8 Incredible Places to Visit in and Around Chengdu--China's City of Pandas, Hotpot, and Heritage
SHANGHAI, June 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Once a hidden gem, Chengdu —the capital of China's Sichuan province— is fast becoming one of the country's most talked-about destinations. With an alluring blend of ancient tradition, fiery cuisine, and natural beauty (often showcased on social media), it's no surprise that the city is a rising favourite, with pre-summer bookings up over 180%.
A notable rise in domestic and international flight routes, including greater connectivity via major hubs such as Shanghai and Beijing, is making the vibrant city more accessible than ever.
And as travellers seek deeper, more immersive experiences beyond the bustling megacities, Chengdu, the City of Gastronomy designated by UNESCO, is emerging as the perfect counterpoint—rich in culture yet refreshingly laid-back.
For visitors looking to explore the city's most iconic experiences, here are a few highlights that stand out:
1. Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
No visit to Chengdu is complete without meeting its most famous residents. The research base offers a rare opportunity to see giant pandas and red pandas in a carefully designed environment that mirrors their natural habitat. Enjoy an intimate experience with over 100 giant pandas and meet celebrity pandas Hua Hua and Qi Yi. The best viewing spots are Villas 1 and 2, where you can watch these majestic creatures play and snack on their favourite snack, bamboo. An unmissable experience is the panda cub enclosure, where you can observe 3-month-old cubs play, nap, and explore their surroundings. Make sure to visit in the morning when the pandas are most active and adorable. Find out more here: Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
2. Margo Manor Hotpot
Spice is a way of life in Sichuan province, and nowhere is it more memorably served than at Margo Manor. This impressive hotpot restaurant blends stunning architecture, performance, and fiery Sichuan flavours into one unforgettable dining experience. It's a must for lovers of bold cuisine, local flair and spicy flavours.
3. Taikoo Li Chengdu
Blending ancient Chinese architecture with modern luxury storefronts creates a cosmopolitan cool. This open-air shopping and lifestyle complex in the city's heart is a case study in how Chengdu embraces the modern without losing its soul. Expect designer brands like Alexander McQueen, Gucci and Versace among cutting-edge galleries, and some of the city's best cafés and cocktail bars, including %Arabica and Wang De Chuan Tea Company. Shoppers can also enjoy tax-free benefits at the nearby IFS (International Finance Square)—a convenient bonus for international travellers looking to indulge and conveniently process their tax refunds immediately after shopping at participating stores.
4. Chuancai Museum
Located in the northwest suburb of Chengdu, this interactive museum is the first of its kind in China. Visitors explore the history of Sichuan cooking with a sensory overload. Take in the smell of Sichuan's famous peppercorn, an intoxicating, earthy perfume scent like no other. Or dive in and sample delicious Sichuan delicacies, including Sichuan-style stuffed pancake, northern Sichuan-style jelly, Tofu pudding, and dumplings. Not only will you observe the local gastronomic history, but you can also enjoy the museum through taste and smell, sampling famous local foods. Guests can even try their hand at preparing local dishes alongside expert chefs, who will take you on a culinary journey of Sichuan province. Find out more here: Sichuan Cuisine Museum.
5. Chengdu Peoples Park
Chengdu Renmin Park is an essential stop for a taste of local life. This urban oasis allows visitors to experience the laid-back nature of the city from locals practising tai chi, families enjoying tea in open-air pavilions, and street musicians playing traditional instruments. Be sure to stop and sip on Chengdu's famous jasmine tea, or even try the local tradition of ear-cleaning. A soothing experience that's part cultural curiosity, part wellness ritual.
Side Trips Beyond the City
Thanks to Chengdu's well-developed high-speed rail and domestic flight network, getting away from the city is easy and rewarding. Here are three must-see attractions, perfect for a day or weekend trip:
6. Jiuzhaigou Valley
On the edge of the Tibetan Plateau are the Min Mountains, which include the nature conservation site Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, famed for its crystal-clear lakes and lush wooded mountains. Jiuzhaigou is a nature lover's dream. Spring sees the landscape in full bloom, making it a wonderful escape for hikers, photographers and anyone seeking peace in nature.
7. Mount Emei
Mount Emei, one of China's Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains, offers spiritual tranquillity and dramatic mountain views. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is ideal for those up for a challenge; scaling its ancient stone stairways will ensure you're standing on a sea of clouds, overlooking a breathtaking vista. Visitors can also take a leisurely stroll along its cliffside monasteries and potentially encounter the monkeys that inhabit the mountain.
8. Leshan Giant Buddha
Just a short train ride from Chengdu, this 71-metre-high stone Buddha statue, carved over a millennium ago, is the largest of its kind in the world. Viewed by boat or from a hillside path, it's a staggering testament to ancient ingenuity and faith.
More about Chengdu: The International City of Intangible Cultural Heritage
Chengdu isn't just a side trip—it's becoming the main event with its unique pace of life and an abundance of experiences in and around the city!
The return of the biennial Chengdu International Intangible Cultural Heritage Festival (ICH) from 28 May to 3 June is adding to the city's allure. The ICH Festival is a vibrant celebration of traditional arts, music and heritage, and further highlights the cultural pull of the vibrant Sichuan province and the uniqueness of Chengdu. This year's festivities were organised in partnership with Trip.com Group.
As part of the continued celebrations, Trip.Best Awards were also handed out: Trip.com's AI-curated, expert-reviewed rankings, which spotlight the city's must-see attractions, restaurants and hotels. For example, on the Trip.Best Chengdu list, local attractions include Wuhou Shrine, Sichuan Opera show and Chengdu Museum or find the best hotels in Chengdu.
During the evening award show, guests were captivated by an eye-catching drone light show which stylishly told the history of China and Chengdu, while lively folk music and dances added to the atmosphere.
Chengdu is part of a growing wave of cities benefiting from China's broader inbound tourism push. New visa-free policies, expanded rail connections, and digital-friendly travel tools make multi-city trips across China even more seamless. If you find yourself transiting in China, travellers can benefit from some amazing express tours – a free half-day layover tour designed to allow travellers to explore the charm and traditions of Shanghai or Beijing. Find out more on the Trip.com website: Beijing Express & Shanghai Express.
For more travel inspiration, check out the Trip.Best Asia 100 list or dive straight into Trip.Best Chengdu list and start planning your trip to China.
About Trip.com
Trip.com is an international one-stop travel service provider, available in 24 languages across 39 countries and regions in 35 local currencies. Trip.com has an extensive hotel and flight network consisting of more than 1.5 million hotels and flights from over 640 airlines covering 3,400 airports in 220 countries and regions around the globe. Trip.com 's world-class 24/7 multilingual customer service, as well as additional centres in Edinburgh, Tokyo and Seoul, help to 'create the best travel experience' for its millions of customers worldwide. To book your next trip, visit trip.com.
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In December, a friend sent me the trailer for a new Chinese movie called Clash. It's a sports comedy about a ragtag group of Chinese men who start an American-football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learn to block and tackle, build camaraderie, and face off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. Funny, I thought. In 2014, I wrote an article for The New Republic about a ragtag group of Chinese men who'd started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learned to block and tackle, built camaraderie, and—yes—faced off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. The Chinese studio behind Clash, iQIYI, is not the first to take an interest in the Dockers' story. 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At the very least, one of us had to see the movie. Fortunately, it was premiering in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I booked a flight to the Netherlands. The movie I saw, which came out in Chinese theaters last month, did not alleviate my concerns. But the film, along with the conversations I had with its producer and director, provided a glimpse into the cultural and political forces that led to Clash 's creation. Indeed, the trajectory of the IP itself—from the original article to the Hollywood screenplays to the final Chinese production—says a lot about how the relationship between the United States and China has evolved, or devolved, over the past decade. What began as a story about transcending cultural boundaries through sports has turned into a symbol of just how little China and the U.S. understand each other—and how little interest they have in trying. I went to China in 2011 because I had a vague sense that something important was happening there. I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. (In 2012, then–Vice President Joe Biden negotiated an agreement to raise the quota of U.S. films allowed to screen in China.) It was, in effect, a classic technology transfer, much like General Motors setting up factories in China in exchange for teaching Chinese workers how to build cars. Erich Schwartzel: How China captured Hollywood With a potential audience of 1.4 billion, every U.S. studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to the Chinese market. This led to some ham-fisted creative choices. The filmmakers behind Iron Man 3 added a scene in which a Chinese doctor saves Tony Stark's life, though it wasn't included in the U.S. cut. The Chinese release of Rian Johnson's time-travel thriller, Looper, contained a gratuitous sequence in which Bruce Willis and Xu Qing gallivant around Shanghai. In the same film, Jeff Daniels's character tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's, 'I'm from the future—you should go to China.' The threat of being denied a Chinese release also resulted in countless acts of self-censorship by Hollywood studios. Sony changed the villains of its Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean in postproduction, and removed a scene showing the destruction of the Great Wall of China from the Adam Sandler film Pixels. In this environment, Hollywood put a premium on stories that could appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences. That usually meant going as broad as possible and leaning away from cultural specifics, as in the Transformers and Marvel movies. But in theory, another, more difficult path existed, the Hollywood equivalent of the Northwest Passage: a movie that incorporated Chinese and American cultures equally. This could be a breakthrough not only in the box office but also in storytelling. It could even map a future for the two countries, offering proof that we have more in common than we might think. The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Popit Games Tournament Early Access Launches June 7th with $500,000+ Prize Pool
Mobile Gaming Tournament Opens to Players Worldwide via Steam and Android SOFIA, Bulgaria, June 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Acki Nacki, the fastest blockchain possible, today announced the launch of Popit Games, a multiplayer roguelike deck-building card game, with a highly anticipated Early Access period beginning June 7, 2025. The launch coincides with the game's official availability on Steam, with availability on other platforms upcoming. This limited-time Early Access window runs through June 15, 2025, giving players exclusive first access to play Popit Games pool before the main tournament begins, letting players compete for the game's $500,000+ tournament prize. Popit Games showcases Acki Nacki's breakthrough consensus technology, which reaches finality in just 2 communication steps, the fastest theoretically possible. With full decentralization and security assured, Acki Nacki boasts a community of 5 Million-plus members, many of whom will be vying for the top spot in the tournament. Following the Popit early access period and tournament, Acki Nacki will debut its mainnet launch, which is slated to arrive later this summer. "We're thrilled to bring Popit Games directly to players' mobile devices in a dedicated app," said Mitja Goroshevsky, GOSH Co-founder and Acki Nacki co-author. "The Early Access period represents a crucial opportunity for players to master the game's strategic depth before the main tournament begins. With over $500,000 in prizes at stake, we want to ensure every player has the chance to compete at their highest level." The upcoming Popit Games Tournament features $100,000 in cash prizes for the top 16 players and teams, $400,000 worth of Node Cores for places 1-1000, and 850,000,000 Boosts for places 1-10,000. Boosts enhance user rewards based on their contribution to network security through Acki Nacki's mobile verification system. The tournament will be covered live in several languages by top YouTube and Twitch commentators. Popit Games combines strategic deck-building with competitive multiplayer action, where players strategically create and finalize blocks while competing to surpass set block limits. The game's programmable card sequences allow players to boost their scores while potentially sabotaging opponents, creating dynamic matches that reward strategic thinking and quick adaptation. The tournament features dual leaderboards for both individual players and team competitions. The Early Access period allows players to practice and strategize with the tournament beginning immediately after the Early Access window closes on June 15. The game features a "Best of All" format where players build and maintain the highest possible block throughout the tournament duration. Popit Games will be available for download on Android and PC beginning June 7, 2025, with availability on other platforms upcoming. The Early Access period runs through June 15, 2025. The main tournament runs June 15-22, 2025, with registration available through the official tournament website. For more information about Popit Games, the Early Access period, and tournament registration, visit or follow @ackinackichain on Twitter. Media Contact:M Group Strategic Communications (for GOSH)GOSH@ About GOSH GOSH is the core contributor to the Acki Nacki blockchain, founded and led by former CTO of TON Labs Mitja Goroshevsky. The company recently raised $6 million through its pre-launch node sale with participation from leading investors including Kingsway Capital, Hack VC, K5 Global, and Original Capital. About Acki Nacki Acki Nacki is the fastest blockchain possible. Based on a breakthrough consensus protocol, the Acki Nacki network reaches consensus in 2 communication steps, the lowest number possible in any interactive network, meaning that by design Acki Nacki finalizes transactions faster than any other blockchain that can be built. Acki Nacki has a community of over 5 million users in its mini-app that allows anyone to verify blocks by playing a simple interactive game on their mobile phones. This means players contribute to network security and mine Acki Nacki network coins as block rewards. Acki Nacki is a decentralized blockchain. There is no token pre-mine, airdrop, token generation event, investor or team allocation. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE GOSH Sign in to access your portfolio
