Why this trip, and why most people do it badly

Everyone in Chengdu tells you to go to the pandas. Go to the pandas. But if you have a second spare day, the pair of sites northwest of the city, Mount Qingcheng and the Dujiangyan irrigation system, is the best full day out of Chengdu and almost nobody plans it properly.

The usual mistake is trying to do both in one day from central Chengdu using buses. It is possible. It is also miserable. Do it by high-speed train instead and you gain about three hours.

The transport bit, which is the whole trick

Trains leave from Chengdu North and from Chengdu West, run roughly every thirty to sixty minutes, and take around forty minutes to Dujiangyan station. Book on the official rail app a day or two ahead; morning departures around 7.30 to 8.30 are the ones that matter.

• Chengdu to Dujiangyan: about 40 minutes, second class roughly 15 yuan
• Dujiangyan station to the irrigation site: local bus or a ten-minute taxi
• Dujiangyan to Qingcheng Mountain: about 30 minutes by taxi, or a short train hop to Qingchengshan station
• Return trains run until around 9pm, but aim to be back on a train before 7pm

Dujiangyan: the engineering you did not expect to enjoy

Dujiangyan was built around 256 BC and is still working. That is not a marketing line, it is a fact, and it is the reason the Chengdu plain has been a reliable rice bowl for two thousand years while other regions starved.

The system splits the Min River into an inner and outer channel with a fish-mouth levee, then uses a narrow bottle-neck channel to control how much water enters the irrigation network, and a spillway to dump excess. No dam. It has survived earthquakes that flattened everything else nearby.

Walk it from the fish mouth up to the suspension bridge and the Two Kings Temple. Give it two to three hours. The cable car across the river is optional and the queue is usually worse than the walk.

Qingcheng Mountain: pick your version

This is where people go wrong. Qingcheng has a front mountain and a back mountain, and they are completely different days out.

• Front mountain: Taoist temples, stone steps, cable car, about four hours, the one with the history. This is where Taoism took shape.
• Back mountain: waterfalls, longer trails, more climbing, fewer people, six hours or more. Do not attempt this as half of a combined day.

On a one-day trip, do the front mountain. Take the cable car up and walk down, or the reverse if your knees are better than mine. The summit area has the Shangqing Palace and a view that opens out over the Sichuan basin when the cloud lifts, which in autumn it often does by early afternoon.

Eating on the mountain

There are small restaurants near the cable car stations and around the temple courtyards. Menus are short: cold noodles, mountain vegetables, tofu, and a local cured pork. Prices are higher than in the city but not absurd. Bring cash or make sure your phone payment works, because signal on the upper trails is patchy.

The version I would actually book

Leave Chengdu on the 7.40 train. Do Dujiangyan first, finish by noon, eat lunch near the north gate, taxi to Qingcheng front mountain by 1.30. Cable car up, walk the temple circuit, down by 5.30. Taxi back to Qingchengshan station and catch a train into Chengdu in time for a late hotpot.

If that sounds like too much, cut Dujiangyan and give Qingcheng the whole day. Half of one site done calmly beats both of them done at a jog.

What to bring

• Proper shoes for wet stone steps. The mountain is damp year-round.
• A light rain shell, even in a dry forecast.
• Passport, for the train and any ticket checks.
• Warm layer from October to March. The mountain runs several degrees colder than the city.

Originally published on 71Asia Tours blog.