Pandas, hotpot, and the numbing-spicy heart of Sichuan — the UNESCO City of Gastronomy that China built on a plain of abundance
The capital of Sichuan Province and a UNESCO City of Gastronomy since 2010, Chengdu is one of the great food cities of the world — the home of hotpot (a roiling pot of chili-scarlet Sichuan broth at the table, shared with whatever you choose to cook in it), mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, and dan dan noodles, all built on the 'mala' flavor philosophy unique to Sichuan: numbing heat from Sichuan peppercorn plus dried chili, a flavor combination not replicated at the same scale anywhere else on earth. The city is also home to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding — the highest concentr…
Chengdu has been continuously inhabited for over 3,000 years and was the capital of the ancient Shu Kingdom and later the Three Kingdoms-era Shu Han (221–263 CE, whose Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang remain cultural heroes in Chengdu). The Dujiangyan irrigation system — built in 256 BCE by Li Bing and still functioning, diverting the Min River to prevent floods and irrigate the Chengdu Plain — turned the Sichuan Basin into one of China's most productive agricultural regions, called 'the land of abundance' (tianfu zhi guo). Chengdu was Marco Polo's 'magnificent city' in his 13th-century travels. The U…