Shapingba and Jiulongpo: Ciqikou, Gele Mountain and Huangjueping

Two 1940s secret-police prisons on the wooded slope of Gele Mountain, the setting of the novel 'Red Crag'. Zhazidong was a coal pit turned detention centre; Baigongguan a villa turned prison a kilometre downhill; on 27 November 1949, three days before the People's Liberation Army entered Chongqing, most of the prisoners held in both were shot. Together with the martyrs' cemetery and the Red Crag Soul exhibition hall at the foot of the hill they form the Gele Mountain Revolutionary Memorial, the Shapingba half of the Hongyan museum system — free, open 9:00-17:00 with last entry 16:30, and since 1 October 2025 without the real-name booking that guides still describe: you scan an identity document at the gate. Line 1 to Lieshimu ('Martyrs' Tomb'); the two prisons are a 1.6-2.4 km walk uphill from the station.

The Ming-Qing river port on the Jialing that shipped porcelain (hence the name, 'porcelain-ware port') and the one old town inside the city, a first-batch 'Chinese historic and cultural street' and a 4A scenic area with no gate and no ticket. The main street from the Line 1 station down to the wharf is a single file of mahua (fried dough twist) shops, hotpot-spice stalls and queues; the town the name promises is one street over — Hengjie, Jinbi Street, the lanes up to Baolun Temple, the steps down to the water. Since 2021 the district has added a 'back street' of new-built shops open 24 hours, a riverside promenade, a wharf and the 'Chongqing 1949' stage show. Spring Festival 2026 brought 1.58 million people, the most of any monitored site in the city; a weekday morning brings almost none.

The small working Buddhist temple on the hill above Ciqikou's main street, the one building in the town older than the shops: its Ming-dynasty main hall, a municipal protected monument since 1983, is one of the oldest surviving timber structures in central Chongqing (the Donghua Temple scripture hall on Kaixuan Road is the other one), and the legend that the deposed Jianwen Emperor hid here in the 1400s gave the town its old name, 'Longyin' — 'hidden dragon'. Free, open 7:30-18:00 according to every platform we can find (the temple publishes nothing online), with the stone steps up from the street, a ginkgo courtyard that turns yellow in late November, a viewing terrace over the Jialing and a queue at the free stamp table. Ten minutes; the best ten minutes in Ciqikou on a crowded day.

The biggest of the 'one airport, four stations' and the farthest from the peninsula: opened January 2018 in the Shangqiao valley of Shapingba district behind the Zhongliang ridge, it takes the trains to Xi'an, Kunming, Guiyang and Guangzhou, plus a share of Chengdu and, since the January 2026 timetable, one Qianjiang train via Wulong South. Two metro lines, the Loop and Line 5, sit in the basement, and the corridor from the rail exit to their gates has long been a 'single security check' — West and North had it before Shapingba station caught up in January 2025. Everything else about it is scale: a station 6 km from Shapingba, 40-45 minutes from Jiefangbei by any means (platform figure), a taxi rank two levels down, a ride-hailing pick-up that moved to the south side in October 2025, and a chronic tout problem at the exits that the city's own enforcement notices name.

The forested ridge above the prisons — about 780 m at the top by the district broadcaster's figure (platforms print 728), pines and cypresses, six hiking trails and a 1993 two-seat gondola that runs 900 m from the road by Baigongguan to the summit in about 17 minutes. The city lists it as an open, non-charging 4A park run by the Shapingba district scenic-area office; the cableway is the paid part, ¥30 one way and ¥50 return when the district reported its 2021 reopening, 9:30-17:30 on weekdays and to 18:00 on holidays. It is the local weekend hill (families, climbers on the outdoor wall, retirees on the steps), and the reason to add it to a prison morning is the view over the Jialing and the cooler air in a Chongqing summer. Check the cableway is running before you count on it: nothing official has been published since the 2021 reopening, and the 'suspended for maintenance' line on platform listings has sat there since the 2014 stop.

In 2007 the district and the art college painted 37 apartment blocks along 1.25 km of Yangjiu Road between the railway hospital and the 501 art warehouse (800 workers, students and artists, 150 days, 12.5 tonnes of paint) and called it the largest graffiti work in China. It has been repainted twice since, in 2021 (facades reproducing Luo Zhongli, Zhang Xiaogang and other Sichuan Fine Arts Institute names) and from 2025, when the district split the street into a free-graffiti zone, a restricted zone and a look-only zone and published a map. It is a public road, open all hours, two million visitors a year, with the Jiaotong Teahouse in a sunken lane off it and the old campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute at its end — which lets the public in with an ID document, and, for foreigners, 'valid documents registered at the gate' during the June graduation show. Line 18 'Sichuan Fine Arts Institute' station since December 2023.

A 1960s canteen of a trucking company turned into a teahouse in 1987 and not changed since: timber frame, glass-tile skylights, square tables, long benches, an iron kettle, retirees at cards from first thing in the morning — said to be the last teahouse in Chongqing that still looks like the 1970s. It survived because a painting professor from the art college next door, Chen Anjian, paid the rent when a net café wanted the room in 2005, on one condition: that nothing be altered; he has painted its customers for twenty years and has a chair with his name on it. A bowl of lidded-cup tea is ¥8-10 with unlimited refills (visitor posts, 2023-24), the doors open around 7:00 and close around 19:00 (platform), and since a scene of 'Crazy Stone' was shot here in 2005 (the film came out in 2006) the room is half old men and half people photographing them. Line 18 'Sichuan Fine Arts Institute' station, 200 m.

A high-speed station you cannot see: the Chengdu-Chongqing line's Shapingba stop was rebuilt 2012-2018 as 'China's first high-speed TOD in a shopping district', with platforms at ground level, a seven-storey Longfor Jinsha Tianjie mall and two 200 m towers on top, and eight floors of interchange dug 47 m down for the Loop line, Line 1, Line 9, buses and taxis. It is the small one of the city's 'one airport, four stations' (a share of the Chengdu trains and little else), but for a visitor it is the most useful: two Line 1 stops to Ciqikou, one to the Gele Mountain prisons, the Sanxia Square shopping streets at the door, and since January 2025 a 'single security check' corridor from the rail exit straight into the metro. If you are arriving from Chengdu and staying on the peninsula, check whether your train stops here before booking Chongqing West.