People's Park in the city centre is Chengdu's living room. The park's teahouses are the most atmospheric in the city — large outdoor pavilions where old men spend the afternoon with jasmine tea and newspapers, punctuated by the clack of mahjong tiles. The park also has a small lake with rowing boats, a memorial to the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (an uprising that inadvertently triggered the 1911 revolution), and a good night market around the edges after dark.
At weekends, parents bring photos of unmarried children to a section of the park known as the marriage market, where prospective matches are pinned to umbrellas or laid out on mats. It is one of the most peculiar social institutions in urban China and entirely genuine.