Ciqikou: the port town that walked up the bank

Ciqikou began as a market town on the lower Jialing, first recorded under the emperor Zhenzong of Song and important by Ming times as a port that shipped goods by land and by water alike. The name means porcelain port: what was made along the river was the leading industry for a long stretch, and when the town was renamed from Longyin the character was corrupted into the form used today. In the late Qing it was at its height, a place described as greeting a thousand people by day and lighting ten thousand lamps at night. What survives is the ground itself, stone slabs and timber shopfronts on lanes that step up the hillside between the river and the ridge behind it.

The old town has twelve lanes, most of them paved in stone, and a set of buildings that still fix its shape. Bao Lun Temple, whose main hall was built about six hundred years ago in the Ming dynasty, stands on the slope without a single nail in the frame, and the four characters over its great hall were written by Zhao Puchu. The Zhong family compound, put up more than 120 years ago for a late Qing court eunuch, mixes northern and southern building rules in the same yard. Nearby are the Bayu dwelling houses of timber, stone and brick, and the Han Lin academy, once a family school whose pupils sat the national examinations.

When the national government moved to Chongqing, Ciqikou kept room for the people who came with it. Guo Moruo, Xu Beihong, Feng Zikai, Fu Baoshi, Ba Jin and Bing Xin all lived here during the war years. They came for the reasons the ministries did: the river was the road, and the rooms were cheap. Chinese accounts name the town as the birthplace of Shaci culture, the wartime pairing of Shapingba and Ciqikou. What it offered was ordinary and specific, a market, river craft, tea houses, temple fairs, a dragon dance, a dragon boat race, circles of Sichuan opera and chuntai drama.