On the morning of June 4th, after the clearance operation at Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, police were ordered to evict protesters from Tianfu Square in Chengdu. According to official accounts, 51 of the 300 students remaining left during the hour-and-a-half-long peaceful eviction. However, when news of the Beijing massacre broke, thousands of citizens returned to the streets of Chengdu and marched again. They held up wreaths of mourning and slogans: "We Are not Afraid of Death"; "June 4th Massacre, 7,000 Casualties"; "Overthrow the Dictatorial Government!"; and "Return Our Classmates to Us". The following day, the street movement became more intense, and many places in the city center of Chengdu, such as the People's Shopping Center and the People's Movie Theater, were burned.

Andy Levin, a member of the US House of Representatives, was on the scene when all this was happening. Levin wrote in his memoirs, "Young people were breaking windows and destroying buildings to express their discontent with the government. A student from Chengdu Sport University, not involved in the looting, told me, 'People are burning buildings because of the bad government. Martial law is wrong. We don't like it…' Three fire trucks came from the direction of the Square to put out the blaze. However, when they stopped to connect the hoses and aimed them at the flames, people surrounded the fire trucks and set one of them on fire! And within five minutes, they had flipped the other one over. It was unbelievable. The crowd roared its approval. Five minutes later, the tear gas canisters began to explode and people fled, but the panic didn't stop as the explosions continued and got closer. There were four… five… six explosions."

References: "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited"; "The Big Bang of History: A Complete Record of the June 4th Incident"; "The Tiananmen Papers"; [紐約時報中文網("New York Times Chinese Edition")(Chinese)] (https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20190531/congressman-remembers-june-4th-in-chengdu/zh-hant/)