Our first full day in Chengdu was completely unplanned. We were staying very near the Sichuan museum and very near a well known city park. So we got up and had noodles at a local shop and then walked over to the museum. We spent several hours touring the museum. It has a lot of exhibits on the history of Sichuan and was a great place to spend a rainy afternoon. We spent most of our time on the Sichuan antiques and handicrafts floor which included extensive exhibits on things like Sichuan embroidery. There is an incredible panel that has a single sheet of fabric embroidered such that one side shows a husky like dog and the other shows a persian like cat. Yet both sides are all done with the same stitches and thread on a single panel of fabric. They even had women doing embroidery. It looked painful and painstaking. Then we spent some time wandering around the park. Eventually we ended up back home after buying local grapes, peaches, watermelon and plums on the street. Chengdu is famous for its produce and productive farms. This dates back more than a 1000 years to a water project which diverted water from a local river to the plain around Chengdu in order to make it one of the most fertile agricultural areas in China. Many Chinese stereotype people from Chengdu as "laid back" or even "lazy" and some believe the easy life created by the fertile lands led to this personality in the local people. For dinner the kids and I wandered down the street just to see what we would find. We ended up in a cul-de-sac lined with restaurants and tea houses. Chengdu is famous for local tea houses where people hang out while drinking tea and eating snacks. They gossip, play mahjong, network, conduct business, and chill out for hours. The communist party in China was supposedly born in conversations in the tea shops of Chengdu in the early 20th century. One restaurant seemed to have these weird barbecued breads so we ordered some of those. Another had fried noodles so we got some of that. One restaurant was really unique. In front they had two giant covered clay pots. They probably held 100's of gallons. I made Syd ask the owner what was inside. She told me soup and that the pots were indeed hot. I couldn't believe they had 100's of gallons of soup inside so I asked to look in. Inside the pot was lined with little shelves holding mason jars covered in foil. Each jar was full of some sort of soup. In the bottom of the big clay pots was a charcoal burner turning the whole thing into an oven.
The next day was our tour of Dujiangyan Panda base. There are several bases dedicated to support of giant pandas in Sichuan. The one at Dujiangyan is mostly for rehabilitating injured pandas found in the wild and also for keeping and quarantining pandas that are returning after being loaned to overseas zoos. Others are more dedicated to breeding or tourism. The panda bases run two special programs for tourists. The first is called the volunteer keeper program. You basically spend the day doing some of the activities of the keepers. The other is the "panda hugging" program. In this program you get to spend 10 seconds hugging a panda which has been heavily distracted with food while having your picture taken. The panda keeper program costs about $200 per day. The panda hugger program costs about $300 per day. Those are US dollars. My guess is that the programs were originally one program but then they discovered that a lot of tourists bailed on the keeper activities as soon as they got to hug the panda so they made it two programs for twice as many people. So we showed up at the base and were soon in a room with about 30 or so tourists. Some had come all that way and spent all that money to spend 10 seconds hugging a panda. Some were going to spend the day shoveling panda poop. Some were going to do both. Some had even signed up to shovel panda poop every day for a week!
We started by going to our assigned panda enclosure. Once the panda had been lured into a little cage we entered the enclosure, about 1/2 an acre of grass and trees, and began shoveling all the poop we could find into a trash can so it could be weighed. Then we removed all the old dried bamboo. Next we had to take the fresh bamboo and smash it on the ground so it would splinter and be easier for the Panda to eat. Then the panda was let back out into the enclosure and we repeated the poop scooping in their cage. Finally we washed out their cage. We did the same thing in the afternoon. Our reward for all this was a chance to see the pandas much closer than the usual tourists and two chances to hand feed the pandas some treats.
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| scooping panda poop |
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| sweeping up old bamboo |
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| breaking bamboo |
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| And a token red panda |
After the panda tour we went to the Dujianyan irrigation system. This was an 800 year old public works project designed to control flooding and silting in the Min river while also diverting water for year round irrigation. All done with multiple channels and levees but without any dams. It was an amazing feat of engineering and has been modernized a bit but the same system is still basically in use today. You can read more about it on the wikipedia page and they do a better job of explaining how it works anyway. With all the recent rain and flooding in Sichuan (more on that later) the system was running at the max.
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