Chengdu – Capital of West China
China Today by Bill Brown, November 10, 2016 Adjust font size:
The couple taste Sichuan’s most famous dish – the tongue-numbing mapo tofu.
Sichuan cuisine gets its seven flavors through almost 40 cooking techniques, including frying, stewing, and sautéing, and dozens of ingredients, including garlic, ginger, scallions, star anise, bean paste, fermented glutinous rice wine, mushrooms, fungi, and many more.
Foreigners’ favorites include kung pao chicken, Sichuan beef, braised eggplant, barbeque pork, chicken and sweet corn soup and hot and sour soup, Sichuan shrimp, and of course Sichuan’s most famous dish, the tongue-numbing mapo tofu, cooked by a pockmarked lady (mapo) over a century ago.
I could have happily spent a month or two in Chengdu, but we also wanted to see giant pandas (80 percent of which live in Sichuan) and China’s largest monkey reserve (I was born in the year of the monkey, so felt right at home there). But Sichuan’s most famous site is Mt. Emei.
Only a two-hour train ride from Chengdu, Mt. Emei is one of China’s four holy mountains, and site of the country’s first Buddhist Temple. I especially like Jiulao Cave Scenic Area and the Qingyin Pavilion, and also the ancient plank path along the cliffs. It feels like a spacewalk, and the 200 plant species there which are found nowhere else on the planet add to Emei’s otherworldliness.
The 71-meter-high Leshan Giant Buddha, begun in 713 to protect boatmen from the raging river, took 90 years to carve out of the cliff. Few visitors know that the statue has survived for more than 1,000 years due to an ingenious drainage system in the Buddha’s hair, shoulders and garment folds that carries water away before it can erode the statue.
Whether irrigating entire provinces or carving colossal Buddhas, Sichuanese build for the ages.
I was happy to learn that Leshan is also famous for its cooking. In quaint little Xiba Old Town, about 20 km from Leshan City, we feasted on Bobo Chicken, Qiánwèi Flatcake and Xiba Tofu, which is used to create more than 100 dishes. Even now, 20 or more years later, my mouth still waters at the memory.
I hope someday to drive around China again and write about its two decades of changes, but next time around, I’m spending an entire month in Sichuan!
DR. BILL BROWN is a professor at the Xiamen University MBA Center and Academic Director of its OneMBA program.