can’t also do it for all of them. Maybe it’s to motivate a waiguoren like me to learn Mandarin. Or to eat more warm cucumber goop that grants me the gift of tongues.