The tower's facts are dates, and they are precise. The relic stands in Xishan Park in Wanzhou and is dated 1931. On 7 September 2000 it was listed in the first batch of Chongqing municipal cultural relics; on 7 October 2019 it was announced in the eighth batch of national key cultural relics. Between those two listings is the usual curve of a twentieth-century building: first protected as local heritage, then recognised as national. A bell tower is a civic instrument, built to be heard rather than visited, and the park setting has outlasted the function. What remains is a clock face and a date.
From the journal
The Xishan bell tower: 1931, kept in a park
A tower dated 1931, listed as a municipal relic in 2000 and a national one in 2019, in a city rebuilt around it.
In the same city · Wanzhou District ↗A date and two listings
The town around the park
Wanzhou's own numbers put the tower in context. Its urban area covers 110 square kilometres, and the Three Gorges project moved and resettled 263,000 people here, the heaviest resettlement task in Chongqing; 47 percent of the old urban area was submerged. It has been named a historic-culture city of Chongqing, and its red tangerine is a geographical indication product. At the end of 2024 it had 1,689,800 registered residents and 1,538,800 permanent ones. A 1931 tower in a park is one of the few fixed points in a town that has been rebuilt around it.