Must-see in Chongqing - Ciqikou Old Town

Posted by ugfanfan on September 15th, 2014

Located on a hill above the Jialing River in the western part of Chongqing city, Ciqikou Old Town consist of two city streets and back allies that are set aside as a pedestrian shopping and dining area where people go to shop and eat snacks and gourmet food. Originally, Ciqikou Old Town was a river port and market town in the Ming Dynasty. Goods were transported over land and water from here. Nowadays, it becomes a part of Chongqing with some buildings renovated and preserved.

Shops for porcelain and other items and many restaurants and snack shops line along the streets. So it offers a perfect shopping environment to travelers. While you are shopping, you can eat and drink beverages at the same time. Furthermore, some of the tea houses have performances of traditional Chinese music, so it is a nice place to see how Chongqing used to be, eat and shop.

Ciqikou Old Town is sometimes called Small Chongqing or Porcelain Town because the place hasn’t been as modernized as the rest of Chongqing and the town people manufactured and traded porcelain. There is a restaurant boat to eat in and a hostel to stay in. As the restaurants and shops, there are candied sweets, pastries, the Zhangfei Beef Shop for Indian food, different kinds of stir-fried dishes with lots of hot chili pepper which looks like they are mostly fried red chili pepper, noodles and fried donuts etc. furthermore, one of the teahouses has a Sichuan Opera Face Changing Performance.

Another interesting place must be the classroom where physics Nobel Prize winner Samuel CC Ting studied when he was a child. Its original look was recreated with a picture of Sun Yat-Sen on the wall. Location: On the Jialing River near where it merges with the Yangtze River. It is about three or four kilometers from the main business and shopping area of the Shapingba District in the western part of urban Chongqing. It is about an hour’s drive from the city center.

Grace Fan works for a tour agency, chinatour.com offering a very wide range of tour service like China panda tours, China themed tours, affordable China tours, Yunnan tours, China travel videos, China day tours, China city tours, Tibet Travel, and China Sichuan Tours etc...