Chongqing

About Chongqing

Chongqing is one of China's four direct-administered municipalities and by far the largest: 32,054,159 people at the 2020 census across 82,403 square kilometres of the Sichuan Basin's eastern rim — an area the size of Austria that is a city, its hinterland and a stretch of the Three Gorges all under one government. The municipality runs 37 county-level divisions — 25 districts, 8 counties and 4 autonomous counties — after a November 2025 reorganisation folded the Jiangbei and Yubei districts into the newly formalised Liangjiang New Area. The urban area proper counts about 22 million people, with some 9.6 million in the contiguous built-up core.

The city began as the capital of the state of Ba, refounded as Jiangzhou after the Qin conquest of 316 BC. The name Chongqing, "double celebration", was bestowed in 1189 by the future Emperor Guangzong, who was made king of Gong and then emperor within a few months and promoted his prefecture to mark the coincidence. Between 1937 and 1946 it was the wartime capital of the Republic of China, bombed for years and never taken; in 1997 it was carved out of Sichuan as a province-level municipality to anchor the development of the Chinese west.

Modern Chongqing is a manufacturing heavyweight — for years the world's largest laptop production base and one of China's biggest car and motorcycle centres — and the head of Yangtze navigation, with ships reaching the sea through the Three Gorges locks. Visitors know it for the terraced skyline of Yuzhong peninsula, the Hongya Cave riverside complex, the Yangtze cable car, a monorail that threads through an apartment block, and a hotpot so central to the city's identity that it is practically municipal policy. The 2027 Smart China Expo returns to the city, which hosted the fair's earlier editions.