History of Chongqing Municipality - Page 1

Chongqing lies at the confluence of the Yangzi and Jialing Rivers in the southeast of the Sichuan Basin with a population of 30,000,000. Until the 1990s it was part of Sichuan Province. It is now separated and self controlled.

More than 3,000 years ago it was originally called "Ba", capital of the Ba Kingdom. Later in the Sui Dynasty it was renamed "Yuzhou" after the Jialing River that was then called the Yu River. "Yu" is still used today for the short form of Chongqing. Emperor Zhao Dun of the Song Dynasty had been made Prince of Gongzhou before he succeeded to the throne in 1190. To commemorate the two happy events, he renamed the city as Chongqing which, in Chinese, literarily means double jubilation.