01

Stop one
Wuhou Shrine
Prokennex Q Gear Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): GREAT crowd, phenomenal crowd, stay hydrated, there is tea at the end of this corridor and I have already located it. So: red walls, green bamboo, and a tomb mound holding Liu Bei, who was an EMPEROR. Big job! Huge job! And what is the name over the door? Wuhou Shrine, after Zhuge Liang. His chancellor. His employee. They merged the two shrines centuries later and kept the staff member's name on the building. Imagine dying, getting a beautiful red-walled complex in southern Chengdu, and everyone who turns up walks straight past you asking where the assistant is. That is a review. That is an eighteen-hundred-year one-star review and it is STILL UP. Right. Teahouse. Somebody find me a teahouse. This tour is going long and I want it to.
02

Stop two
Du Fu Thatched Cottage
Prokennex Q Gear Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): Bamboo, streams, a thatched hut, and the single greatest hot streak in world literature. Du Fu, the greatest poet in Chinese history, turns up here around 760 fleeing a rebellion, builds himself a small thatched roof on this exact site off Qinghua Road, and writes something like two hundred and forty poems in a few years. Two hundred and forty! And his most beloved poem from this address is the one where the autumn wind tears the thatch off his roof and the neighbourhood boys grab it and run away with it. A national treasure. Robbed. By CHILDREN. And instead of moving house he wrote it down and it outlived everybody involved. That is the energy I want from all of you tonight. Pour something. We are toasting the man.
03

Stop three
Jinsha Site Museum
Prokennex Q Gear Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): Best story in the city, hands down, no competition, order another round first. In 2001 a construction crew in western Chengdu is digging out foundations for apartments. Regular day. Regular job. And they hit ivory. Then jade. Then GOLD. They have gone straight through the roof of a three-thousand-year-old civilisation that nobody had any paperwork for whatsoever. The apartments did not happen. Somebody's property development became a national museum with a glass roof built directly over the dig, which you are standing on. And the gold foil disc they pulled out, birds circling a sun, became a national heritage emblem. From a Tuesday! To an emblem! Every hole I have ever dug has contained a pipe. Drink up, we are going out on that one.
04

Stop four
Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding
Prokennex Q Gear Tennis Bag (12 Racquet): Final stop, the loudest quiet place on earth: founded in 1987 with six pandas rescued from the wild. SIX. That is not a breeding programme, that is a dinner party. And the species is famously unenthusiastic about the entire reproduction agenda, so an enormous quantity of extremely serious science got aimed at the problem of persuading a bear to care. And it worked, hundreds of pandas now trace back to that programme, in a bamboo park north of the centre with nurseries and viewing paths. So the punchline of the whole day is that the laziest-looking animal alive triggered one of the most intense research efforts alive. I feel seen. I am also carried everywhere by other people. Right, hot pot, all of you, no arguments, the tour is now a night out.
<p>Chengdu is famously damp. The Sichuan basin sits under cloud for most of the year, the humidity does not really let go, and that is the exact condition a racquet bag is supposed to defend against.
The Q Gear 12 Pack is built for it: three main compartments carrying up to twelve racquets, one of them thermal lined specifically to keep outside moisture off your frames and strings.</p>
<p>The rest is sensibly arranged. A zippered side panel takes the overflow.
A smaller ventilated pocket underneath takes wet clothes or shoes and keeps them isolated from everything else, which is not a luxury in a city where an afternoon can go from bright to soaked without warning. There is a quick-access top zip for a phone, keys and a wallet, so you are not opening a whole main compartment at the gate.
The shoulder straps are ergonomic and can be positioned front or back, and the logo on the outside is reflective — a genuinely useful detail in a city where a very large number of people ride to the courts.</p>
<p>You will use it everywhere from a court out near the panda base in the north of the city to an indoor centre in Wuhou, and by the way it fits the local schedule perfectly, because in Chengdu nothing ends when it ends.
There is always a teahouse afterwards, and then the mahjong starts, and then somebody says hotpot, and it is midnight. Twelve racquets, a dry compartment and a pocket that keeps damp kit away from the rest of your life is exactly what that evening requires.</p>
<p>Prokennex Q Gear Tennis Bag (12 Racquet)</p>
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