Chongqing

• 1. Introduction

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  Chongqing is the only inland city among China's four direct-administered municipalities, and it carries a name that means a double celebration. The municipality covers a geographical area roughly the size of Austria, with disjunct urban areas spread across mountains and rivers. By that classification it ranks as the largest city proper in the world by population. It is the only Chinese city with a resident population of over 30 million, though much of that number lives in the countryside. This is a place where a thick layer of fog can enshroud the streets for sixty-eight days each year, where night rain in the Ba Mountains has appeared in poems throughout Chinese history. How did a remote river port become the wartime capital of an entire nation? Why does a single municipality govern dozens of former counties with no political layer in between? And what does it mean to be the only Chinese city that still runs aerial tramways across a river? The answers run from a Qin general's conquest to a system of monorails unmatched anywhere on earth.

• 2. A Name For A Coronation

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  Zhao Dun, a prince of the Southern Song dynasty, described his crowning as king and then Emperor Guangzong as a double celebration, or chongqing in short. To mark his enthronement in 1189, Yu Prefecture was converted to Chongqing Fu, and the city has carried that name ever since. The place had worn many names before that moment. A Qin general named Zhang Yi called it Jiangzhou, a name it kept under Qin Shi Huang and through the rule of Han dynasty emperors. During the Northern and Southern dynasties it became Chu Prefecture, then in 581 AD under the Sui dynasty it was renamed Yu Prefecture. The name Yu has outlasted them all. It survives as an abbreviation for Chongqing and in Yuzhong, the Central Yu district where the old town once stood. The city's origins reach back further still, historically associated with the State of Ba, whose legendary hero Ba Manzi belongs to the Zhou dynasty. That ancient identity would echo for centuries in district names like Banan, the Southern of Ba District.

• 3. Rebels And Massacres

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  Ming Yuzhen, a peasant rebel leader, established the short-lived Daxia Kingdom at Chongqing in 1362, during the Yuan dynasty. The city had a habit of becoming a base for those who challenged a dynasty. In 1621, under the Ming, She Chongming founded another brief kingdom called Daliang with Chongqing as its capital. The bloodiest turn came in 1644. After the Ming dynasty fell to a rebel army, Zhang Xianzhong captured Chongqing along with the rest of Sichuan. He was said to have massacred a large number of people and depopulated the province, in part by driving many to flee elsewhere. The Manchus later conquered the region, and during the Qing dynasty the emperor supported a wave of immigration into Chongqing and Sichuan. That great migration, known in Chinese as huguang tian chuan, left a linguistic trace. It explains why a few speakers of Xiang and Hakka still live in the municipality today, scattered among a population that mostly speaks Sichuanese.

• 4. The City Of Heroes

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  From November 1937 to May 1946, Chongqing was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's provisional capital. After the defeat at the Battle of Wuhan, Chiang and his army retreated here in 1938 and made it their base of resistance. The capital was formally declared on the 6th of September 1940. The war brought the wider world to a remote river port. After Britain, the United States, and other Allies entered the war in Asia in December 1941, the deputy commander of operations in Southeast Asia, Joseph Stilwell, was based in the city. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of Southeast Asia Command, visited as well, though his command was headquartered in Sri Lanka. From 1938 to 1943, Chongqing endured continuous massive bombing campaigns by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army Air Forces. The battles were fought by Chinese Air Force squadrons and anti-aircraft units, and many lives were saved by air-raid shelters dug into the mountainous terrain. The city was acclaimed the City of Heroes for the spirit of its people. Factories and universities relocated from eastern China, turning an inland port into a heavily industrialized city. When the Communists took Nanjing on the 23rd of April during the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalist government decamped first to Guangzhou and then back to Chongqing, holding it until late November 1949 before withdrawing by air.

• 5. Carved From A Province

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  On the 14th of March 1997, the Eighth National People's Congress voted to separate Chongqing from Sichuan and grant it independence. The plan merged the sub-provincial city with the adjacent Fuling, Wanxian, and Qianjiang prefectures it had already been governing on the province's behalf since September 1996. The result was a single entity holding 30,020,000 people across forty-three former counties, with no intermediate political levels between them. The new municipality had a clear assignment. It became the spearhead of China's effort to develop its western regions and to coordinate the resettlement of residents from the reservoir areas of the Three Gorges Dam. The first official ceremony took place on the 18th of June 1997. Recognition kept arriving. On the 8th of February 2010, Chongqing was named one of the nine National Central Cities, alongside Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Xi'an, and Zhengzhou. That same year, on the 18th of June, the Liangjiang New Area was established as the third state-level new area of its time, a designation that would later be reshaped again when Jiangbei and Yubei districts were abolished in November 2025.

• 6. Furnace And Fog

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  Highs reach 34 degrees Celsius in July and August in the urban area, earning Chongqing a place among the Three Furnaces of the Yangtze River, alongside Wuhan and Nanjing. Its summers rank among the hottest and most humid in China. The city sits in the transitional area between the Sichuan Basin and the plains of the middle and lower Yangtze, and every month of the year carries relative humidity above 75 percent. The basin location starves the city of sun. Chongqing records only 983 hours of annual sunshine, lower than much of Northern Europe, with monthly possible sunshine ranging from a mere 5 percent in January to 43 percent in August. Temperature extremes since 1951 have climbed as high as 43.7 degrees Celsius, recorded on the 18th and the 19th of August 2022. The fog is the city's signature. With over 100 days of fog per year, Chongqing is known as the Fog City. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, that weather possibly helped shield the city from being overrun by the Imperial Japanese Army. The terrain matches the climate for drama. The Yangtze runs through the whole area for 665 kilometers, cutting through the Wu Mountains to form the Qutang, Wuxia, and Xiling gorges before the Jialing River joins it in the city itself.

• 7. Bridges Rails And Tramways

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  Chongqing runs the world's longest and busiest monorail system, with 70 stations, more than any other system. Public transport here combines metro, intercity railway, a ubiquitous bus network, and that record-setting monorail. In May 2007 the municipal government committed 150 billion RMB over 13 years to build a network blending underground metro with heavy monorail. The rivers demanded engineering on a vast scale. The first important bridge in urban Chongqing was the Niujiaotuo Jialing River Bridge, built in 1958, and the first bridge over the Yangtze was the Shibanpo Yangtze River Bridge, built in 1977. Within the nine central districts there came to be 20 bridges on the Yangtze and 28 on the Jialing, earning the city the nickname Bridge Capital of China. One form of transport survives only here. Chongqing is the only Chinese city that has kept public aerial tramways, and the 1,160 meter Yangtze River Tramway still operates as a Class 4A tourist attraction, carrying about 10,000 passengers a day. The air links reach as far as the rails. Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport, in Yubei District, is the second-busiest airport in China and among the top 50 busiest in the world, running four parallel runways to destinations from Auckland to Dubai.

• 8. Spice Stone And Spectacle

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  Chongqing hot pot puts a central pot on the table, where customers boil beef, pork, tripe, kidney slices, and goose intestine in a spicy broth. Chongqing food belongs to Sichuan cuisine, and it is known for a numbing heat that comes from Sichuan pepper. Many local meals cost less than 10 RMB, and dishes often arrive in small individual portions that suit the solo diner. Beyond the table, the municipality holds some of China's most striking heritage. The Dazu Rock Carvings in Dazu county form a series of religious sculptures dating back as far as the 7th century AD, blending Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist beliefs. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, they are made up of 75 protected sites containing some 50,000 statues, with over 100,000 Chinese characters of inscriptions. War and legend mark the land too. Fishing Town is one of the three great ancient battlefields of China, noted for its resistance to the Mongol armies during the Southern Song dynasty, and the place where the Mongol leader Mongke Khan died in 1259. The People's Liberation Monument stands in the center of the city, once the highest building in the area and now dwarfed by shopping centers. Originally named the Monument for the Victory over Axis Armies, it remains the only building in China built for that purpose, a quiet reminder of the years when the world's war passed through the City of Heroes.