Nan'an: Nanbin Road, Longmenhao, Danzishi and Nanshan's One Tree

The other half of the wartime capital. Across the river in Yuzhong and Shapingba the museums tell the Communist story; up here on Huangshan, a forested spur of Nanshan at 580 m, are the villas where Chiang Kai-shek's government actually ran the war from 1938 to 1946 — Yunxiu Lou, Chiang's own house and office; Song Ting, Soong Mei-ling's; Kong Yuan; the Lianqing Lou that housed the American military mission; a grass pavilion where Marshall stayed; the school for war orphans; the air-raid shelter. Fifteen buildings, a national protected site since 2013 and the best-preserved wartime residence group in the west of China (district government). It is a ticketed park-museum: ¥18, open daily 9:00-18:00 in summer and to 17:30 in winter, booked or bought on WeChat, Ctrip or Meituan (district tourism table, 2026). Not free and not closed on Mondays, whatever older guides say.

The fourth of the 'one airport, four stations', opened 27 June 2025 at Chayuan in the south-east of Nan'an with the Chongqing-Changsha high-speed line: this is where the fast trains to Wulong South and Qianjiang start — 61 minutes to Qianjiang at best (city government). It is also the farthest of the four from the peninsula: Metro Line 6's East Station branch runs to Liujiaping, where you change to the main Line 6 for Shangxinjie and Xiaoshizi, about 45 minutes to Jiefangbei; Line 24 is still under construction (2026 reports put its opening at the end of 2027). Do not assume 'new means central' or 'Wulong means East': since the January 2026 timetable some Wulong-Qianjiang trains also leave Chongqing West, so the station on your ticket is the only rule.

Chongqing's city-planning museum in its 2022 home: a converted car-park structure under a great curving roof on Danzishi Square, facing the confluence, with the huge scale model of the central city, a 'fly over Chongqing' theatre, a walk-through of the four historic city walls and a floor of district-by-district plans — the fastest way to understand why this city stacks the way it does. Free; Tuesday to Sunday 9:00-17:00, last entry 16:30, closed Mondays (museum notice). Reservations were dropped in July 2024 with the city-wide order; the museum's own visitor rules now contain no booking clause. Two things to know before you set off: the old hall at Chaotianmen has closed, and guides that place the new one 'in Jiangbeizui' are wrong — it is on the south bank.

The one place in the city that explains why the south bank looks the way it does. In 1891 Chongqing became the first inland treaty port; the British trader Archibald Little built his factory, warehouses and villas on this slope at Ma'anshan in 1896, and the city spent 2020-2023 restoring eight protected buildings and the ruins around them into a hillside park with a river terrace. The former Little & Co. warehouse is now the Treaty Port History Exhibition Hall — 300-odd documents, photographs and objects, a hand-cranked dynamo that relights 'Chongqing's first electric lamp'. The park is open-air and free; the hall is free, open Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-17:00 and booked on the park's WeChat mini-program (2023 rule). It is on the road down from the cableway's south station.

A brand-new 'old street' that is honest about it: a kilometre of stepped lanes climbing 80 m from the Yangtze, opened 1 June 2018 as phase two of the Changjiahui shopping park, rebuilding the Wang family mansion and other courtyards on their original sites and stringing 'ten scenes' of treaty-port history up the slope. What is genuinely old sits at the bottom: the French Navy Barracks of 1902, a national protected monument. What makes it worth the trip is the position — the terraces face the confluence head-on, with Chaotianmen and Raffles City across the water and the Grand Theatre to the left, the frontal view of the peninsula that Nanbin Road only gives at an angle. The Planning Exhibition Hall is on the square next door. Free, shops 10:00-22:00 (district tourism table).

The top of the old road south: for a thousand years travellers from the river to Guizhou and Yunnan climbed the stone-flagged Huangge path from Haitangxi and rested at Huangjueya, the pass village on the Nanshan ridge — the district calls it 'the first ancient road of Ba-Yu'. The 600 m street was rebuilt in 2016-2019 and reopened over National Day 2019 with 175 restored or rebuilt Ba-Yu timber houses, among them the birthplace of the writer Sanmao (Echo Chen), who lived here from 1943 to about 1948 and whose small house is now a memorial. It is the dinner stop of a Nanshan day (teahouses, hotpot, spring-water chicken) and the walkable link between One Tree, Laojun Cave and the botanical garden. Free; the ancient path from Shangxinjie is a 3.6 km climb.

Where the cableway lands on the south bank: a restored treaty-port hillside of brick villas and stone lanes under the Dongshuimen bridge, with the American, Italian and Belgian legation buildings of the 1930s-40s and a straight view back at Hongyadong and Raffles City. The first section opened on 22 September 2018 after a 2015 city decision to rebuild 'on the original site, footprint, height and appearance'; Xiahaoli, the lower lanes, followed in September 2023, and the street was named a national tourism and leisure district in March 2025. Practical point: the cableway's south station at Shangxinjie (Line 6 / Loop, exit 2) usually has the shorter queue — ride south-to-north and you have done the old street first.

The south bank's riverside boulevard, 24.9 km end to end according to the district, of which the stretch that matters runs 4 km from the cableway landing at Longmenhao north-east to Danzishi: hotel towers, hotpot terraces and river-fish restaurants on one side, the Yangtze and the whole lit peninsula on the other. It is the classic angled view of Chongqing at night, free, and the walk itself is flat. Halfway along sits Ciyun Temple, a Tang foundation rebuilt in 1757 and enlarged in 1927 as the country's only monastery housing monks and nuns together, its stone lion facing Baixiang ('white elephant') Street across the water. Restaurants here price for the view; eat one street back or up at Nanshan.

The old Nanshan Park, a 1959 hill park turned botanical garden in 1999 and now 551 hectares of ridges at 420-680 m — camellias (it holds the national germplasm bank for Sichuan camellias), plum in winter, cherries from February, roses, a display glasshouse, and two paid viewpoints that are technically part of it: One Tree and the Golden Eagle. The garden is a spring-and-autumn place for locals, and for a visitor the reason to come is the cherry and camellia weeks of February-April or an escape from a 40-degree August; the views are better from One Tree. Tickets: ¥15 off-peak (January, June, November, December), ¥16 peak (July-October), ¥30 in the February-May flower season, ¥50 all year with the glasshouse — and none of these includes One Tree or the Golden Eagle (city price notices; garden rules); 9:00-17:30, last entry 17:00.

The paid, canonical night-view platform: a terrace and a six-storey 'radar' tower on the Nanshan hillside at about 500 m, looking straight across the Yangtze at the whole Yuzhong peninsula — the shot that is on every Chongqing poster. The deck opened in January 1997 around a century-old huangjue (banyan-fig) tree, the city's official tree, hence the name. The city price notice caps the ticket at ¥30 from March to October and ¥15 from November to February; platforms sell it at ¥30 year-round. The garden management publishes 9:00-23:00 from May to October and 9:00-22:30 the rest of the year, and a roughly two-month rebuild of the paths behind the tower began in August 2026 — use gate 2. There is no metro up here: it is a taxi from the cableway's south station, and the view is worth exactly nothing in fog.

Two hill monasteries a kilometre apart on the Nanshan ridge above the cableway, with names that point the wrong way: Tushan Temple is Buddhist, on the site of a Jin-dynasty shrine to Yu the Great — who by legend married a woman of the Tushan clan here — and Laojun Cave is Taoist, the 'first Taoist monastery of eastern Sichuan', founded in the Sui-Tang period, rebuilt in 1480 and laid out up the cliff in the shape of the character 玄. Both are municipal protected sites and both are still working religious houses. Platforms report ¥5 at Tushan and free-to-¥10 at Laojun Cave, roughly 7:30/8:00-17:00; neither has published its own hours, so treat the gate as the authority.