Discover Chengdu
Kuanzhai Alley (Wide and Narrow Alleys)
宽窄巷子
Three parallel Qing-dynasty lanes - Wide, Narrow and Well - of grey-brick courtyard houses, now restored into teahouses, bars and boutiques. The only surviving Qing street layout in Chengdu, and the most photogenic place in the city centre.
The story
What makes this place special
These lanes are the last fragment of Chengdu's Manchu quarter. In 1718, after the Qing put down an incursion into Tibet, over a thousand Eight Banner soldiers were left to garrison Chengdu and built the Manchu City, also called Shaocheng - a walled, closed quarter that Han Chinese were barred from and that at times housed more than twenty thousand bannermen and their families. The walls came down in the early Republic. The two main lanes were originally Xingren and Taiping hutongs, renamed Wide Alley and Narrow Alley; the third, Well Alley, was Ruyi hutong. They survived because they were unimportant - ordinary housing, never redeveloped. The reconstruction scheme was set up in 2003, cost close to 600 million yuan, and the rebuilt streets reopened on 14 June 2008, covering a core of about 108 mu.
What you’ll discover
Three parallel lanes with connecting cross-alleys, lined with grey brick courtyard houses behind heavy timber gates - restored and in many cases rebuilt. The three have different characters by design: Wide Alley is the traditional-market one, with teahouses, courtyard restaurants, ear-cleaners and street food; Narrow Alley is the upmarket one, with boutique hotels, bars, galleries and international-style restaurants; Well Alley is the young and nightlife one, with a section of excavated old brick wall displayed as a history exhibit. The courtyard interiors, where you can walk through a gateway into a quadrangle, are the best bits.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Walk through the gateways, do not just walk down the lanes. The courtyards behind the gates are what survives of the old architecture; the street frontages are mostly new work.
- Wide Alley in the day, Narrow Alley in the evening, Well Alley at night. The three lanes genuinely have different functions and visitors who do one loop at one time of day see a third of it.
- The food here is tourist-priced. Chengdu has better and cheaper eating three streets away in any direction; come here for the setting and a teahouse, and eat properly elsewhere.
- The brick wall exhibit in Well Alley - a dug-out section of the old city wall with a timeline - is the only part of the site that engages with its own history, and almost nobody stops at it.
- If you want the unrestored version, walk out into the surrounding Shaocheng lanes, Guihua Xiang and the streets around it, which are still ordinary Chengdu and five minutes away.
When to come
Evening, from about 6pm, when the lanterns come on and the restaurants and bars fill; or very early morning if you want the architecture without crowds. Avoid weekend afternoons and the national holidays, when it is one of the most congested places in Chengdu.
Getting around
Easy. The three lanes are flat, paved, pedestrianised and short, with no steps on the main routes, so a wheelchair can do the whole area. The obstacles are the raised stone sills in the courtyard gateways - which are exactly the places worth going into - and the evening crowds. Public toilets throughout; metro access nearby.
Worth knowing before you go
Wide Alley has the best-preserved courtyard architecture, Narrow Alley the bars, Well Alley the modern bar strip. On May Day and National Day the lanes top 100,000 visitors a day - go before 09:00 or after 22:00.
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