Chengdu's People's Park Teahouse Is the New Face of Chinamaxxing

The Chinamaxxing video format keeps moving indoors. After night markets and bamboo-pole dances, the scene now spreading across TikTok and Instagram is slower: a foreign visitor sitting in a Chengdu park teahouse, lifting the lid off a bowl of jasmine tea, and letting an afternoon pass the way locals spend it. People's Park, in central Chengdu, is where that scene keeps being filmed this autumn.

The numbers behind the rush are real. Alipay reported that inbound visitor spending through foreign-card binding and Alipay+ rose close to 50% year on year over the Golden Week holiday, with Chengdu ranking among the ten cities where inbound visitors spent the most. The pattern matches what Chinamaxxing has been about all year: visitors want ordinary Chinese life, not just the landmark photo. In Chengdu that means a lidded-bowl tea at an outdoor table under the trees.

People's Park has been a working-class leisure spot since the 1910s, and the teahouse culture there is not staged for tourists. On the National Day weekend, resident-run performances drew small crowds of onlookers, and the park's famous matchmaking corner — where parents post profiles of their adult children on umbrellas and boards — became a quiet curiosity for visitors from Spain, France, Chile, Russia and Canada, several of whom told Chinese media they found the everyday scenes fresher than the standard sights. One visitor from Chile put it plainly: under a tree at an outdoor teahouse, a person can finally relax.

If you go: People's Park is at No.12 Shaocheng Road, a five-minute walk from Tianfu Square metro station (Lines 1 and 2). The main teahouses charge roughly ¥15–30 for a lidded-bowl tea with free refills of hot water; hours typically run from early morning to around 18:00–19:00, with the liveliest scene in late afternoon. Pay by Alipay or WeChat once your foreign card is bound, and keep a little cash as backup. Go on a weekday if you want a seat near the lake; weekends draw local families.

The charm is the absence of an entrance fee and a script. Chengdu's teahouses cost about what a single café latte costs in London or New York, and they run on a slower clock. For travellers who have already seen the pandas and the Giant Buddha, an afternoon at People's Park is the cheapest way to understand why "maxxing" — going all in on a place — became a thing: you are not watching China, you are sitting in it.