Chunxi Road

Chunxi Road is Chengdu's main pedestrian shopping street, running north-south near the city centre and connecting to the Taikoo Li development and Daci Temple. It holds the city's most concentrated collection of Chinese and international retail, from luxury brands to fast fashion to street food carts. It is liveliest in the evening when office workers fill the restaurants and the LED displays above the shops light up the street.

For visitors, it is primarily interesting as an index of 21st-century Chinese urban commercial culture — the flagship stores of homegrown Chinese brands alongside the global ones, the scale and confidence of the investment, the crowds on a Tuesday evening. The nearby Taikoo Li development is more interesting architecturally.

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A story
Chunxi Road was established as a commercial street in 1924 and was briefly renamed Minzhu Road after 1949 before reverting to its original name. The street's defining feature is a bronze statue of a fashionable 1930s Chengdu woman, arm raised to hail a rickshaw. She has become so associated with the street that she is photographed more than almost any actual sight in the city. Behind her, the glass and steel of a 2000s redevelopment shows how thoroughly Chengdu has rebuilt itself in the past two decades.