Chongqing hides an unusually layered past behind its skyline: a Ming river port at Ciqikou, Qing migration guild halls, the bombed wartime capital of Free China, and the Gele Hills prisons where 300 detainees were shot days before liberation.
Ming-era porcelain port on the Jialing, first settled around 998 AD as Baiyan Chang and renamed for the kilns whose celadon shipped downriver. Twelve flagstone lanes of Qing shophouses survive; open 08:00–22:00.
Founded in the Tang and rebuilt under the Ming, this hall above Ciqikou is where the deposed Jianwen Emperor is said to have sheltered in 1402 — giving the town its older name Longyin, the hidden dragon. Open 08:30–17:00.
Qing merchant compound begun in 1759 and restored in 2005: the Yuwang, Guangdong and Qi'an halls with carved opera stages. Its museum documents the Huguang Tian Sichuan migration that repopulated the province after the 1640s wars.
The only surviving land gate of the seventeen in Chongqing's Ming wall, rebuilt in 1372 by general Dai Ding. Bronze tableaux on the ramparts stage the Song siege and Zhang Xianzhong's 1644 assault; the wall runs on behind Qixinggang.
A national-grade museum opened in 2005 facing the Great Hall. Permanent galleries cover Ba kingdom bronzes, the towns drowned by the dam, and Chongqing as wartime capital from 1938 to 1946. Tuesday–Sunday, 09:00–17:00.
Built 1951–54 to architect Zhang Jiade's design, its 65-metre dome quotes Beijing's Temple of Heaven above a Soviet-scale auditorium seating 4,200. The granite Renmin Square in front was cleared only in 1997.
Two Sino-American Cooperative Organization prisons where the Kuomintang held communist detainees; some 300 were shot here on 27 November 1949, days before the city fell. Cells, shackles and the Red Rock museum displays remain.
A sunken memorial marking 5 June 1941, when roughly 2,500 people suffocated in an overcrowded air-raid tunnel during a Japanese bombing raid on the wartime capital. The bronze relief and shelter mouth are lit after dark.
The eighteen stone flights that linked the cliff-top city to the Yangtze docks, laid in the Ming and rebuilt in 2021 after the old quarter was cleared. Seven restored lanes hold the Huanghuayuan well and a bang-bang porter museum.
The Nan'an bank where Chongqing opened to foreign trade after the 1890 Yantai Convention. Restored in 2019, its lanes keep Republican consular villas, the former US embassy bar and the steps down to the vanished Longmen ferry.
Chiang Kai-shek's wartime retreat on Nanshan: the Yunxiu villa, Song Meiling's Songlin Hill house, Soong Ching-ling's cottage and a private bomb shelter, scattered across wooded slopes. Open 09:00–17:00, last entry 16:00.
The best-preserved Republican street in Chongqing: Guiyuan, where Mao and Chiang signed the Double Tenth Agreement in 1945, Zhou Enlai's residence at Zengjiayan 50, and old government offices under century-old banyans.