During the war the Yuzhong peninsula was bombed flat, and the National Government's actual seat was in Banan, on the south bank. The traces are listed rather than reconstructed: Chiang Kai-shek's former residence and Kong Xiangxi's former residence are among the district's sights, and the Nanquan wartime site group is its national key cultural relic. What survives is a geography of retreat, houses set in the hills where the district is 62.27 percent hill and 32.99 percent low mountain, on the far side of the river from the offices they served.
From the journal
Nanquan: the wartime retreat south of the river
The houses across the Yangtze where the government worked while the peninsula was bombed, and the 1949 battle named for the same valley.
In the same city · Banan District ↗The government across the river
A spring and a battle
Nanquan is also a spring town. The Nanquan hot springs are one of the district's scenic areas, and geothermal water is drawn at Dongquan, Nanquan and Qiaokouba; the subdistrict covers 84.5 square kilometres. On 1 November 1949 the People's Liberation Army's attack on Chongqing opened with the battle of Nanquan, fought on the same ground where the wartime houses stood. The two dates, the wartime capital of the 1940s and the battle of 1949, are only a few years apart and sit in the same small valley, which is why the place reads as a sequence rather than as a single monument.