Morning - the Three Gorges Museum
Most visitors meet Chongqing as a skyline. This day starts underneath it, with the city's own account of how it came to look the way it does. The China Three Gorges Museum was the first national first-class museum in the country built around the theme of the Three Gorges, and it stands on People's Square facing the Great Hall of the People - an old-and-new pairing the city planned deliberately. It is free to enter and requires an advance reservation with passport details; your guide makes the booking before you arrive.
Four permanent exhibitions carry the story: the landscape and people of the Three Gorges, ancient Bayu culture, the growth of Chongqing as a city, and the wartime years when it served as the capital of the Republic. The collection runs to more than 113,000 objects across 32 categories. The pieces most visitors remember are the Wushan Man fossil, roughly two million years old, a Warring States bronze bird-shaped vessel, a Shang dynasty three-ram bronze zun, and the Eastern Han Jingyun stele. Budget about two hours; the museum is closed on Mondays.
Late morning - the Great Hall of the People
Across the square, the Great Hall of the People is a 1950s building in a deliberately classical key: an axial plan, layered green glazed roofs, and a central rotunda modelled on the Temple of Heaven, all carried on vermilion columns. The rounded profile of its auditorium is the reason for the tiered dome above it, and the whole composition is why the building appears on lists of the classic Asian architecture of the twentieth century. Liang Sicheng, the founding figure of modern Chinese architectural history, called it the most typical landmark work of Chinese classical architecture of the 1950s. Your guide tells the story of how it was designed and built, then leaves time to walk the square.
Lunch
A restaurant in the Yuzhong district, with Sichuan cooking at a moderate heat; the guide orders a mild table as well.
Afternoon - Eling Park and the Erchang quarter
Eling Park occupies the highest ridge of the Yuzhong peninsula, the land between the Yangtze and the Jialing. It began in 1909 as the private garden of Li Yaoting, a Yunnan salt merchant who had made his money on the river, and it is one of the earliest private gardens in Chongqing - a garden built on a slope, with the two rivers as its borrowed scenery. From the Kansheng Pavilion the whole peninsula opens up, and the confluence of the two differently coloured rivers is clear from above.
Just below the park gate, the old printing works are worth an hour. The buildings went up in 1937 as the printing plant of the Central Bank of the Republic, and were renamed Chongqing Printing Factory No. 2 in 1953. The presses stopped long ago and the yard is now a creative quarter of cafés, studios and small restaurants among the original concrete frames - the setting for the film I Belonged to You. On the way down we pause at Liziba, where the Line 2 monorail runs straight through a residential block, which is now the city's most photographed piece of engineering.
Evening
The tour ends at your hotel, or at the Shancheng Steps if the group wants to walk down through the old city afterwards - the route passes the Ming city wall at Tongyuanmen, the Shancheng lane and the site of the French charity hospital, and comes out near the Shibati lanes.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
