Chongqing

Overview

Chongqing municipality is the stretch of the upper Yangtze between Sichuan and the Three Gorges, run as a province-level unit since 1997, and the river organises any visit: cruises through the gorges leave from the city’s piers, and Dazu, Wulong and the resettled river towns are each a train ride from the centre. It is one of China’s four direct-administered municipalities and the only one inland; the other three (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin) are on the coast.

The scale confuses people. The municipality covers roughly the area of Austria, about 82,400 km², and counts around 32 million residents, which makes it the largest “city” in the world on paper; most of that is farmland, mountains and a scatter of separate towns, not one urban mass. The Yangtze crosses the whole territory from west to east on a 665 km course, and it is the eastern half, where the river cuts through the Wu Mountains, that holds the first of the Three Gorges.

Chongqing city itself gets its own guide, with pages for Hongya Cave, Liziba station, Eling Park and Ciqikou. This page is about everything beyond the peninsula. Three things justify the extra days. The Yangtze cruise downstream to Yichang in Hubei, three nights on the water past Fengdu, Shibaozhai and Baidicheng and through the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges to the Three Gorges Dam. The Dazu Rock Carvings, a UNESCO site since 1999 with some 50,000 statues cut between the 9th and 13th centuries into hillsides west of the city. And Wulong Karst, part of the South China Karst World Heritage listing, with three natural limestone bridges over 200 m high and a show cave that is the only one in China on the UNESCO list.

There is a fourth reason for anyone interested in military history: Diaoyucheng at Hechuan, the hilltop fortress where the Mongol Great Khan Möngke died during a siege in 1259, an event that pulled Mongol armies out of Syria and split the empire.

History & character

Ba, and a name that means double celebration

Before the Qin unification this was the state of Ba, a loose confederation of clans that fished and hunted more than it farmed. Its administrative centres included Jiangzhou (modern Chongqing), Dianjiang (Hechuan) and Pingdu (Fengdu); Qin conquered Ba in 316 BC but let the Ba elite keep local rule rather than flooding the territory with settlers. Ba bronzes are in the Three Gorges Museum in the city.

The Qin general Zhang Yi named the settlement Jiangzhou. The Sui renamed it Yu Prefecture in 581, which is why “Yu” is still the one-character abbreviation for Chongqing and the name of the central district, Yuzhong. The present name arrived in 1189, when the Southern Song prince Zhao Dun was made king and then emperor in quick succession and called it a “double celebration”, chongqing.

The fortress that stopped the Mongols

From 1243 the Southern Song built a chain of hill fortresses across the region against the Mongols. The most famous is Diaoyucheng, on a hill with water on three sides near the meeting of the Qu, Fu and Jialing rivers outside Hechuan. It held out for 36 years and more than 200 engagements, and in 1259 the Great Khan Möngke died there during the siege, either from a projectile or from disease depending on which sources you believe. His death sent Mongol armies home from Syria to settle the succession and precipitated the civil war that broke the empire into pieces. A sister fortress, Tianshengcheng, survives as a ruins park above Wanzhou.

Emptied, refilled, opened to steamers

In 1644 the rebel Zhang Xianzhong took Chongqing with the rest of Sichuan and is said to have massacred and scattered so many people that the province was left depopulated; the Qing emperors then sponsored waves of immigration to refill it. For most of the imperial period the river was the only route into Sichuan from the east, and it was a brutal one: by the late 1700s grain was rowed downstream each year and cargo hauled back upstream by gangs of men on towpaths cut into the gorge cliffs, a practice that survived in some form into the 1970s.

Wartime capital

Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreated here after the fall of Wuhan and Chongqing served as provisional capital from November 1937 to May 1946, formally declared so on 6 September 1940. Factories and universities relocated from eastern China turned an inland port into an industrial city, and General Joseph Stilwell, one of the Allied deputy commanders for Southeast Asia, was based in the city after December 1941. Japanese bombing ran from 18 February 1938 to 19 December 1944: by incomplete counts, 268 raids, some with more than 150 bombers, aimed at breaking the government’s will.

The city had one more turn as a capital: after Nanjing fell to the Communists in April 1949 the Nationalist government moved first to Guangzhou and then to Chongqing, and flew out in late November 1949.

The 1997 municipality and the dam

On 14 March 1997 the National People’s Congress merged the city with the Fuling, Wanxian and Qianjiang prefectures and took the whole lot out of Sichuan: a single municipality of 30 million people in 43 former counties, created to spearhead western development and to coordinate resettlement from the Three Gorges reservoir. The dam had squeaked through the NPC in 1992 with 1,767 of 2,633 delegates in favour, an unusually thin margin for that body; construction started in December 1994, the dam body was finished in 2006, the power plant was fully operational in 2012 and the ship lift followed in 2016. At its maximum the reservoir stands 175 m above sea level, 110 m above the river below the dam, and stretches about 660 km upstream.

The modern political footnote is Bo Xilai, the Party Secretary of Chongqing stripped of his posts in 2012 after his wife was charged with murdering the British businessman Neil Heywood; he was jailed for life in 2013.

The character that comes out of all this is a river-port culture, what locals call dockside culture, blamed for everything from the swearing to the hotpot, and a habit of rebuilding on top of whatever was there before.

See & do

The Three Gorges cruise

The set piece. Ships leave Chaotianmen and run downstream to Yichang in Hubei: three nights down, four nights back up against the current, with the luxury operators including shore excursions (Fengdu, the Shennong Stream or Lesser Three Gorges by small boat, and the dam) and all meals except dinner on boarding day. Expect ¥700 to ¥2,500 depending on the ship and cabin class. Victoria Cruises and Viking are among the international-facing operators.

The gorges themselves run about 310 km from Baidicheng to the Nanjin Pass at Yichang, with Fengjie and Wushan on the Chongqing side and Badong and Zigui in Hubei. Qutang is the shortest, 8 km, and the narrowest, 150 m at its widest point, between mountains reaching 1,200 m; the entrance is the cliff gate of Kuimen, and Qutang is the gorge printed on the back of the ten-yuan note. Wu Gorge runs 45 km from Wushan to Guandukou past the Twelve Peaks, the best known of them Goddess Peak. Xiling, 66 km and wholly in Hubei, was the most dangerous of the three for rapids before the dams; the Three Gorges Dam sits in the middle of it at Sandouping.

Most itineraries also stop at Shibaozhai in Zhong County, a 200 m crag with a red nine-storey wooden pavilion built against it in 1819 so that pilgrims no longer had to be hauled up by chains; three more storeys were added in 1956, and a protective dyke was built around the base when the reservoir rose.

Dazu Rock Carvings

Seventy-five protected sites, some 50,000 statues and more than 100,000 carved characters spread across the hills of Dazu district, showing Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian subjects side by side, which is unusual for Chinese cave art. Two clusters matter. Beishan was begun in the late 9th century by the prefect Wei Junjing and continued by monks, nuns and gentry over 300 m of cliff. Baodingshan is the masterpiece: a U-shaped valley of carvings 500 m long created in the 12th and 13th centuries by the monk Zhao Zhifeng, who gave 70 years of his life to it. The three lesser sites, Nanshan, Shimenshan and Shizhuanshan, are mostly Taoist or three-religion work from the 11th and 12th centuries and cost ¥30 each.

Everyone visiting Baodingshan must go through the visitor centre first (08:30 to 16:30, no tickets after 16:10) and take the shuttle bus from there. In peak season, 1 March to 30 November, Baodingshan costs ¥115 and Beishan ¥70; in winter ¥100 and ¥50. Combination tickets add the digital cinema (¥80 on its own) and the shuttle. Beishan also runs a night tour, 19:00 to 23:00. The carvings were closed to outsiders for years; Chinese visitors were let in from 1961 and foreigners from 1980, and until 1975 the road to Baodingshan was a mud track.

Wulong Karst

Three areas make up the UNESCO component. The Three Natural Bridges span the Yangshui River, a tributary of the Wu, within 1.5 km of each other: Tianlong is 235 m high, Qinglong 281 m and Heilong 223 m, with two sinkholes 276 to 285 m deep between them. Entry (08:30 to 16:30) is ¥95 from November to March and ¥155 from April to October, including the shuttle and the Tianlong lift down into the gorge; a via ferrata runs along a water channel cut into the cliff. Next door, the Longshuixia Fissure Gorge is ¥105 with shuttle and lift.

Furong Cave at Jiangkou, near where the Furong River meets the Wu, was found by farmers in 1993 and opened the following year; it is 2,846 m long and unusual for its coral-like and dog-tooth calcite flowers, helictites and gypsum crystals. Tickets are ¥150 including the cable car, 08:30 to 16:30, and a gondola over the Furong River has run since December 2023. The third area, the Qingkou Tiankeng cluster around Houping, is five sinkholes that form the only known tiankeng group thought to have been carved by surface water erosion.

Diaoyucheng

Walk the walls of the Song fortress at Hechuan where the siege of 1259 played out; the hill still shows why it held, with water on three sides and the fortifications following the cliff line. Interpretation is largely in Chinese; the Tianshengcheng ruins at Wanzhou have bilingual signage and a small museum, ¥10 in 2025.

Hot springs

The municipality has dozens of hot-spring resorts. The Northern Hot Springs at Beibei have been a bathing spot and Buddhist site for around 1,600 years; the park is ¥10 but bathing starts at ¥308. Cheaper soaks include the Southern Hot Springs in Banan from ¥88, Tianci in Jiulongpo at ¥79, Tongjing in Yubei at ¥118 to ¥148, and Ronghui in Shapingba (¥149), which made the news in 2018 with a pool designed to look like a hotpot, complete with red water and inflatable chillies.

The city in an evening

If the gorges are the trip, give the city at least a night: the Liangjiang evening cruise from piers 5 and 6 at Chaotianmen runs an hour on both rivers, 19:30 to 22:20, ¥95 to ¥118, and covers the lit skyline and Hongya Cave from the water. The rest is in the city guide.

Towns & cities

Chongqing city

Chongqing is the peninsula where the Jialing meets the Yangtze, and the reason most people come to the municipality at all. Cruises leave from the piers at Chaotianmen, the square at the tip of the peninsula where the two rivers join. Before you leave for the gorges, the Three Gorges Museum on Renmin Road covers the Ba culture and the drowned river valley, and is free, Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 17:00 with last entry at 16:00. The city guide covers the neighbourhoods, the stacked streets and Hongya Cave.

Dazu

Dazu, a district of about 1.07 million people west of the city, was founded in 758 during the Tang; and its name means abundance and prosperity. The five carving sites are the whole point of the visit, but the district has its own table: rabbit hotpot and Youting crucian carp are the local dishes, and at Chinese New Year the town of Zhong’ao burns a 20 m bamboo fire dragon while bare-chested performers dance it through showers of molten iron.

Wulong

Wulong, southeast of the city on the Wu River, is the karst district. The tourist centre is at Xiannüshan (Fairy Mountain), a plateau resort town where the shuttle buses to the natural bridges and the fissure gorge start; the Fairy Mountain National Forest Park above it is grassland and forest with easy trails, ¥50 to enter. Black goat is the district’s speciality, sold as jerky and preserved slices in the town markets.

Fuling

Fuling is where the Wu River empties into the Yangtze, downstream of the city. Its claim on the visitor is Baiheliang, the White Crane Ridge: a 1.6 km rock ledge in the river carved with 163 inscriptions and fish figures that recorded low-water levels from the year 763 onwards, the longest such sequence in the world. The ridge now lies more than 30 m under the reservoir and is viewed through the Baiheliang Underwater Museum, opened in May 2009. Fuling is also the home of zhacai, the pickled mustard tuber sold in foil packets across China; the Fuling Zhacai company is listed in Shenzhen and passed 15 billion packets sold in 2021.

Fengdu

Fengdu, about 170 km downstream, is the Ghost City: a hillside of temples and statues on Ming Mountain laid out as the capital of the Chinese underworld, where the dead are judged before passing on. The reservoir cut the site off from the county seat, which was rebuilt on the south bank; the Ghost Town is reached by ferry from the main town, opens 07:00 to 17:20, and costs ¥100 from April to November and ¥60 from December to March.

Fengdu also has the Snowy Jade Cave (Xueyu Cave), a pure white karst cave 12 km from the Ghost City, ¥98, and Nantian Lake at 1,400 to 2,000 m, a summer cooling-off spot and a winter snow-sports one, ¥60.

Wanzhou

Wanzhou is the municipality’s second urban core, 228 km from the city on the upper reaches of the Three Gorges reservoir; the name comes from a phrase about the place where ten thousand rivers converge and ten thousand traders gather. It is the place to understand the dam’s human cost. The Chongqing Three Gorges Immigration Memorial on Nanbin Avenue (free, Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 17:00) tells the story of the more than a million people relocated, in a mostly positive official register but with some acknowledgement of the hardship; the Wanxian Incident Memorial covers the 1926 British bombardment; the Xishan Clocktower of 1931 in Xishan Park is the town’s landmark and still chimes the hour.

Yunyang and Fengjie

Yunyang, east of Wanzhou, is a county that moved: its seat went from the now-submerged Yunyang Town to Shuangjiang in 1999, and the Zhang Fei Temple, a shrine to the Three Kingdoms general where the poet Du Fu once lived for two years, was rebuilt opposite the new town. Fengjie, next downstream, holds the entrance to the gorges. Baidicheng, the White Emperor City, is a temple complex on a hill 8 km east of the county seat that became an island when the water rose and is now linked to the bank by a bridge; Li Bai wrote of leaving it at dawn, Du Fu lived there, and cruise ships stop for it. Fengjie’s other export is navel oranges, grown on the slopes above the river.

Wushan

Wushan’s county seat stands at the western entrance to the Wu Gorge, on the north bank; the old town was drowned and the new one built on the hills above. It is the base for the Little Three Gorges on the Daning River, a side excursion that has lost some depth since the reservoir filled, and it has had its own airport since August 2019.

Hechuan

Hechuan, 54 km from Yuzhong where the Jialing, Fu and Qu rivers meet, is the town for Diaoyucheng, which sits on its hill about 5 km east of the centre across the Jialing. The fortress covers 2.94 km² and keeps a naval wharf, drill grounds, watchtowers and gun positions; it went on China’s World Heritage tentative list in August 2018.

Food & drink

Chongqing eats within the Sichuan school but harder: more chilli, more Sichuan pepper, more beef tallow. Hotpot started on the Jiangbei wharves in the 1920s, when peddlers boiled beef tripe, liver and stomach in a clay stove partitioned by an iron grid so that dockers could cook and pay for only their own section; no restaurant served it until 1934. The city counted 26,991 hotpot restaurants in 2019, and the chain Liuyishou has opened 1,200 branches worldwide. The city guide goes into the pot itself; the short version is that the broth is red chilli oil built on beef fat, you dip what you fish out in sesame oil, and you can ask for yuanyang (a pot split between red and plain bone broth) or wei la hong tang, red soup without the jolt.

The everyday food is cheaper and quicker than hotpot, and much of it comes in single portions, which is unusual in China and makes the region kind to solo travellers. Xiaomian, the plain noodle tossed in chilli oil and spices, runs about ¥7 at a noodle shop; cold noodles ¥5, beef noodles ¥18, and every noodle shop will do its dishes plain if you ask. Laziji, chicken buried under dried chillies, originated near Geleshan on the western edge of the city; suan la fen is sweet-potato glass noodles in a hot vinegar soup; the Jialing gives the region its jiangtuan (bighead carp), steamed or baked; and fish with pickled mustard greens is a Chongqing invention.

Each river town has its own dish, and they are the reason to eat outside the city:

• Wanzhou grilled fish, the district’s most famous plate, with restaurants specialising in it across the town.
• Fuling zhacai, the pickled mustard tuber, sold under the Wu River brand.
• Dazu rabbit hotpot and Youting crucian carp, the latter served at a cluster of restaurants by the Youting toll gate on the Chengdu expressway.
• Wulong black goat, plus mountain tea and dried bamboo shoots from the karst plateau.
• Ciqikou mahua, the fried dough twists sold in the old town of Ciqikou, Fengdu spicy chicken nuggets and Jiangjin rice candy are the standard edible souvenirs.

Drink is simple. Local bottled beer is ¥3 and up at a small restaurant and around ¥10 in a bar; a meal from a street stall or food court in the city centre often comes in under ¥10.

Nature

The municipality is mountain on every side. The Daba Mountains close the north, the Wu Mountains the east, the Wuling range the southeast and the Dalou range the south, and the land slopes from north to south into the Yangtze valley; karst is everywhere, with stone forests, peak clusters, caves and gorges. The Jialing arrives from the northwest through its own “Lesser Three Gorges” (Libi, Wentang and Guanyin) to join the Yangtze at the city; the Wu comes up from Guizhou to join at Fuling.

Jinfo Shan (Golden Buddha Mountain) in Nanchuan district is the highest point of the Dalou range, an isolated flat-topped mountain ringed by cliffs up to 300 m with its limestone platform at about 2,000 m. It holds 4,768 species of seed plant, possibly one of the few wild populations of ginkgo, and the endangered François’ langur, and it was added to the South China Karst World Heritage listing in 2014.

The karst continues underground. Furong Cave in Wulong formed in Cambrian and Ordovician limestone about 500 million years ago, and the country around it holds more than 50 vertical shafts, including the Steam Shaft, the deepest in Asia. On the surface the Wulong forests run from Masson pine and Chinese cypress through evergreen oaks to bamboo, with protected ginkgo, Chinese yew and camphor.

The Daba Mountains along the Shaanxi and Hubei borders are one of the WWF’s 200 priority ecoregions, and the Chongqing share is protected as the Dabashan National Nature Reserve in Chengkou county. This is where the dawn redwood, a relative of the Californian redwoods that was thought extinct, was found growing in the 1940s.

Water features worth a detour: the Wanzhou Grand Falls at Ganning, 50 km from Wanzhou, is 115 m wide and 64.5 m high, wider than Guizhou’s Huangguoshu, and flows all year (¥98); the Little Three Gorges on the Daning River at Wushan are done by small boat; and the Wu River below Wulong has commercial rafting from June to September, ¥180 to ¥260.

Climate

The urban area has a humid subtropical monsoon climate with relative humidity above 75 per cent in every month of the year. Summers are long and among the hottest and stickiest in China, with July and August highs around 34°C, and the city shares the “Three Furnaces” label with Wuhan and Nanjing. Winters are short and mild but overcast and damp. The record range since 1951 runs from 0°C in January 1955 to 43.7°C on 18 and 19 August 2022.

Rain often falls at night in late spring and early summer, the “night rain in the Ba mountains” that Li Shangyin put into a poem, and the wider municipality is fog country: more than 100 foggy days a year around the city. Air quality can be poor from October to March, which matters if you have respiratory problems.

The river towns match the city: Wanzhou averages 7.0°C in January and 28.3°C in August and runs about half a degree warmer by day than the city proper. The high country is another climate altogether: the top of Jinfo Shan has an annual mean of 8.2°C and 1,434 mm of rain. Winters at Dazu are 5°C to 15°C, colder in the countryside, and most buildings there have no heating, so locals dress for indoors.

When to go

March to May and September to November are the months to aim for: warm rather than punishing in the city, and comfortable on deck through the gorges. Autumn at Dazu averages 20°C to 26°C and is the district’s most pleasant season; spring is mild but wetter.

The sites price by season, and the seasons do not line up: Dazu switches to peak rates on 1 March, Wulong’s natural bridges in April, and Fengdu’s Ghost Town also in April, each dropping back between November and December.

Summer has its own calendar. Rafting on the Wu River at Wulong runs June to September only. The lotus ponds at Lotus Villa beside the Baodingshan visitor centre flower from June to September. The one festival worth planning around is Chinese New Year at Zhong’ao in Dazu, when the fire dragon is danced and burned.

Getting there

By air

Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport (CKG) is about 19 km north of the city centre in Liangjiang. International flights use Terminal 3A, which opened in August 2017; the 2025 satellite Terminal 3B connects to it by an underground people mover. Non-stop routes include London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Brussels, Budapest, Moscow, Doha, Dubai, Seattle, Sydney, Auckland and a spread of East and Southeast Asian cities. Into town, Rail Transit Line 3 takes around 50 minutes from Terminal 2 to Lianglukou on the peninsula; Line 10 is the only metro line into Terminal 3. A taxi runs ¥40 to ¥80.

The outlying towns have their own small airports: Wanzhou Wuqiao takes flights from Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, Wushan opened in 2019, and Xiannüshan at Wulong runs a thin, largely seasonal schedule.

By train

Chongqing has three main high-speed stations plus Shapingba, and which one you use depends on where you are going. Chongqing North (2006) handles most long-distance services and the Chengdu trains, one hour on the 350 km/h intercity line since December 2020. Chongqing West (2018) sends the fastest trains to Dazu. Chongqing East opened on 27 June 2025 with 29 tracks and 15 platforms, and serves Hunan and the southeast of the municipality, including Wulong; through trains reach Changsha in about 3 hours 53 minutes.

For the gorges without the boat, high-speed trains reach Yichang in about 4.5 hours. The Zhengzhou to Wanzhou high-speed line, fully open since June 2022, links the river towns to central China and connects at Wanzhou with the Chongqing intercity line. Services from Beijing, Xi’an and Guangzhou run into the city; see the China guide for the network.

By boat and bus

Upstream cruises from Yichang take four nights to reach Chaotianmen. The main coach station is Caiyuanba, next to the old Chongqing railway station and chaotic most of the time; Chengdu is 2.5 hours by bus and Wanzhou 3 hours, and Chenjiaping station in Jiulongpo serves buses west into Sichuan. Avoid the sleeper buses.

Getting around

In the city

The Chongqing Rail Transit is the workhorse: 12 lines and 574 km, the sixth-largest metro network in the world by length, with Lines 2 and 3 running as heavy monorails that together form the longest and busiest monorail system anywhere. The terrain produced records: Hongyancun is the deepest metro station in the world, Hualongqiao the highest with platforms 48 m above ground, and Line 2 passes through the sixth to eighth floors of the apartment block at Liziba. Finish any trip within three hours of entering or you pay the maximum fare on top.

Taxis are small yellow saloons: ¥8 flagfall plus ¥1.8 per km, rising to ¥8.9 and ¥2.25 after midnight. On the hottest days they vanish, because the gas-powered fleet queues at too few filling stations. Bicycles are the worst way to move here; the gradients, the two rivers and the traffic see to that. The Yangtze River Cableway of 1987, 1,160 m across the river and the last of the city’s three public aerial tramways, still carries around 10,000 passengers a day at ¥20 a ride; the Huangguan escalator beside the old railway station at Lianglukou saves the climb up to Changjiang Yi Road for ¥2.

To the sites

Dazu: five daily high-speed trains from Chongqing West reach Dazu South in 26 to 33 minutes, ¥40 in second class, and a few more run from the other city stations. From the station bus 204 goes to the old bus station in town, and bus 205 (¥3, 30 to 45 minutes) runs from either town bus station to the Baodingshan visitor centre; Shimenshan needs buses 210 or 211, and Shizhuanshan a taxi.

Wulong: trains from Chongqing East reach Wulong South, opened in 2025, in 40 to 50 minutes; from North, West or the airport station add about an hour. The old Wulong station takes only conventional trains, 2 to 3 hours from North. The Fairy Mountain Star tourist bus (¥10, first bus 07:00, last 20:00) links Wulong South, the town, the resort and the forest park.

The river towns: Fengdu is about an hour by train from the city, mostly from Chongqing North, or two hours by bus from Chaotianmen or Sigongli. Wanzhou North is an hour from Chongqing North on the 248 km intercity line, which also stops at Changshou, Dianjiang and Liangping; the Zhengzhou line carries on from Wanzhou through Yunyang and Fengjie towards Wushan. Fuling and Wulong sit on the older Chongqing to Huaihua line, double-tracked since 2020, which is the conventional-rail route into the southeast. Hechuan is 54 km from Yuzhong, and Diaoyucheng is 5 km east of the town across the Jialing.