Out in the western suburbs of Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, the town of Pengzhen is home to what’s said to be the oldest teahouse in China. About 300 years old, the Guanyin Pavilion is at the heart of a tiny community of historic streets where, against a tide of rapid modernisation, the local population proudly preserves its heritage and traditional way of life.

The teahouse serves a blend of tea leaves and flowers grown on the foothills of the Himalayas, below the Tibetan plateau, near the town of Ya’an

“An old proverb goes: ‘In Sichuan you’ll see more teahouses than sunny days’,” Qiang Li, the Pavilion’s manager, tells me as he unlocks a pair of heavy wooden doors. “Even though they can be found on every street corner, none are like this one. This is a yizhu, a hidden pearl.”

We step into the bamboo and adobe building and he flicks a switch. A series of lightbulbs come to life, revealing striking communist propaganda splashed across the walls. Fading images of Mao Zedong gaze down, the former leader of the People’s Republic beaming his trademark beneficent smile.

The Guanyin Pavilion teahouse.

“The teahouse has survived centuries of Chinese history as well as the many fires that destroyed the rest of Pengzhen,” Mr Li continues as he lights an old woodstove and loads it with rusting kettles. “It has even escaped the modern developers and their concrete,” he adds with a laugh. “The whole neighbourhood is the same. It’s a piece of the old China that is disappearing everywhere else. Go see for yourself.”

Clockwise from top left: a server pours boiling water from a height to extract maximum flavour from the jasmine green tea; a local in front of an old propaganda poster; artefacts from the teahouse’s former opium smoking den; a teahouse worker enjoys a bowl of soup at lunchtime

Outside, the sun is rising over the buckled terracotta rooftops of Horse Market Street. An old lady shuffles into town in her slippers, her tiny frame laden with foraged roots and leaves. She stops to exchange pleasantries with a vendor setting up a stall of the Chinese delicacy pidan (preserved egg), before heading off in search of customers of her own down the town’s main thoroughfare, Forever Harvest Street.

There, in one of Pengzhen’s oldest dwellings, I meet Zhihu Fu who is hanging freshly cut noodles out to dry, like shredded clothes on a washing line. “So much history in China has been knocked down completely, or it’s been rebuilt to look old, but not here,” she says in the courtyard of her centuries-old home, now under a local government preservation order. “The only thing that’s new is the paved road – and that only arrived a year ago.”

Zhihu Fu, 56, the town’s noodle maker

A local chef, Bin Li, hurries over to buy some bundles of wheat flour mien and I follow him back to his restaurant. “A Heavenly Table” for a breakfast of mapo doufu, which translates as “pock-marked old woman’s tofu”, a Sichuan speciality.

“This restaurant was once a communist-run canteen which served free food to the workers,” he says, waving a spoon towards photographs of the former party chairman. “We are not rich people but we have a type of wealth in knowing our past”, he says. “That’s rare in China. No matter what we think of what went before, we like to cherish it.”

Chef Bin Li in the kitchen of his restaurant, A Heavenly Table, left; and a customer waits for a lunchtime meal

At the next table I chat with a man who is visiting from distant Xi’an, China’s Imperial capital for 11 dynasties. “Here, there’s a different kind of history on display,” he says. “The attraction is not in grand temples or museums but simple, everyday life. You don’t learn the history of emperors here, instead the stories of ordinary people.”

I continue to the junction with Chicken Market Street, where I’m introduced to the local doctor, Qingyuan Xu, a man with a captivating, toothless grin and fingers disconcertingly wrapped in yellowing bandages, the result of an accidental knife wound.

Qingyuan Xu, Pengzhen’s traditional medicine practitioner, alongside his wife, in his doctor’s ‘surgery’

“I recently cured my wife of leukaemia,” he says, as if to reassure me of his credentials, “using a tincture made from the hoods of cobra snakes”. Restored to good health, Mrs Xu joins us and promptly lights up a celebratory cigarette.

Qingyuan, 78, began studying traditional medicine at the age of eight under the tutelage of Master Liu, one of the physicians to Chiang Kai-shek, the former Chinese leader who was ousted by the communists and forced to flee to Taiwan. “All lives, even humble ones, are touched by the greatest milestones of history”, he says.

Clockwise from top left: a monk at a nearby temple; the town barber awaits customers in his ‘salon’; an old lady selling foraged roots and leaves; Biru Wang, 78, the town’s supplier of pidan

I loop back to the teahouse where mid-morning sunlight is now pouring through holes in the roof. Old men sit in lonely silence, staring into the distance as if mesmerised by the puffs of Thermos steam and cigarette smoke sailing up into the rafters.

Pengzhen’s Forever Harvest Street – renamed in the 1950s in honour of one of Chairman Mao’s grandest ambitions for the Great Leap Forward

In one corner I see a young woman taking photographs of an antique ceramic. The figurine portrays a landlord forced to his knees by students, his arms tied in preparation for torture, a dunce’s hat denouncing him as evil and worthy of death. “There are things here from the old China which we don’t get taught in school,” she tells me in a guarded whisper.

“This teashop, this neighbourhood, they don’t look anything like the modern China I know,” she adds. “I’m from Guangzhou and in the big cities we don’t get many opportunities to experience the past but here you can literally feel it – it’s like history has come back to life.”

• Guanyin Pavilion Old Tea House, 23 Mashiba Street, Pengzhen Town, Shuangliu District, Chengdu. Pengzhen is off the tourist trail so it’s best to take a cab. A ride from central Chengdu using Didi Chuxing (Chinese version of Uber, available in an English-language version) takes around 45-60 minutes and costs from £10 one-way. It’s worth considering downloading both Didi Xuching and a VPN such as ExpressVPN in advance of travel to ensure your mobile phone functions optimally in China. Waygo, the visual translator is recommended for menus and signs, and a voice translation app is useful as almost no English is spoken in Pengzhen

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