Baisha: the town that held the county seat and the wartime schools

Jiangjin's old county seat was at Jijiang, on the bend the Yangtze makes around Dingshan. In 1951 the seat of the Jiangjin special district moved from Jijiang to Baisha, and in 1956 it moved back. That is five years in which a river town held the administration of a district, and it left Baisha with the institutions and the buildings a seat accumulates. The district now administers five subdistricts and twenty-five towns, and Baisha is one of the twenty-five. Its own list runs from the Chaofang community to Baozhu village, seven communities and seventeen villages.

When the war with Japan pushed the government upriver, 36 universities and schools moved into Jiangjin, most of them to Baisha, and with them the National Compilation and Translation Bureau, the Central Library and the Kuomintang's central party history office. The Jinsha cultural area, Jiangjin and Baisha, was counted for a time as one of the four great cultural areas of the wartime rear, beside Shapingba and Ciqikou in Chongqing, Jinniu in Chengdu and Beibei. For a few years a small Yangtze town held a national library and a national translation office.

Baisha is the birthplace of Chongqing's sorghum liquor and the main producing area of Chinese xiaoqu qingxiang sorghum liquor, the light-aroma style made with a small starter culture. In the 1930s a great fire destroyed the town's brewing base, which is the kind of event that decides where a trade goes next, and the industry rebuilt elsewhere on the same bank. In 2019 Baisha was named one of China's top 100 cultural towns. The district's older bottle is Laobaigan, a strong clear spirit known in the towns of Chongqing and of eastern and southern Sichuan.