Beneath the neon and the hotpot steam, Chongqing runs on art schools, wartime guild halls and printing plants turned studios. Three days move from the graffiti campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute to face-changing opera on a Qing courtyard stage above the Yangtze.
The academy's campus museum, wrapped by architect Tang Hua in roughly 1.5 million salvaged coloured bricks. Six floors of Chinese contemporary painting and sculpture, with the June graduation shows drawing collectors from Beijing and Shanghai.
A 1.25 km stretch of Jiulongpo painted by some 800 art students and factory workers in 2007 and patched over ever since. Murals climb across noodle shops, barbers and the old Chuanmei factory walls below the institute's original campus.
The municipal art museum sits inside Cui Kai's Guotai Arts Centre, a stack of red and black cantilevered beams modelled on Sichuan tenon joinery. Rotating shows of ink painting, printmaking and Chongqing documentary photography fill four floors.
A 1950s printing plant that once ran off Nationalist banknotes, now studios, record shops, bookbinders and rooftop bars stacked against the cliff. The terrace over Changjiang Binjiang Lu appeared in the 2016 film Chongqing Hot Pot.
Facing the Great Hall across People's Square, its curved glass wall echoes a dam sluice. Galleries run from Ba-Yu bronzes and Han cliff tombs to the villages drowned by the reservoir, plus a 360-degree cinema of the gorges before the water rose.
Zhang Jiade's 1954 hall borrows the Temple of Heaven's triple blue roof and sets it on a Renaissance-scale colonnade, seating 4,000 under a 65-metre dome. Walking the terrace and axis costs nothing and shows the whole composition.
A glass shard beached where the Jialing meets the Yangtze, designed by von Gerkan Marg und Partner. Its two halls host the Chongqing Symphony, touring ballet and Sichuan opera, and the crystalline lobby frames the Yuzhong cliffs across the water.
Merchants from Hunan and Guangdong built these courtyard halls in the 1700s below Dongshuimen. The Yuwang Gong stage still runs chuanju: bianlian face-changing, fire-spitting and gaoqiang singing, with tea poured from a metre-long copper spout.
A Ming porcelain port on the Jialing whose flagstone lanes still hold Baolun Temple's Tang-era main hall, shadow-puppet workshops and teahouses where storytellers keep time on a bamboo clapper.
The stair street that once carried porters between the cliff-top city and the wharves, rebuilt in 2021 as courtyards of grey brick and diaojiaolou timber. Craft rooms demonstrate bamboo weaving, Rongchang pottery and Shu embroidery between the noodle stalls.
A 1992 workers' housing slab with no lift, entered on the 1st, 10th and 15th floors from three different street levels. Laundry poles and mahjong tables line the open walkways, and the upper corridor frames the Dongshuimen bridge cables.
Chongqing's first electrically lit lane drops down the Yuzhong cliff past the 1902 French Sisters' Hospital, a small nunnery and stilt houses now working as ceramic, letterpress and dyeing studios.