Chéngdū

Chengdu stands at the heart of the fertile plain of western Sichuan, a city of gardens, waterways and markets, sheltered by mountains to the west. The Min River, diverted by the ancient Dujiangyan works, waters the plain and helps protect it from flooding. Long the principal city of Shu, Chengdu was a seat of government and culture and the meeting place of roads leading into the highlands and the Yangtze basin; its brocade was famous across China, and in the Song period local merchants issued the first paper notes, the jiaozi.

Under the Ming the city was the seat of Shu princes, the first of whom, Zhu Chun, was enfeoffed in 1378. West of the city stands the site of the thatched cottage where the Tang poet Du Fu lived through years of upheaval. Later generations turned it into a shrine, repairing and enlarging it; a major rebuilding in 1500 and another in 1811 gave the memorial its sequence of halls and courtyards.

The city suffered terribly in the wars at the end of the Ming. In 1644 the rebel leader Zhang Xianzhong took Chengdu and made it the capital of his Great Western regime; fighting, hunger and disease then devastated Sichuan. Migrants from Huguang and other provinces came over the following generations. Early in the eighteenth century the Qing walled off a Manchu garrison quarter inside the old city, and in 1783 the governor-general Fúkāng'ān had the city walls thoroughly rebuilt.