Discover Chengdu
Jinli Ancient Street
锦里古街
A rebuilt Qing-style lane beside Wuhou Shrine, hung with red lanterns and packed with Sichuan snack stalls, teahouses and craft shops. Unapologetically touristy, but it is the easiest single place to eat your way through Sichuan street food.
The story
What makes this place special
Jinli is a reconstruction, not a survival: a commercial street in Qing-style architecture built against the wall of the Wuhou Shrine and opened in the 2000s, developed as an extension of the shrine's Three Kingdoms theme with western-Sichuan folk culture layered on. The name is genuine - Jinli was a brocade-weaving district of Chengdu in the Han period, and Chengdu's old nickname is the Brocade City - but the buildings are new. It is worth knowing this before you go, because visitors who think they are walking an ancient street feel cheated and visitors who know it is a themed street enjoy it.
What you’ll discover
A few hundred metres of narrow lanes with grey brick, dark timber, red lanterns and a small canal, divided loosely into a food section, a craft section and a bar section. The craft stalls are the distinctive part: sugar painting, clay figurine modelling, shadow puppetry and paper cutting demonstrated and sold. The food end sells Chengdu street snacks in small portions - sanda pao, dandan noodles, zhong dumplings, rabbit head, chuanchuan skewers - and there is a teahouse and a small outdoor Sichuan opera stage.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Come in the evening. Lit lanterns and a warm crowd are what the street is designed for; by day it is an obviously new shopping lane.
- Eat here in small amounts and treat it as a tasting stall crawl rather than a meal. Portions are deliberately tiny so you can try eight things, and the prices per portion are tourist prices.
- Do not judge Chengdu food by Jinli. The snacks here are a sampler; the versions in Kuanzhai Alley are no better, and the real thing is in ordinary neighbourhood shops away from both.
- It connects directly to the Wuhou Shrine, so buy the shrine ticket and do both; Jinli itself has no gate.
- The sugar painter and the clay modeller are genuinely skilled and will make something to order in a couple of minutes. That, rather than the mass-produced souvenirs, is the thing to spend money on.
When to come
After dark, roughly 7pm to 10pm, when the lanterns are on. Weekday evenings over weekends. During the Spring Festival temple fair next door it is extremely crowded.
Getting around
Easy. Flat, paved, pedestrian-only lanes with no steps on the main route and short distances, so a wheelchair can do the whole street. The constraints are the narrowness of the lanes and the density of people in the evening, which is when you want to be there - a wheelchair in the 8pm crush is hard going. Shop thresholds often have a lip. Public toilets on site.
Worth knowing before you go
Come after 20:00 when the lanterns are on - daytime Jinli is just a shopping lane. Try sanda bing (three-cannon rice cakes) and the Zhang Fei beef, and ignore the identical souvenir shops.
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