Ciqikou Ancient Town

Overview

Ciqikou is a Ming and Qing river port on the west bank of the Jialing, about a square kilometre of steep stone-paved lanes in Chongqing’s Shapingba District, and the one place in the city where the old river-trade town survives at street scale. The name means “porcelain port”: the town shipped the output of local kilns downriver, and porcelain, handicrafts and gifts are still what most of the shops sell.

Expect a crowd. Ciqikou is free, open at all hours and on the metro, so it fills with day-trippers from mid-morning until the shops shut. The main street is a run of snack stalls, tea houses and souvenir shops, and the specialities are edible: fried dough twists (mahua), pepper-salt peanuts, maoxuewang (duck blood and offal in chilli broth) and qianzhangpi tofu sheets. The quieter version of the town is one lane back from the main drag, where people still live, and up the hill at Baolun Temple, a Buddhist foundation that is around 1,500 years old.

Allow half a day, and go in the morning before the tour groups if you want the lanes to yourself.

History

The town predates its name by a long way. It was first built under Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty, who reigned from 998 to 1004, and was known then as Baiya, after the White Cliff Temple on the hill. The temple gave the place its second name. When the Ming Jianwen Emperor lost his throne to his uncle in 1402, the story goes that he fled here and hid in the temple as a monk for four or five years, and the town became Longyin, “the hidden dragon”. Whether the emperor ever came is not settled; the name stuck for centuries.

Porcelain made the town’s fortune under the Ming and Qing. Kilns in the hills behind fed the wharf, the wharf became the main transfer point for goods on the lower Jialing, and “porcelain port” (ciqikou, written with a different first character today) replaced the older names. Its nickname, “Little Chongqing”, dates from this period, when the port was busy enough to stand comparison with the city downstream.

The last chapter is the wartime one. When the Nationalist government moved to Chongqing in 1937, the universities and cultural institutions that came with it settled around Shapingba, and Ciqikou filled with writers and painters: Guo Moruo, Xu Beihong, Feng Zikai, Fu Baoshi, Ba Jin and Bing Xin all spent time here. The old building stock, twelve streets and alleys in Ming and Qing style, was listed for protection by the district in August 2014. Several East Syriac Christian crosses, evidence of a Nestorian presence in the area, were found at Ciqikou and are known in the literature as the Ciqikou crosses.

Visiting

Take Line 1 to Ciqikou station; the entrance gate is a few minutes’ walk from the exit. There is no ticket and no closing time, though the shops keep ordinary retail hours and the place empties after dark.

The main street leads from the gate down towards the river, and it is the tourist spine: snack stalls, tea houses, porcelain and craft shops, and the dough-twist bakeries that are the town’s best-known product, several of them frying in the window. It is narrow, stepped and slow-moving on a weekend.

Turn off it. The side lanes, which are what the 2014 protection order covers, are stone-paved, lined with two-storey timber and grey-brick houses, and mostly residential. Baolun Temple is on the hill above the lanes; it is the oldest building in the town, and its courtyard is the quietest place in Ciqikou at any hour. At the bottom of the main street the lanes open onto the Jialing embankment, where the old wharf was and where the tea houses now put out tables in fine weather.

Two to three hours covers the main street, the temple and the back lanes with a stop for tea. Add an hour if you sit down for maoxuewang.

Tips

Arrive before 10:00 or after 17:00. The middle of the day belongs to tour groups, and the main street is single file.

Buy the mahua from a shop that is frying them in front of you, not from the pre-bagged racks, and try the pepper-salt peanuts and the tofu sheets too; together with maoxuewang they are known locally as the three treasures of Ciqikou.

The lanes are steep and the paving is worn stone, slippery when wet. Chongqing is wet often.

A tea house on the embankment is the right way to end the visit. Prices on the river side are higher than one lane back, but you are paying for the water.

Nearby

Hongya Cave, the lit stilt-house complex on the Jialing at Jiefangbei, is 20 minutes back along Line 1 to Xiaoshizi and is at its best after 20:00, which makes it the natural second half of a Ciqikou day.

Liziba station and Eling Park, the monorail-through-a-building and the hilltop park above it, are on the way back into the centre: change to Line 2 at Jiaochangkou or walk between them.

The rest of Shapingba is university district; the city page covers the wartime sites and the Yangtze cruise departures.