Small shops flank a street in Anren, a small town in Sichuan province.                    Photo provided to China Daily

  Anren is an ideal place to wind down and enjoy Sichuan snacks, but it is also a great place to immerse yourself in China's recent history, write Raymond Zhou and Li Yu.

  People visit museums to get a taste of history, and they hang out at old towns to be immersed in history. Since the functions of these two kinds of places overlap somewhat, why not put one inside the other?

  That is exactly the idea for Anren, a small town about an hour's drive to the west of downtown Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province.

  China boasts thousands of charming little communities rich in heritage, but none has as many museums as Anren. The town, which has a population of 35,000, has 35 museums featuring more than 8 million pieces of collectibles, and more museums are being planned.

  The number of residents is deceptive because the museums cater mostly to visitors. Last year more than 4.5 million people visited the town. The thing about Anren is, you don't feel like you're surrounded by museums. Rather, it has a theme park-cum-movie backlot feel. Instead of the humongous halls at State or province-level museums, those in Anren offer a ton of fun factoids, are thematically organized, and friendly to those with little historical knowledge.

  For example, Jianchuan Museum is actually a cluster of 24 museums, each with its own theme and collection. It started with memorabilia from the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), and has been building on that theme, but later branched out to all kinds of collections. The one that touched a deep chord with me is the Museum of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, where everything is authentic and details of the ruins convey an immediacy that is typically lacking in most historical collections.

  Not only does it display objects; it puts a human face on the disaster. The museum is also home to a pig that survived 36 days trapped in a fallen building. The pig is now so well fed it can hardly walk. It adds a much-needed touch of light-heartedness to an otherwise heavy topic.

  There is also the oddity of a gallery devoted to bound feet, a practice that was outlawed a century ago.

             Walking along Anren's streets can immediately transport you back to the                  early 20th century. Photo provided to China Daily

 Mix of architectural styles

  During the first half of the 20th century, Anren was home to many of the warlords and politicians in Sichuan, who built spacious manors along the main streets or in the back alleys. Of these, 27 compounds still remain, remnants of an East-meets-West architectural style popular at the time.

  What's interesting is they do not hew to a uniform architecture such as Beijing's courtyard homes (siheyuan), but adopt a great variety of sizes and fusions. There is one with a big garden right in the middle of the compound, and another, which has been converted to a bed-and-breakfast inn, uses the front as a bookstore.

  Invariably, the entrances on the main street look quite inconspicuous. Small shops flank the street, and in between them is the occasional door opening to a narrow corridor. Only when you walk up the corridor will you find a much wider row of rooms.

  There are only three streets in old Anren, but rambling along them can immediately transport you to the early 20th century. The Republic of China era, with its smattering of Western influence and local Sichuan color, is preserved so thoroughly that many film and television crews shoot their period dramas here. Even a route for trolleys was constructed recently to add not just a visual touch, (a town this size probably had little need for this mode of transportation) but also the clanking that rises above the dim of the crowd.

There is also a gallery devoted to vintage films. And Cui Yongyuan, a television host who for several years did a weekly show on China's film history, has a museum that is a draw for cinephiles.

             Anren was home to many of the warlords and politicians in Sichuan, who built              spacious manors along the main streets or in the back alleys. Photo provided              to China Daily

 Infamous estate

  About 10 minutes' walk from this commercial hub lies another cluster of manors-museums. This one belongs to the Liu family, the richest of them all. The Liu estate takes up 70,000 square meters of land, of which 20,000 square meters are buildings, and it has 350 rooms.

  The father of the patriarch, Liu Wencai, was a small landlord with a brewery. They had a courtyard with a dozen rooms. He had six sons, some of whom later became military commanders who controlled Sichuan and neighboring provinces. Wencai, a small trader, was assigned to the lucrative posts of tax collection as well as tobacco and liquor trade.

  The southern part of the estate was built one section at a time, thus gaining the tacked-on feel and a maze-like layout. The northern part, which he built for his brother Wenhui, was carefully designed.

  Liu Wencai had a dramatic life that befits this convoluted mansion. He had a military conflict with his nephew Liu Xiang and lost. His brother Wenhui, also a warlord, changed allegiance to the Communists shortly before the founding of New China, and later served as minister of forestry in the new government.

  Wencai died in 1949 and was later molded into an exemplar of the evil landlord class. Some of the functions of his homestead were interpreted in that vein, but have been debunked in recent years. A cellar flooded with water was said to be a water prison cell for poor peasants, and now it's divulged that it was nothing but a warehouse for opium, which required high humidity.

  A 1965 collection of clay sculptures detailing the mostly trumped-up "evil deeds" of the Liu household, which ironically served to put his name in national consciousness, is still on display, now a cultural relic of its own time. Only now you get to see up close the myriad facets of this historical personality, the place he lived and how the different public images of him took shape. It's a piece of Chinese history with its many shades of coloration.(From China Daily)