Chongqing
municipality of China

Chongqing is a provincial-level direct-administered municipality in Southwestern China. It is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of China and the only one located inland.
The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria, which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper. Due to its classification, the municipality of Chongqing is the largest city proper in the world by population, though it is not the most populous urban area.
The municipality of Chongqing is the only Chinese city with a resident population of over 30 million, but that number includes its large rural population. In 2020, Chongqing surpassed Shanghai as China's largest municipality by urban population and, as of 2024, it had an urban population of 23.01 million. The municipality contains 26 districts, eight counties, and four autonomous counties.
The city served as the wartime capital of the Republic of China (ROC) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). On 14 March 1997, the current municipality was separated from the surrounding province of Sichuan, with the goal of furthering development in the central and western parts of the country.
Chongqing is one of China's national central cities.
“Chongqing” enters the record as municipality of China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chongqing, municipality and China can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11725. VIAF identifies the subject as 125995653. The Library of Congress control number is n81082039. Authority coordinates are 29.550, 106.507. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2024, 1937 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chongqing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.