The free ferry and the arsenal

The name comes from a free ferry. In the late Qing a crossing on this stretch of the Yangtze was run without charge, and the place was called Dadukou after it. Until the Republic the ground belonged to Ba county, and it remained county land while the city grew on the peninsula upstream. That changed in 1938, when the Hanyang steelworks, the Hanyeping ironworks and the Shanghai steelworks were moved inland and set up here as the 29th arsenal. The river made it possible: heavy plant could come up the Yangtze by boat.

On 2 April 1965 the Jiugongmiao, Xinshancun and Yuejincun subdistricts were separated from Jiulongpo and made the Dadukou industrial district, with its seat at Xinshancun, and in 1995 the district grew from 7.46 to 103 square kilometres, taking Xiqiazi, Baqiao and Jiansheng from Jiulongpo and Tiaodeng from Banan. Iron and steel shaped the plan: schools, hospitals and shops were organised around the plant, and Chongqing Iron and Steel, Chonggang, stood at the centre. The district has five subdistricts and three towns, and it remains an important base for metallurgy and building materials. The workshop of the steelworks relocation committee is now a national key cultural relic.

Dadukou faces Nan'an and Banan across the Yangtze and borders Jiulongpo, the high-tech zone and Shapingba, and it is a materials distribution centre for the city's south-west. A container terminal here has a 32-hectare customs bonded zone. The district is served by Line 2, China's first straddle-beam monorail, which reached Xinshancun from Jiaochangkou on 28 June 2006 and calls at Dadukou station on its way south. The line was proposed as an underground railway from Chaotianmen to Yangjiaping in the 1983 master plan, and parts of it use tunnels built between the 1960s and 1980s.