Set on the western side of the Red Basin, CHENGDU is a city with two faces: a modern provincial capital whose smoggy streets sport glassy skyscrapers, Japanese four-wheel-drives and fluorescent-coloured bicycles, coupled with narrow back lanes where old men play cards in noisy tea houses and pot plants crowd the wooden porches of traditional, half-timbered homes. Whether you're an old hand or arriving through the air link with Tibet for your first taste of Han China, you'll find Chengdu a far-from-typical metropolis - it's one of the country's most mellow cities, intrinsically interesting and built on a very human scale.

Settled for more than 2400 years and once ringed by almost 20km of battlements and gates, Chengdu was styled Brocade City in Han times, when the urban elite were buried in elegantly decorated tombs, and its silk travelled west along the caravan routes as far as imperial Rome. A refuge for the eighth-century Tang emperor Xuan Zong after his army mutinied over his infatuation with the beautiful concubine Yang Guifei, the city later became a printing centre, producing the world's first paper money. Sacked by the invading Mongols in 1271, Chengdu recovered soon enough to impress Marco Polo with its busy artisans and handsome bridges, and has since survived similar cycles of war and restoration to become, once again, a major industrial and business centre.

Plenty of sites illustrate this chequered history, with a sprinkling of monuments and temples in and around the city well worth a few days' browsing. There's a university founded in the 1920s, an important School of Chinese Medicine , a bustling economy and a strong cultural tradition enjoyed by a million and a half people. Backed by an embryonic nightlife, and with one of China's most outstanding cuisines to spike your taste buds on, at the very least Chengdu offers a comfortable base to organize travel into the rest of Sichuan, or to recuperate afterwards.