Eleven storeys on the cliff

Hongya gate was one of the seventeen gates of the Ming wall of 1371, and one of the eight that were kept closed; it stood on the Jialing side, where the cliff comes down to the water. The natural cave above it had a waterfall, and the scene was counted among the twelve of Bayu under the name Hongya Dicui. The site is thought to have served as a fortress from the time of the Ba state to the end of the Qing. What visitors walk through now is not that gate but the ground it controlled.

The riverside house of the old city was the diaojiaolou, a timber floor carried on a few posts set into the slope, a form that goes back to before the Eastern Han. In the 1940s water-borne trade brought residents who built such houses up the Hongya bank, and people lived in them until 1949; as shipping declined they were left to decay. By the end of the century the type had almost gone from the urban area, surviving at Ciqikou and at Zhongshan. The new complex was intended to bring it back.

In August 1999 the district fixed on a traditional folk-custom quarter built in diaojiaolou form, and the project was listed among the city's eight livelihood works for 2005. The Chongqing Swan Group built it and opened it on 29 September 2006: eleven storeys, 53,000 square metres of shops, four streets inside, and the cliff and its waterfall left in place. At night the outline is lit in gold. Since 2016 short videos have carried the night view, and on the 2018 May Day holiday it drew 80,000 people against an estimated capacity of 5,000 to 8,000.