Chongqing

Overview

Chongqing is China’s largest city by urban population, built in tiers up the cliffs where the Jialing River meets the Yangtze, and it is where the cruises through the Three Gorges begin. It is one of four municipalities that report straight to the central government and the only one away from the coast. Beijing cut it out of Sichuan province on 14 March 1997 to drive development in the west, and the municipality it created is roughly the size of Austria, with over 30 million residents, most of them in the rural counties covered on the Chongqing municipality page rather than in the city itself.

The old core is the Yuzhong peninsula, a ridge with the Jialing on one flank and the Yangtze on the other, and nothing on it is flat. The ground floor of one building sits level with the twentieth floor of the next, roads vanish into tunnels under housing blocks, and a monorail line runs through the middle of a residential tower. Chongqing is also the only Chinese city that kept a public aerial cableway, and the crossing over the Yangtze is still the best-value ride in town.

The layer of history that still shapes the place is the war. Chongqing was the provisional capital of the Republic of China from November 1937 to May 1946, formally named the “second capital” on 6 September 1940, and it absorbed 268 Japanese air raids between February 1938 and December 1944 without being taken. Factories and universities evacuated from the east turned an inland port into an industrial city, and some of the bomb shelters dug into the hillsides now hold museums, including the eight-museum Jianchuan cluster in Jiulongpo.

People come for four things: hotpot, which wharf labourers invented here in the 1920s; the night skyline, which the city lights up on purpose; the river, whether for a one-hour evening loop or a multi-day cruise to Yichang; and the sheer strangeness of the terrain, which rewards anyone with decent knees and a bottle of water. The language on the street is Sichuanese, a Southwestern Mandarin dialect; standard Mandarin and bilingual signage work fine, but expect a broader, faster sound than in Beijing.

Neighbourhoods

The urban area is eight districts, and visitors use five of them.

Jiefangbei and the upper city

Yuzhong is the most densely populated district in the municipality and the Jiefangbei business district in the middle of it holds nine-tenths of Chongqing’s domestic financial institutions plus the international hotels, the luxury boutiques and the food street Haochi Jie. It is where first-time visitors sleep and where the evening crowds gather, with three metro stations within a few minutes’ walk: Linjiangmen on Line 2, Jiaochangkou on Lines 1 and 2, Xiaoshizi on Lines 1 and 6. Errands here involve stairs; the district is walkable only in the vertical sense.

Chaotianmen and the lower city

The “lower half city” along the Yangtze shore below Jiefangbei was the commercial and political centre in Ming and Qing times, when the flat ground by the docks mattered more than the ridge above. Today it is the cruise terminals and the Raffles City towers at the tip, the guild hall and the Dongshuimen lanes further round, and long stone stairs up to the upper city. Stay here if you are boarding a boat; Line 1 ends at Chaotianmen.

Nan’an and Nanbin Road

The south bank has the restaurant and bar strip on Nanbin Road facing the lit peninsula, the Nanshan ridge behind it with the Yikeshu (“single tree”) viewpoint, temples founded in the Tang dynasty and a hot spring. The ridge tops out at 681 m and also holds the wartime residences of Chiang Kai-shek and George Marshall. Reach it by the cableway to Shangxinjie, or by Line 6 and the Loop line. It is calmer and cheaper than Yuzhong, and the new Chongqing East railway station is out here.

Jiangbei

Across the Jialing, Jiangbeizui is the newer business district, with the Chongqing Grand Theatre (a 64 m glass building of 2005 to 2009 with two halls, Line 6 Grand Theatre station) and the free Science and Technology Museum beside it. Guanyinqiao pedestrian street and the Paradise Walk mall are where locals shop; the underground arcade and the beer gardens above it are the district’s night out. Note that Jiangbei and Yubei districts were merged in 2025 into the Liangjiang New Area, so maps and addresses may show either name.

Shapingba

The university district in the north-west, on Line 1, the Loop line and Line 9, with cheap student food, Ciqikou at its river edge and Geleshan forest park and the prison sites on its hill. Further out at Daxuecheng on Line 1, the art museum of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute is free (Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 17:00), and the institute’s old Huangjueping campus has the painted piano staircase that plays a note on every step. Chongqing West railway station is in this district too.

See & do

Give the peninsula and the south bank two full days, add a third for Ciqikou and the wartime sites out at Geleshan, and treat Dazu as a separate day trip.

Jiefangbei and the observation decks

The People’s Liberation Monument at the centre of the Jiefangbei pedestrian square is 27.5 m tall, and it is the only monument in China built to mark the victory over the Axis. A wooden “Spirit Fortress” went up here in 1940 to stiffen the bombed city; the concrete octagonal tower replaced it, with foundations laid on 31 October 1946 and completion on 10 October 1947, and in 1950 the new government re-inscribed it as the monument to the city’s liberation. It once towered over the district; now the 25,000 m² square around it, finished in 1997, is walled in by malls and LED screens, and the monument looks small.

Two towers sell the view. The Chongqing World Financial Centre at 188 Minzu Road (Linjiangmen station) is 339 m tall and its skydeck is open 10:00 to 22:00 for ¥118, with far smaller crowds than the equivalent in Guangzhou. Raffles City, the eight-tower Moshe Safdie complex at the tip of the peninsula, carries a 300 m glass skybridge called the Crystal across four of its 250 m towers; the observation deck costs ¥180.

Hongya Cave

Hongya Cave is the eleven-storey stack of stilt-house architecture between Jiefangbei and the Jialing, free to walk through and lit gold every night. It has its own page; the short version is that the view from the far bank and the Qiansimen Bridge is the point. Use Linjiangmen station exit D on Line 2 or Xiaoshizi exits 6 and 9 on Line 1.

Chaotianmen

The square at the tip of the peninsula is where the green Jialing pours into the brown Yangtze, and the line between the two colours is visible from the steps. A Ming gate stood here facing the imperial capital at Nanjing, hence the name (“gate facing heaven”); the customs house went in when the port opened to foreign trade in 1891, the gate came down in 1927 to make room for the docks, and stretches of Song and Ming wall turned up in 2015 during the Raffles City excavation. Line 1 has ended at Chaotianmen station since 31 December 2020. Up the stairs opposite pier 6 is the Chongqing Planning Exhibition Hall, free, Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 17:00, with a 3D model of the whole city that makes the topography make sense.

The Yangtze River Cableway

Chongqing once had three aerial tramways; the Jialing and Nanshan lines are gone and the Yangtze one survives, carrying about 10,000 people a day between Xinhua Road in Yuzhong (a short walk from Xiaoshizi station) and Shangxinjie on the Nan’an bank. It opened on 24 October 1987, spans 1,166 m, carries around 80 people a cabin, was listed as a municipal heritage structure on 15 December 2009 and became a rated tourist attraction in 2018. It runs 07:30 to 22:30, ¥20 one way and ¥30 return.

Eling Park, TestBed 2 and Liziba

Eling Park is the highest point on the peninsula, a 1909 merchant’s garden whose pavilion looks down on both rivers at once, and it is free. Just below it, TestBed 2 (Eling Factory Creative Park, 1 Eling Main Street) is a Republic-era banknote printing works converted into cafés, bars and design shops with the same view for the price of a coffee. Downhill on Line 2, Liziba station is the stop where the monorail passes through floors six to eight of a block of flats; the viewing platform at the north end of Liziba Park is built for the photo, and the park itself holds relocated wartime bank and government buildings.

Ciqikou

Ciqikou is the Ming and Qing porcelain port on the Jialing in Shapingba, reached on Line 1, and the only piece of the old river-trade city that survives at street scale. The main lane is souvenir shops and dough-twist bakeries; walk uphill away from the river and it is still lived in.

The wartime capital

The Three Gorges Museum (236 Renmin Road, Zengjiayan station exit A) opened in 2005 with four main galleries: the gorges themselves, ancient Ba-Yu, twentieth-century Chongqing and the Anti-Japanese War, the last with a 180-degree panorama of the city under bombardment. Tuesday to Sunday 09:00 to 17:00, last entry 16:00, free. It faces the People’s Auditorium across People’s Square, a 1951 to 1954 domed hall seating 4,200 that borrows its shape from Beijing’s Temple of Heaven; ¥10 to go inside, but the exterior from the square is the reason to come.

On 5 June 1941 the Japanese bombed for three hours and about 4,000 people sheltering in a tunnel near Jiaochangkou suffocated. The June 5th Tunnel Tragedy Museum stands on the site (87 Jiaochangkou, 10:00 to 17:30); the exhibition is free and a ¥50 guided tour takes you into the tunnel.

The Stilwell Museum (63 Jialing New Road, 200 m from Fotuguan station on Line 2) is the 1940s house of General Joseph Stilwell, Allied chief of staff in China from March 1942, who despised Chiang Kai-shek and is therefore well regarded in Beijing; it reopened after refurbishment in August 2023. Open 09:00 to 17:00, ¥15, with the free Flying Tigers museum directly opposite. Two more free houses sit near Zengjiayan: Zhou Enlai’s residence right outside exit C, and Guiyuan on Zhongshan Si Road, where Mao and Chiang negotiated in 1945.

Huguang Guild Hall and Shibati

The Huguang Guild Hall at Dongshuimen (1 Bajiaoyuan, Changjiang Binjiang Road, Xiaoshizi exit 8) was built in 1759 and enlarged in 1846 as a meeting place for merchants from other provinces; 09:00 to 17:00, ¥30. Put up by settlers from Hunan, Hubei and Guangdong, it is the largest old guildhall complex left in any Chinese city centre and holds the museum of the Qing “Huguang fills Sichuan” migration that repopulated the province. Shibati, the 200-odd stone steps over 400 m that linked the upper and lower city at Jiaochangkou, was a slum until a 2017 to 2021 rebuild; it reopened on 30 September 2021 as a heritage-style shopping quarter, free, with a memory museum at the northern entrance.

Dazu Rock Carvings

Dazu, 165 km west of the city, has 75 protected sites with some 50,000 Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian figures carved between the 7th and 13th centuries, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. Baodingshan, the 500 m U-shaped valley that the monk Zhao Zhifeng spent 70 years carving in the Song dynasty, and the older Beishan cliff are the two to see. Buses take about three hours from Chenjiaping station; a high-speed station at Dazushike is under construction.

Food & drink

Hotpot started on the Jiangbei wharves in the 1920s, when porters bought cheap beef tripe and offal, boiled it in a clay stove divided into sections so each man paid only for his own compartment, and ate standing at the riverside. It was 1934 before a restaurant served it as a proper dish. The base is beef tallow fried with dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorn, bean paste, garlic and spices; the peppercorn gives the ma (numbing) and the chilli the la (hot), and together they are the mala the city is known for. The city counted 26,991 hotpot restaurants in 2019.

Ordering works in three tiers: hong tang is the red spicy broth, yuan wei is the plain bone stock, and yuanyang is a pot split down the middle with one of each. Ask for wei la hong tang for the red broth with the heat turned down, or say wo bu yao la if you want none at all. The classic things to drop in are beef tripe, duck intestine, pig’s blood, sliced beef and lamb, tofu, mushrooms and leafy greens, and everything comes out into a bowl of sesame oil and garlic to take the edge off.

Breakfast is xiaomian, “little noodles”: fresh alkaline wheat noodles in a bowl built from a dozen seasonings (chilli oil, soy, lard, garlic and ginger water, ground Sichuan pepper, pickled mustard stem, crushed peanuts, spring onion) with a few blanched greens on top. The local rule is “wide soup, narrow noodles”: the flavour matters, not the quantity. A plain bowl runs about ¥7 at a stall; wanza adds stewed peas and minced pork, and beef noodles are around ¥18. Cold noodles (liangmian), sweet-potato suanla fen in a sour chilli broth and Sichuan-style wontons (hundun) sit on the same menus.

Where to eat it: the stalls and small canteens of the city centre, where a meal is often under ¥10 and the portions are sized for one, which makes Chongqing easier for solo diners than most of China. Haochi Jie, the food street a short walk from the Jiefangbei monument, is the concentrated version. For dinner with the skyline in front of you, cross to Nanbin Road on the south bank.

Nightlife

The night out in Chongqing is mostly the view, and the city has arranged it as a timetable. Every Saturday at 20:30 a drone show fills the sky over the confluence for twenty minutes; the June 2025 edition set a Guinness record with 11,787 drones. Watch from Chaotianmen Square or from a bar on level 6 of the Riverside Park mall, and get there early. The Liangjiang night cruises leave from piers 5 and 6 at Chaotianmen between 19:30 and 22:20 for a one-hour loop of both rivers, ¥95 to ¥118 depending on the deck.

After that the crowd splits. Nanbin Road on the south bank is the long dinner-and-drinks evening with the peninsula lit up across the water. Jiefangbei has the bars and dance clubs packed into the pedestrian streets around the monument. Jiangbei’s underground arcade near Guanyinqiao is bars and restaurants, with open-air beer gardens above it showing Premier League football on big screens. Shapingba is the student scene. A bottle of local beer is about ¥10 in a bar and from ¥3 in a small restaurant, which is one reason the local night usually happens around a hotpot table rather than a bar.

Hotpot is the late option: in the old-style places, summer diners strip to the waist (“bare torso” is a recognised local tradition) and tables run for hours. For something gentler, the hot springs keep late hours: Southern Hot Springs Park in Banan is open 10:00 to midnight from ¥88, and Ronghui in Shapingba, which made the news in 2018 with a pool built to look like a hotpot, is open round the clock from Friday to Sunday for ¥149.

When to go

Chongqing is one of the “three furnaces” of the Yangtze, with Wuhan and Nanjing; humidity stays above 75 percent in every month, the Sichuan Basin gives it only 983 hours of sun a year, less than much of northern Europe, and fog settles on more than 100 days. Plan around temperature, not rain.

March to May

The best window. Average highs climb from 18.6°C in March to 23.9°C in April and 27.4°C in May, and rain rises with them, from 56 mm to 143 mm a month, mostly at night in the tradition the poets called “night rain in the Ba mountains”. The Labour Day holiday at the start of May is a national peak for travel, so sit either side of it.

June

The wettest month, 212 mm, with highs of 29.8°C and the humidity that goes with it. The rivers are high and the gorges look their best from a boat.

July and August

Average highs of 33.7°C and 33.9°C, nights that stay above 25°C, and the sunniest weeks of the year, around 170 hours a month. The record is 43.7°C, set on 18 and 19 August 2022. On the hottest days empty taxis vanish, because the gas-powered fleet queues for refills; use the air-conditioned metro and do your walking before ten and after six.

September to November

Highs fall from 28.5°C in September to 22.0°C in October and 17.3°C in November, rain drops below 100 mm from October and the air is as clear as it gets. The National Day week from 1 October is the busiest travel period in the country; the weeks before and after it are the year’s second sweet spot.

December to February

Mild and grey: highs of 10.4°C to 13.6°C, lows around 6°C to 8°C, 20 to 25 mm of rain and fewer than 20 hours of sunshine in January, which is 5 percent of what is possible. The lowest temperature recorded since 1951 is -1.8°C, so snow is not a planning factor. Smog is worst from October to March and worth checking if you have respiratory problems. Hotpot is at its most logical in this weather, and the Spring Festival holiday is the one week to avoid for transport.

Getting there

By air

Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport (CKG) is about 19 km north of the centre and was mainland China’s ninth-busiest airport in 2025, with non-stop flights to London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Sydney, Auckland, Seattle, Dubai, Doha and most of East and South-East Asia. Terminal 2 handles domestic flights on Sichuan Airlines, West Air, China Express and Spring; Terminal 3A takes all international flights and most domestic ones; the satellite Terminal 3B, opened in April 2025, is domestic only and reached by an underground people mover from 3A. Metro Line 10 serves both T2 and T3, Line 3 serves T2, a free shuttle links the two terminals in about 15 minutes, and a taxi to Jiefangbei costs ¥40 to ¥80.

By train

Chongqing North (Yubei, open since October 2006) handles most long-distance trains and the high-speed service to Chengdu, about an hour and a half away; its North Square is on Lines 4 and 10, its South Square on Line 3 and the Loop line. Chongqing West, in Shapingba, opened on 25 January 2018 with 15 platforms and connects to Line 5 and the Loop; it serves the lines towards Guizhou, Kunming and Lanzhou. Chongqing East, in Nan’an, opened on 27 June 2025 as one of the largest passenger stations in the world, on a branch of Line 6; it takes trains from Hunan and the south-east of the municipality. The old central Chongqing station at Caiyuanba has been closed for rebuilding since 20 June 2022. Check which station your ticket names; they are far apart.

By bus

The main long-distance station is at Caiyuanba (3 Caiyuan Road, Yuzhong), beside the closed railway station; Chenjiaping in Jiulongpo serves Sichuan and Dazu, and Sigongli in Nan’an is the interchange for the south. Chengdu is about two and a half hours by road.

By river

Chongqing is the upstream end of the Three Gorges cruises. Boats leave Chaotianmen and run downstream past Fuling and Wanzhou through the Qutang, Wuxia and Xiling gorges to Yichang, with some continuing to Wuhan, Nanjing or Shanghai; several companies operate and fares run roughly ¥700 to ¥2,500. Almost all traffic on this stretch is now leisure rather than transport, since rail and expressways took over the practical journeys.

Other outings from the city, including Wulong’s karst bridges and the gorge towns, are on the Chongqing municipality page.

Getting around

Chongqing Rail Transit is the answer to most journeys. It opened on 6 November 2004 with Line 2, China’s first straddle monorail, and by 2026 ran to 574 km, the sixth-largest metro network in the world; Lines 2 and 3 are monorails, the rest conventional metro. The terrain shows: Hongyancun on Line 9 is the deepest metro station in the world at 116 m, Hualongqiao’s platforms stand 48 m above the ground, and Line 6 crosses the Jialing on a bridge about 100 m above the water. Line 1 links Chaotianmen, Jiefangbei, Shapingba and Ciqikou; Line 2 runs from Jiaochangkou past Liziba to the zoo; Line 3 goes to the airport and Chongqing North; the Loop line touches every other line.

Fares are by distance, ¥2 to ¥11 on the tariff introduced on 30 July 2025, and you must exit within 270 minutes of entering. Tourist passes sold at stations and in the Yu Chang Xing app cost ¥18 for one day, ¥45 for three and ¥70 for five, with unlimited rides. Announcements are in Mandarin and English and every train is air-conditioned.

Buses are frequent and cheap but signed in Chinese only; know the name of the centre you want (Jiefangbei, Shapingba, Jiangbei or Nanping) and ask the driver. Taxis are the yellow saloons: flagfall ¥8 then ¥1.80 a kilometre, rising to ¥8.90 and ¥2.25 after midnight. Drivers rarely speak English, so show the destination written in Chinese or a hotel card. Bikes and scooters are almost absent from the streets, which tells you what cycling here would be like.

On foot, expect stairs, and use the city’s shortcuts. The Huangguan Escalator beside Lianglukou station, claimed as Asia’s second-longest, climbs from the old railway station to the upper city for ¥2, 07:00 to 22:00, and yes, you pay going down too. Mall lifts double as public corridors between street levels. A small ferry, the Liangjiang passage boat, crosses from the Hongya Cave wharf to Danzishi in about six minutes for ¥10, 08:00 to 18:00, and the cableway described under See and do is public transport in its own right.

Where to stay

Prices span from dormitory beds around ¥30 through three-star equivalents near ¥150 to the international chains at ¥600 to ¥2,000, and most hotels are rarely full, so you can ask to see the room before you commit.

Jiefangbei is the default for a first visit: the cableway, Hongya Cave, three metro lines and most of the dining are within walking range, and the big names sit on the square itself, including the InterContinental at 101 Minzu Road, the Westin at 222 Xinhua Road and the JW Marriott at 235 Minsheng Road. Serviced apartments with kitchens are a good fit for longer stays; Somerset has one block on Minzu Road and another on Changjiang Binjiang Road overlooking the Yangtze.

For budget travellers the long-running option is the Yangtze River International Youth Hostel at 80 Changbin Road in Yuzhong, English-speaking, central, with beds and rooms from ¥30 to ¥180 and its own budget tours.

Jiangbei has the newer luxury stock, with the Niccolo in the Chongqing IFS tower, the Regent and the Hyatt Regency at Paradise Walk, and it is closer to the airport; the trade-off is a river between you and Jiefangbei. Around Lianglukou and the People’s Auditorium, the Hilton on Zhongshan San Lu and the mid-range DLT Hotel behind the auditorium (from about ¥320) put you on Lines 1, 2 and 3 with the museums next door. Shapingba is cheapest, with three-star hotels from about ¥220, and it is the natural base if you are arriving or leaving through Chongqing West.

Practical info

Visas, payment apps, the VPN question and the national basics are on the China page. What follows is specific to this city.

Finding your way

Street level is a slippery idea here. A building’s ground-floor entrance can be on the same contour as the twentieth floor of the block next door, so a map distance of 300 m may involve several flights of stairs or a lift through a mall. Look for the direct-route tricks (escalators, mall lifts, the cliff-side Shancheng Footpath) before committing to a staircase in summer. Taxi drivers almost never speak English; collect hotel business cards and show the one nearest your destination.

Heat and air

Summer afternoons are the dangerous hours and the fog and smog season runs from October to March; people with respiratory problems should check the air index before a long walk. Every metro train is air-conditioned, which in July is reason enough to ride one stop.

Museums and tickets

Most municipal museums are free and closed on Mondays, opening Tuesday to Sunday around 09:00 to 17:00 with last entry half an hour or an hour earlier. The Planning Exhibition Hall at Chaotianmen offers English-language guides for ¥300. The metro’s transport card and QR codes give a 10 percent discount and a free or reduced transfer within an hour, worth having if you skip the day pass.

Consulates and photography

Chongqing hosts a dozen foreign representations, the fifth-largest diplomatic presence in China after Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu, so several countries have a consulate here if you lose a passport. If the old, unrestored city is what you are after, photographer-led “Houjie” (backstreet) walks have become a local movement, documenting districts like Dadukou before they go; the appeal is the streets, not the guides.