Chengdu Travel Map and living guide

Nanjing Travel Guide

Chengdu is depicted in a poem as "Chengdu Landscape, as if endowed by the Ninth Heaven, is shared in the creations of many a master artist." A magnificent and modern provincial capital, Southeast of the Sichuan basin, Chengdu enjoys temperate climate and plentiful products. with ith an annual rainfall of 997.6 mm, it occupies an area of 12,389.6 square kilometers, and now has over 3 million inhabitants in the city proper, and over 10 million in greater Chengdu. The average annual temperature of 16.2 , an annual sunshine time is 1,239 hours and the frost-free period is 300 days.

Chengdu is more than 2,000 years old. In contrast to some other Chinese urban centres, and despite raging redevelopment, Chengdu has managed to preserve the atmosphere how one might imagine China to have once been sometime in the past. Chengdu was already the political, economic, and cultural centre of western Sichuan by 400 B.C. During the Five Dynasties Period (907-960), Meng Chang, a ruler of later Shu, had numerous hibiscus trees planted on the city wall, so the town eventually became known as the City of Hibiscus.
Chengdu, also known as the hibiscus city or the brocade city, has been a famous cultural centre with age-old colorful traditions of both religious and civil significance for the past 2,500 years in Chinese history. With the coming of the spring, peach blossoms abound on the plain and rape-seed flowers tinge the landscape golden while the wafting cooking smoke curls up from the farm huts amidst bamboo groves. All this makes the city and its suburbs truly poetic.

Chengdu has both high mountains and low-lying valleys. Just like its changing geographical feature, Chengdu has esperienced ups and downs in its 2,300 year history.
Indeed, Chengdu is both ancient and young, peaceful and prosperous. Although it is an ancient cultural city, it has a strong sense of the commodity economy. With the deepening of China's reform and opening to the outside world, Chengdu has undergone tremendous changes. Today, as the center of Sichuan Province's politics, economy and culture, the city has such pillar industries as electonics, machinery, pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, chemicals and foodstuff and is China's important grain, oil and agricultural by-product base. It is Southwest China's important commodity and material distributing center and hub of communications and telecommunications. Since ancient times, Chengdu has had the tradition of opening to the outside world. Today's Chengdu people have inherited their ancestors' tradition of opening to the outside by absorbing the essense of foreign civilization to build their beautiful homeland.