People’s Liberation Monument (World War II victory monument)
Chongqing (simpChongqing is said to be the semi-mythical State of Ba that the Ba people supposedly established during the eleventh century BCE. By 316 BCE, however, it had been overrun by the State of Qin. The Qin emperor ordered a new city to be constructed, which was called Jiang (??) and Chu Prefecture (??).
Chongqing was subsequently renamed in 581 CE (Sui Dynasty) and 1102, to Yu Prefecture (??) and then Gong Prefecture (). It received its current name in 1189, after Prince Zhao Dun of the Southern Song Dynasty described his crowning as king and then Emperor Guangzong as a “double/repeated happy celebration” (simplified Chinese: ????; traditional Chinese: ????; pinyin: shu?ngchóng x?qìng). Hence, Yu Prefecture became Chongqing subprefecture to mark the occasion. [citation needed]
In 1362, (Yuan Dynasty), Ming Yuzhen, a peasant rebel leader, established the Daxia Kingdom at Chongqing for a short time.
In 1621, another short-lived kingdom of Daliang was established there.
Between 1627-1645, with the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Chongqing, together with Sichuan, were captured by the Revolts who overthrew the Ming Dynasty across the nation. However, great massacres took place in Chongqing and Sichuan and millions of people died with few people surviving. Later during the Qing Dynasty, immigration to Chongqing and Sichuan took place with the support of Qing emperor.
In 1891, Chongqing became the first inland commerce port open to foreigners.
From 1929, Chongqing became a municipality of the Republic of China. During the Second Chinese-Japanese War (1937-1945), it was Chiang Kai-shek’s provisional capital and was heavily bombed by the Japanese Air Force. Many factories and universities were moved from eastern China to Chongqing during the war, transforming it from inland port to a heavy-industrial city.
In 1954, the municipality was reduced to a provincial city within the Sichuan Province of the People’s Republic of China.
On 14 March 1997, the Eighth National People’s Congress decided to merge the city with the neighbouring Fuling, Wanxian, and Qianjiang prefecture-level districts that it had governed on behalf of the province since September 1996. The resulting single division was the Chongqing Municipality, containing 30,020,000 people in forty-three former counties (without intermediate political levels). The municipality became the spearhead of China’s effort to develop its western regions and coordinate the resettlement of refugees from the Three Gorges Dam project. Its first official ceremony took place on 18 June 1997. The city went through massive flooding in the summer of 2007.
lified Chinese: ??; traditional Chinese: ??; pinyin: Chóngqìng; Postal map spelling: Chungking; Wade-Giles: Ch’ung-ch’ing) is the largest and most populous of the People’s Republic of China’s four provincial-level municipalities, and the only one in the less densely populated western half of China. Formerly (until 14 March 1997) a provincial city within Sichuan Province, the municipality of Chongqing has a registered population of 31,442,300 (2005). The boundaries of Chongqing municipality reach much further into the city’s hinterland than the boundaries of the other three provincial level municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin), and much of the municipality, which is roughly the size of Austria, is rural. The population of the urban area of Chongqing proper was 4.1 million in 2005.
The municipal abbreviation, ? (Yú), was approved by the State Council on 18 April 1997. Chongqing was also a municipality of the old Republic of China. Its abbreviated name is derived from the old name of a part of the Jialing River that runs through Chongqing and feeds the Yangtze River.
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