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Exploring Sichuan culture, cuisine and the arts during a long weekend break in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China.

Pacific Delight World Tours (800/221-7179) arranged our Chengdu visit in conjunction with a tour of the Wolong Giant Panda Breeding Reserve. We planned to leave Chengdu by express bus bound for Chongqing, to join a three-day, upstream Three Gorges cruise on the Yangtze. With gratitude and an email packed with contact information (just in case), we landed at Chengdu Airport and found our CITS guide outside baggage claim.

Sammi's Welcome to Chengdu

Sammi (her real name is Li Jie), as she called herself after a sexy Hong Kong pop artiste, sported a striped pink T-shirt, jeans, flowered socks and high-top sneakers, and a long narrow switch of braided black hair that fell neatly behind her shaggy cut. With a "Three Hours In...Chengdu " clipping fresh from the Asian Wall Street Journal in hand, we asked Sammi if we could go to the recommended Sichuan University Museum.

Her momentary pause reminded me of the Chinese government guides I had met in 1980, who insisted you stick with the program they'd been programmed with. Times change. Sammi pulled out her cellphone, called a student she knew to inquire about the University's hours, and suggested that we stop there on the way to the hotel. After all, our time was so short.

Despite the Wall St. Journal's claim that the museum was on the banks of the scenic Funan or Mother River, it was in fact buried behind a security gate and acres of faceless modern dorms at the huge riverside campus. Led by a uniformed guard who turned on lights and ceiling fan as we strolled through each small gallery, the dusty collection of masks, Sichuan folk arts, pottery, opera costumes, and mesmerizing scroll paintings depicting the rot-in-hell demise of Daoist religious fanatics kept us all entranced for an hour.

Chengdu, otherwise known as the Kingdom of Bicycles because its 11 million residents somehow ride over 30 million two-wheelers, is a fascinating city. Modern highrises and fashion malls, several universities, the "cottage" home of the poet Du Fu, and a street choked with bars sporting KTV signs give it a prosperous air.

We asked Sammi about stopping at a tea parlor where vignettes from the comic Sichuan Opera -- part magic show, part cabaret -- supposedly occurred. Suggesting that they would be closed, she arranged for tickets to the evening tourist performance of the Shufeng Yayun Sichuan Opera.

Sichuan Opera

For about US$60, the three of us were driven to a brightly painted, carved teak tea house, part of a former Taoist abbey, with a central courtyard filled with rattan armchairs. While we waited in the wilting 38°C heat, an army of young ushers in yellow T-shirts descended on the few rows of FITS (foreign individual tourists, as we were known) to offer us US $6 upright massages. About two minutes before the show began, swarms of Chinese from bus tours raced in to take their assigned seats.

The next 90 minutes passed in the stupor that only unfamiliar opera and stifling heat can produce. We do recall seeing a deep-throated fire-swallowing act, a costumed dancer who switched dozens of face masks with sleight of hand, a nagged-to-death husband balancing burning candles on his head while his wife watched, a wonderful soloist on what seemed like a zither, and an unusually creative display of hand shadows. The performer used thumbs, fingers and forearms to create a chicken, a rabbit, their barnyard friends, and eventually a wolf which would eat them all.

Our son, for whom we often think we're doing these things, was amused but not nearly as delighted with the show as his parents. (He did love getting a free straw fan with his ticket.)