Where the rivers change colour

The Jialing comes down from Feng County in Shaanxi, 1,119 kilometres, cuts three spurs of the Huaying range into the Little Three Gorges, and enters the Yangtze at Chaotianmen with a discharge of 2,120 cubic metres per second. From the square the green of the Jialing can be seen entering the brown water of the Yangtze. The two rivers rise and fall 39 metres between the wet and dry seasons, a range controlled mainly by the Three Gorges Dam 570 kilometres away; the stairs at the tip run down to the water across that range.

A gate was built here in the early Ming because it faced the imperial capital at Nanjing, and it gave the point its name. In 1371 Dai Ding's wall had seventeen gates, nine open and eight closed, and Chaotianmen was one of the open water gates on the Yangtze. When the port opened in 1891 the customs house was set up here. The gate itself was pulled down in 1927 to make the wharf and only the base of the wall remains; Song and Ming walling found in 2015 was soon damaged by building work.

The wharf still works: boats leave for Fuling, Wanzhou and Yichang, and it is one of the starting points for the Three Gorges. Deng Xiaoping boarded a boat here for Shanghai on his way to work and study in France, and Sichuan troops embarked here for the front in the war. The highway zero-kilometre marker of Chongqing stands at Chaotianmen. Cargo work moved downstream to the new Cuntan port area, leaving the wharf to passenger and sightseeing boats. Raffles City opened on the site on 6 September 2019, and the Line 1 station opened on 31 December 2020. A nostalgia ferry still crosses from pier two to Danzishi.