Yuzhong Peninsula West: Liziba, the Three Gorges Museum, the Great Hall and Hongyan

The city's main museum, a curved glass-and-stone hall facing the Great Hall across People's Square: the Three Gorges gallery (what the dam drowned, salvaged before 2003), the wartime-capital gallery (1937-46, the bombing, the Allies), Ba-Yu history and a Southwest ethnic gallery — ten permanent shows in all. Free, and since 1 October 2025 there is no booking at all: 'visitors enter in order with a valid identity document' (museum notice, 30 Sept 2025). Passport is not named in that sentence, but neither is anything else — carry it. Tuesday-Sunday 9:00-17:00, last entry 16:00, closed Mondays except public holidays (museum visitor notice). Free Wi-Fi and a free audio guide on the museum's WeChat official account cover all ten galleries.

The hillside farm at Hongyan Village where, from 1939, Zhou Enlai's Southern Bureau and the Eighth Route Army's Chongqing office sat inside the Nationalist wartime capital — the grey three-storey office block (looks like two floors, is three: office downstairs, Zhou's rooms in the middle, the secret radio on top), Rao Guomo's farm, and the 2000 exhibition hall (museum). Mao stayed here during the 1945 talks. Free; since 1 October 2025 no booking: 'visitors of all ages scan a valid identity document at the entrance turnstile and go straight in' (museum notice, 30 Sept 2025). 9:00-17:00, last entry 16:30, open on public holidays; no Monday closure is printed anywhere on the museum's site in 2026. Rao Guomo's house has been shut for works since 20 November 2025. Little English on the labels; the buildings and the view of the Jialing are the point.

The Line 2 monorail station built into floors 6-7 of a 19-storey apartment block on the Jialing riverbank (2004) — the one photograph everyone wants from Chongqing. The city built an official viewing platform across the street in 2018, with an 840 m² shooting deck, angled at 33° to the tunnel mouth (district government); it is free, open-air and the toilets under it are the cleanest on the block. Trains come every few minutes, so this is a 20-minute stop, not a morning. In 2026 the station itself is being rebuilt in stages (June to 30 December), with exits closed one at a time; the trains still run. The city's notice covers only the station itself (staged closures and detours in and out of the exits) and says nothing about the viewing platform across the road (municipal government, June 2026).

The 1954 assembly hall that Deng Xiaoping's Southwest government built as a Temple-of-Heaven lookalike: a 55 m peacock-blue dome over a 4,206-seat auditorium, flanked by two wings and a four-star hotel, on a base of imperial stairs (municipal government). The exterior and the square in front are free and open all day — the square is where the district does its evening dancing. Going inside is a paid tour of the auditorium, 8:00-18:00 with last entry 17:30 (municipal government, 2024); the ticket is ¥8 (the city's A-level scenic-spot list to December 2025 and its 2019 price table; the listings agree; the 2008 and 2013 price orders had it at ¥10 — the hall's own site prints no figure). The hall shuts to visitors whenever there is a session or a concert, with no published calendar. It is the picture, not the visit, that matters.

General Joseph Stilwell's house and headquarters from 1942 to 1944 (earlier T.V. Soong's villa), on Jialing New Road five minutes' walk from the Liziba viewing platform: the only museum in China named after a foreign soldier (its own words), opened 1994, run by the Stilwell Research Center under the city's foreign-affairs office rather than the Hongyan group. Photographs of the Burma campaign, the Hump, the Flying Tigers and the Dixie Mission in the basement; his rooms upstairs; across the road at No. 62 is a separate, privately run Flying Tigers museum. For American readers this is the most direct thread in the city. Free (the city's 2025 museum register lists it as free-admission; it charged ¥15 until at least 2019). The museum's bilingual guide says 'real-name entry, no reservation needed — scan an ID card or register with a valid document', Tuesday-Sunday 9:00-17:00, last entry 16:30, closed Mondays unless a holiday.

A 112 m escalator at 30° that has hauled people 52.7 m up from the old Caiyuanba railway station to Lianglukou since February 1996 — 2 minutes 30 seconds of ride, three escalators (up, down, spare); the 'Asia's second longest' tag comes from the listings, not from the operator's page. Run by the same company as the Yangtze cableway: 8:00-20:00 daily, extended to 21:00 on some holidays (operator). The fare is ¥2 a ride on every listing and in the city's own 2023 notice — the operator's page does not print it. Worth exactly one ride, ideally uphill, and only because it explains the city: Chongqing is a place where a public escalator is public transport.

The Nationalist Central Bank's banknote and stamp printing works (1937), Chongqing's No. 2 Printing Works from 1953 — 'almost every coloured piece of paper on the Chongqing market in the 1950s-70s was printed here' (district government) — shut in 2012 and reopened in June 2017 as an open courtyard of brick sheds, pipes and rooftops turned into cafés, shops and a hostel, under a design by Will Alsop's team. Free, unfenced, on the ridge next to Eling Park with both rivers below. It is where the film 'I Belonged to You' (2016) built its radio-station set, and it is now a photo park first and a piece of industrial history second. The yard is open day and night; the shops keep their own hours, roughly 9:00-22:00.

The highest point of the peninsula, a 1909 merchant's garden ('Li Garden') that the family gave to the state in 1950 and that opened as a public park in 1958 — pavilions, a stone rope bridge, 170-year-old banyans, and at the north-east tip the seven-storey Kansheng Tower (rebuilt in the 1980s on the site of the old Two Rivers Pavilion) with the Yangtze on one side and the Jialing on the other. No ticket since 2005; the district lists the 'Greater Eling' scenic area as open 00:00-24:00 (2026 A-level table). This is the free night view that costs nothing but a climb: half the city's lights from a tower you share with a few dozen locals. Since November 2025 there is also the Eling Boardwalk along the cliff below the park — free, but real-name booked on WeChat, with a service desk for passports.

The wooded ridge-top park west of Eling where Line 2 runs along the cliff through nearly a thousand plum-blossom trees (美人梅) planted along the track by the district — for two or three weeks from late February the green monorail crosses a pink slope above the Jialing and the whole city comes to photograph it. The park is free and open, part of the half-mountain cliff trail; the blossom is the only reason to time a visit, and the timing is the whole trick: 2025 was at 70% on 21 February with 'about twenty days' to run (municipal government), 2026 at 80% on 23 February with 'about fifteen days' (district urban-management bureau, via local press). Outside the season it is a pleasant walk between Eling and Daping with the same trains and no crowd.

Xian Ying's wartime villa on the slope above Jialing Bridge — 'Teyuan', the salon where Zhou Enlai, the Democratic League founders and Mao himself (in 1945) met — rebuilt as the national museum of the eight 'democratic parties' that sit in China's consultative system, with the founding sites of the Democratic National Construction Association and the Peasants' and Workers' Party alongside. It is one of the three halls of the Hongyan museum group and a 4A site: free, 9:00-17:00, last entry 16:30, closed Mondays (municipal government, June 2026; district A-level table, Aug 2026). Chinese-only labels on a subject few foreigners know; the point is the house, the terrace over the river and a clear statement of how the one-party state explains its other parties. Ten minutes' walk from Zhou Enlai's residence.

A three-storey 1930s town house at the east end of Zhongshan 4th Road, rented in 1939 in Zhou Enlai's name as the Communists' in-town office ('Zhou's Mansion') while the Nationalist government sat a few doors down; the Southern Bureau's culture, women's, foreign-affairs and military groups worked here and Mao received writers in the house during the 1945 talks (museum). Free, no booking since October 2025, and the one Hongyan site that stays open into the evening: 9:00-19:00, last entry 18:30 (museum, Feb 2026). The street itself — plane trees, the 1930s villas, Guiyuan where the Double Tenth Agreement was signed, the old Nationalist headquarters — is Chongqing's most walkable half-kilometre of wartime history, free and unfenced.