Dan Dan noodles – her favourite – "were originally made by Chengdu street vendors who carried their gear around in a basket or barrel slung from either end of a bamboo shoulder pole, or 'dan' in Mandarin.
In Tianducheng, near Shanghai, a 108m-high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square; while in Chengdu, to the south-west, a residential complex for 200,000 recreates Britain's Dorchester.
Fan once worked for the Chengdu Urban Rivers Association (CURA), an NGO that helps to raise awareness of environmental issues in the region and who helped to develop an eco-farm in Anlong village in Sichuan province.
And it is not easy persuading expatriate workers to take their families to places like Chongqing and Chengdu, where foreign companions and international schools are thin on the ground.
THE scene at the women's and children's hospital in Chengdu could be in any well-appointed modern maternity unit.
Mr Jiang's complaint is that the office of the People's Bank of China in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, advertised a job in a local newspaper specifying that male candidates must be at least 1.68 metres (5ft 6in) tall and females 1.55 metres.
Three days after the disaster, officials put the number of dead at around 20,000, most of them in Sichuan Province north of the provincial capital, Chengdu.
And while the capital is a hub, the spokes reach Shanghai, which is home to its own distinctive and thriving scene, and also to inland cities, such as Wuhan, Chengdu and Guangzhou.So far, so what?
Ms Lim says Chengdu provides "nearly the perfect case study in first re-writing history, then excising it altogether".
In fact, the security forces are having trouble hiring bright young net-wizards these days, since they would rather apply their knowledge commercially.In the case of Huang Qi in Chengdu, online viewers were able to follow his arrest live.
The World Bank-DRC report says China is among the most unequal countries in Asia.During the NPC Bo Xilai, the party chief of Chongqing, a region in the south-west, used the issue in an apparent attempt to revive his tarnished image (a political ally of his had fled to the American consulate in Chengdu last month, emerging a day later to be led away by Chinese security officials).
