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Escape the busy city and spend a full day exploring the cultural highlights west of Chongqing, combining an ancient town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, an immersive digital show and a classic old street walk. You will visit Changzhou Ancient Town in Dazu, the famous Baodingshan section of the Dazu Rock Carvings, and finish the day in Ciqikou Ancient Town back in Chongqing.
Your morning begins in Changzhou Ancient Town, a riverside settlement in Dazu with more than a thousand years of history. Once the seat of Changzhou Prefecture, this compact old town features stone-paved streets, traditional wooden houses, guild halls and small temples that reflect its Tang and Song Dynasty roots. It is a pleasant place to stretch your legs, try local snacks and get a feel for everyday life in the Dazu area before heading to the rock carvings.
Next, you continue to Baodingshan, the most impressive cluster of the Dazu Rock Carvings, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their outstanding religious art and vivid scenes of daily life in medieval China. Here you follow a walkway past huge rock reliefs carved between the 12th and 13th centuries, with detailed Buddhist figures, narrative panels and expressive faces that are remarkably well preserved. Your guide will help you notice important details and explain how Buddhism, Taoism and Confucian ideas are all woven into the carvings.
After exploring the grottoes, you watch a digital film that uses projection, sound and lighting to introduce the history, symbolism and restoration of the Dazu Rock Carvings in an accessible way. This short show is a good chance to sit down, deepen your understanding of what you have just seen at Baodingshan, and see close-up reconstructions of some of the most famous scenes.
In the late afternoon, you drive back towards Chongqing and stop at Ciqikou Ancient Town, a lively historic quarter on the Jialing River. Once a busy porcelain port, today Ciqikou is known for its old streets, traditional courtyard houses, temples and teahouses, as well as a wide range of street food. You can wander along the stone lanes, visit a temple or riverside pier, sample local snacks and soak up the mix of history and everyday life as the lanterns start to glow.
