Taikoo Li Chengdu at Ten: Lanes, a Temple and 30 Million Visitors a Year

Taikoo Li Chengdu marked its tenth anniversary in April 2025. The retail district, developed by Swire Properties with Sino-Ocean Group, opened in 2015 in the centre of Chengdu, beside Chunxi Road, the city’s main shopping street. It covers 219,000 square metres and receives more than 30 million visitors a year.

A district, not a mall

The site surrounds Daci Temple, a Buddhist monastery with a history of some 1,600 years, where the monk Xuanzang, who later travelled to India, is said to have been ordained. The neighbourhood of lanes around it had decayed, and the city wanted it rebuilt. The usual answer in China at the time would have been an enclosed mall and towers.

The architects, The Oval Partnership of Hong Kong, proposed the opposite: a network of open lanes and squares lined with buildings of two and three storeys, with pitched roofs of grey tile, timber screens and deep eaves in the manner of western Sichuan. Six old buildings that survived on the site, courtyard houses and a guild hall, were restored and kept in place. The temple stands in the middle, and its walls and trees are visible from most of the lanes.

The plan is organised as fast lanes, with fashion and luxury shops, and slow lanes, with cafés, restaurants, bookshops and terraces. The scale is that of a town, and people use it as one. In the evening the lanes are among the liveliest public spaces in the city.

The hotel

The Temple House, with 100 rooms and 42 residences, forms the north-east corner. Its entrance is a restored courtyard of the Qing period, and its spa and teahouse occupy another. It opened in 2015 to a design by Make Architects.

Ten years on

More than 215 shops opened or were rebuilt between 2022 and 2024. Cartier and Louis Vuitton now have multi-storey houses on the main square, Goyard and Lemaire chose the district for new formats, and it is one of the highest-earning retail developments in the country. For the anniversary, Swire installed a ten-metre pavilion of recycled timber beams and published an oral history of the project with more than fifty interviews.

The model has been widely imitated, and Swire has repeated it in other cities. Chengdu remains the best version, because the temple, the old houses and the city’s habit of spending the afternoon in a teahouse give it something real to rest on.

Visiting

The district is at Chunxi Road station, at the junction of metro Lines 2 and 3. Daci Temple is open during the day, free of charge, and has a simple vegetarian restaurant and a tea garden. The Fangsuo bookshop, in a vast basement hall, is worth a visit in itself.