Where to Stay in Chongqing, Chongqing Shi

What is Chongqing known for?

Chongqing is known as a mountain city of stairs, cliffs, and river fog, a municipality wrapped around the head of the Three Gorges. The land dictates the layout. Steep lanes like the Eighteen Stairs climb between levels, and the Three Gorges Museum gathers the story of the great river below.

Saint Joseph's Cathedral and the Stilwell Museum mark its foreign and wartime past. Hills shape every street.

What are the main landmarks in Chongqing?

Chongqing gathers its landmarks on the ridges and stairs of the old city. The Three Gorges Museum holds the record of the great river and the gorges downstream, while the Stilwell Museum recalls the wartime years. The Eighteen Stairs and Baixiangju preserve the old stepped streets and courtyards.

Saint Joseph's Cathedral and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux Church rise among them. Stone steps lead everywhere.

What is the history of Chongqing?

Chongqing grew as a river port and market town on the high ground above the gorges, long before it was made a municipality in 1929. The river built it. Trade moved up and down the gorges of the great river, and goods changed hands on the steep landings below the town, where stair-streets like the Eighteen Stairs still climb from the water.

Foreign missions arrived in the treaty era, leaving Saint Joseph's Cathedral and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux Church among the lanes. Then came the war. During the Second World War, Chongqing became a refuge and a command post, a story kept at the Stilwell Museum in the former quarters of an allied general.

The city swelled with people fleeing the fighting on the coast, and its cliffs and caves offered shelter. Afterward it kept building upward and outward, and the Three Gorges Museum later gathered the heritage of the river valleys flooded downstream. Old courtyards like Baixiangju held on between the new concrete blocks.

The Chongqing Art Museum and the Chongqing Science and Technology Museum mark its modern turn. Layer by layer, the city rose.

Where is Chongqing?

Chongqing sits on high, folded ground at the head of the Three Gorges, where the river carves down through the hills. The city rides a spine of ridges and cliffs, its streets stacked in tiers linked by stairs and lifts. The river and deep ravines cut the built-up land into fingers of high ground.

Chongqing Shi, the vast surrounding municipality, spreads over mountains and farmland inland. The land goes straight up.

What is the climate of Chongqing?

Chongqing has a humid subtropical climate, hemmed in by the hills of Chongqing Shi that trap the heat and the fog. Summers turn fierce. Long, sticky months bake the tiered streets, giving the city its reputation as a furnace on the river.

Winters are mild, grey, and often wrapped in fog that settles over the Three Gorges. Spring comes damp and green.

How do you get to Chongqing?

Chongqing is reached by air, rail, road, and river, though its terrain turns every arrival into a climb up from the water or down from the ridges. Trains tunnel in. Ships work the great river, carrying passengers down through the Three Gorges toward the distant coast.

Bridges and tunnels stitch the split-level city across the ravines of Chongqing Shi. Height rules the map.