Jiezi Ancient Town

This guide to Jiezi Ancient Town in Chengdu follows Tang Qiu, a Tang dynasty poet and former magistrate who abandoned office rather than serve a warlord and retreated into these mountains over a thousand years ago. It traces his private habit of crumpling every poem that satisfied him into a dried gourd by his door, never showing a line to anyone, until illness forced a decision about what to do with a lifetime of unseen work. You'll stand in the square where his statue faces the river that once carried that gourd away.