Discover Chengdu
People's Park & Heming Teahouse
人民公园・鹤鸣茶社
Chengdu's civic living room: an open park where retirees sing, dance and run an infamous weekend matchmaking corner, with the city's oldest surviving teahouse (founded 1923) spread under bamboo at its centre. The clearest window into how Chengdu actually lives.
The story
What makes this place special
The park opened in the early twentieth century as Shaocheng Park, on the site of the Manchu garrison quarter, and was renamed People's Park after 1949. Inside it stands the Monument to the Railway Protection Movement Martyrs of the Autumn of 1911, commemorating the Sichuan agitation against the nationalisation of locally funded railways - the unrest that helped trigger the revolution of that year. The Heming Teahouse was built in the park in 1923 by a merchant surnamed Gong from Dayi County, in a western-Sichuan pavilion style; it is the oldest surviving teahouse in Chengdu, held its centenary in March 2023, and is now run by a municipal catering company. Almost all the park's other original businesses are gone.
What you’ll discover
A working city park, not a sight: a lake with pedal boats, a bamboo grove, the railway monument, an old air-raid shelter, and open areas where people dance, practise calligraphy on the paving with water brushes, play cards and mahjong, and sing. The Heming Teahouse occupies the lakeside under bamboo, with hundreds of bamboo armchairs and low tables set out in the open, served covered-bowl (gaiwan) tea refilled from long-spouted copper kettles. Ear-cleaners circulate between the tables with their tuning-fork and feather kits, and there are long-spout tea-pouring displays and short Sichuan opera sets.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Go in the morning, around 8.30am, not in the afternoon. Morning is when the dancing, the water calligraphy and the tai chi are happening; by afternoon the park is mahjong and the teahouse is loud.
- You pay once for the leaf and the hot water is refilled free all day, which is the entire institution. Nobody will move you on - a single pot entitles you to sit for hours, and that is what the locals around you are doing.
- Ask for sumaofeng if you want what the regulars drink rather than the jasmine the tourists order.
- Take a lakeside table if you can and order everything you want in one go - the teahouse is enormous and staff are stretched, so flagging someone down twice takes a while.
- The ear cleaning is real and not a tourist gimmick, though it is now priced for tourists. The cleaners come to you; you do not go looking for them. If you do not want it, a shake of the head is enough.
- The Railway Protection monument is two minutes away and is one of the most historically consequential objects in Chengdu, and nearly every foreign visitor walks past it to get to the tea.
When to come
Weekday morning, from opening to about 11am. Spring and autumn are ideal because the whole experience is outdoors under bamboo; it works in light rain under the awnings, and Chengdu's grey humid summer afternoons are the worst time.
Getting around
Very good. The park is flat, broad and paved throughout with ramps, and the teahouse is open-air seating at ground level on level paving, so a wheelchair can get to a table. Seating is low bamboo armchairs, which are awkward to get out of with a bad hip or knee - ask for a chair at the edge of a row. Accessible toilets in the park. This is one of the easiest and most rewarding stops in Chengdu for a visitor with limited mobility.
Worth knowing before you go
The roving ear-cleaners (caier) charge around ¥30 for a few minutes and are a genuine old-Chengdu ritual - agree the price before they start. Grab a table yourself first; staff come to you.
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