Day 14: Flying Tigers and Welcome to Dazu!

We got out half day tour of Chongqing. For being one of the largest cities in the world it sure didn’t have much to do. We started the day with a stroll through the park. There were tons of older people doing tai chi and morning exercises. There was a nice lookout of the city. We saw the original house of the first Australian Embassy in China.

I take it back, if you’re a war history nerd then Chongqing is probably your place to go. The city was a major landmark during World War II. After the park we visited the Flying Tiger museum which was all about the war efforts during that time. Flying Tigers was the code name given to the air force mission in Chongqing against the Japanese. The museum is inside the house that was used by the American military and is a common place to film movies from that era. They were actually shooting a TV show while we were there, we didn’t see any of the filming but the 1920’s cars were there and a small screw doing busy work around the set. There were a few rooms of pictures and a nice lady gave us a short presentation about the Flying Tigers, then after that we were herded through the galleries of unrelated paintings being sold to support the museum. Exploited tourists GO!

Our last stop in Chongqing was the public square in between the Three Gorges Museum and the government building that is hailed as one of the triumphs of modern architecture. We didn’t have time for the museum and we weren’t allowed inside the government building. We just got to look at them.

Government building in Chongqing

After lunch we drove 2 hours to Dazu. Now there’s a city with things to see! It only had 900k people but in the surrounding around it is home to more than 50,000 rock carvings dating back to 700AD. We had time for one mountain that afternoon. It had several hundred religious pictures carved straight into the rock side, almost all of them created in the Tong and Song dynasties between 800 and 1200AD. Many of the carvings there had their heads and hands knocked off. A result of the cultural revolution under Chairman Mao. All religious symbols had tried to be destroyed but it’s hard to destroy solid rock so the best they could do was knock off the head and hands. They were fantastic though, huge life size figures meticulously hand carved surviving through hundreds of years.

Dazu Rock Carvings

The hotel we stayed at in Dazu was by far the most impressive of our entire trip. It was a 5 star and for good reason. It was massive, it was gorgeous, it was decked out to the nines. Our room was huge and the best part of it all….inside the bathroom there was a switch next to the toilet that you could use to turn music on while you did your business. Best feature ever.