3-Day Chongqing: Smart Manufacturing & a Mountain City Rebuilt

Morning - The spice market
A Chongqing hotpot base is built from beef tallow, dried chillies, fermented broad-bean paste and a spice mix that varies by shop and is usually a family secret. At a wholesale spice market your teacher explains how to judge a chilli by its smell and colour, what Sichuan peppercorn does to the tongue, and which spices provide aroma rather than heat.

Late morning - Making the base
In a teaching kitchen you make a base yourself: frying the chilli paste slowly so it does not burn, adding the fermented bean paste and spices, and finishing with beef tallow. It is slow work and it cannot be hurried, which is the first thing the class teaches.

Lunch
Hotpot cooked with your own base, plus two dishes that use the same seasoning: maoxuewang, and a wok-fried chicken with dried chillies.

Afternoon - Tea and recipes
A tea session to settle the palate, printed English recipe cards, and a vacuum-sealed jar of your own base to take away if you wish to carry it home.

Evening - Free, with suggestions
Your guide returns you to the hotel with a list of nearby places to eat.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Xiaomian for breakfast
Chongqing starts the day with xiaomian, a bowl of thin wheat noodles dressed with chilli oil, ground pork, peanuts and pickled vegetables, sold from counters that open before dawn. Your guide orders two versions - one mild, one with the full chilli - and explains why the city treats a bowl of noodles as a public institution.

Late morning - Ciqikou Old Town
Ciqikou has been a river port and market for centuries, and its Ming and Qing lanes survive on a bluff above the Jialing. The town is now one of the city's great snack streets: Chen's fried dough twists, hot-and-sour sweet potato noodles, preserved bean curd, sticky rice cakes and bowls of sour plum drink. You walk the lanes, taste as you go, and your guide explains which of these are genuinely local and which arrived for the tourists.

Lunch
A small restaurant in or near Ciqikou, with Chongqing cold dishes and a soup.

Afternoon - Market and chilli
Visit a produce market to see the dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorn and beef tallow that go into a hotpot base, and watch a stall prepare a base from scratch - the chilli paste, the fermented bean paste, the spices, the fat.

Evening - Nine-grid hotpot
Dinner is Chongqing hotpot, cooked in beef tallow rather than water and served in a pot divided into nine squares so that ingredients can be dropped into zones of different heat. The order is standard: tripe, beef, luncheon meat, potato, tofu skin, greens. Mild and vegetarian broths can be provided in a separate pot at the same table.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning — Chengdu to Chongqing by High-Speed Rail
After breakfast your guide transfers you to Chengdu East Railway Station for the high-speed service to Chongqing, roughly ninety minutes through the Sichuan Basin. The two cities form the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-City Economic Circle, the western growth pole written into China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). Together they are approaching RMB 10 trillion in combined GDP, and 350 collaborative projects were scheduled for 2026 with planned investment of RMB 499.2 billion.

Late Morning — Liangjiang New Area Briefing
Liangjiang New Area was approved in 2010 as the first national-level opening-up area in inland China and the third nationwide, after Shanghai Pudong and Tianjin Binhai. A boundary adjustment in October 2025 created Liangjiang District to match the zone's footprint. Your host briefs you on the zone's positioning: advanced manufacturing and logistics on the Jialing River, the land-and-sea corridor that links western China to Southeast Asia, and the incentives available to foreign-invested enterprises setting up distribution or assembly operations.

Afternoon — Smart Manufacturing and New Energy Vehicles
Chongqing is China's leading automotive hub: output reached 2.79 million vehicles in 2025, close to half of them new-energy vehicles. Depending on your sector, the afternoon is arranged as a factory, R&D centre or showroom visit with the production managers, covering line automation, battery and electronics supply, and domestic-plus-export pricing. Electronics and laptop assembly cluster in the Xiyong Micro-Electronics Industrial Park to the west; automotive and EV components concentrate in Liangjiang. Sector-specific site visits are confirmed against availability once your delegation profile is known.

Evening — Chongqing After Dark
Chongqing is built on the steep confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers, and its night skyline is among the most striking in China. Walk the Jiefangbei CBD and the multi-level Hongya Cave complex, then dine on Chongqing hotpot, the city's signature dish — a communal pot of beef tallow and Sichuan pepper dating to the river-port kitchens of the nineteenth century.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Chongqing city centre.