Wuhou Shrine & Du Fu Thatched Cottage Route

We'll meet at the main entrance to Wuhou Shrine at the scheduled time. Once we're all together, we'll begin our tour of the two places that made Chengdu famous in Chinese literature and history.

We'll start inside Wuhou Shrine. Did you know this is the only place in China where a ruler and his minister are honoured under the same roof? The site is officially the temple and tomb of Liu Bei, ruler of the Shu kingdom in the third century, but everyone names it after his chancellor Zhuge Liang — a strategist so admired that his fame overtook his king's. Your guide will introduce you to the Three Kingdoms period, the half-century of war and rivalry after the Han dynasty fell, which is as familiar to Chinese readers as the Trojan War is in the West. We'll also walk the corridor of red walls and bamboo that has become one of the most photographed spots in the city. The halls we'll see were rebuilt in 1672, under the Qing dynasty.

Once we've finished at the shrine, your guide will take us to a restaurant nearby for lunch, so we'll have a chance to sit down and try some Sichuan food before the second half of the day.

After lunch, we'll take the metro across the city together with your guide, and continue on to Du Fu Thatched Cottage. Du Fu is one of China's greatest poets, and almost every schoolchild in the country can recite something he wrote. In 759 he arrived in Chengdu as a refugee from war, built a cottage by a stream on the western edge of town, and spent about four years here — the most productive period of his life, with more than 240 poems written on this spot.

The site today is a garden of bamboo, water and old trees, with memorial halls added over the centuries by admirers, and a thatched cottage rebuilt to show how he would have lived. Your guide will tell you what he wrote here, why it still matters, and what the poems say about the city we're standing in.

Finally, the tour will come to an end at Du Fu Thatched Cottage, after a total of approximately 5 hours.