Chengdu · 成都

Chengdu keeps its own time. In a country that has laid more high-speed rail in fifteen years than the rest of the world has in a century, the capital of Sichuan is where people still spend a Tuesday afternoon playing mahjong under the plane trees, drinking jasmine tea from a lidded bowl that a waiter tops up from a long-spouted copper kettle. There's a local word for it: bāshì. Roughly, "just right."