Chongqing - The International Day for Monuments and Sites, or World Heritage \Day, is held on April 18 each year worldwide. In the afternoon, a series of activities, "Searching in Mountain City," initiated by the Chongqing Branch of the Chinese National Committee for the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS, China), was officially launched at the former site of the Old Drum-tower Government Offices in Yuzhong District. Chongqing's first urban heritage park will be built on the site and opened to the public in 2024.
Old photo for the Old Drum-tower Government Offices in Chongqing. (Photo provided to iChongqing)
The series of activities aims to ensure that cultural heritage workers are organized to walk into the mountain city's numerous monuments and sites together and advise how to protect and utilize cultural relics in Chongqing. Yuan Dongshan, President of Chongqing Branch of ICOMOS, China, and Deputy President of Chongqing Municipal Research Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, said that the former site of the Old Drum-tower Government Offices, discovered in 2009, served as the military and political center of Sichuan and Chongqing in the Southern Song Dynasty. It is the largest, highest-level, the best-preserved former site of government offices excavated in Chongqing. He continued that as its important value has attracted great attention from Chongqing Municipality and the National Cultural Heritage Administration, it has been unexpectedly registered as one of the heritage sites under national-level protection. In addition, the project of building a small urban heritage park on the site has been initiated.
The construction of the park is proceeding in an orderly manner. There is a wall along Jiefang East Road, which is seething with running vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. Within the wall, under a giant protective cover stand the ruins of a rammed earth platform, which has been completely presented.
The Old Drum-tower Government Offices in 1936 when Linsen Road was built (Photo provided to iChongqing)
"In fact, the high-platform building was the watchtower in the front of the government offices in the Southern Song Dynasty, which is the most complete one and the largest extant local one excavated in China to date. The watchtower is composed of the gate tower and the high platform, which is 68.67 meters long, 24.7 meters wide, and about 10 meters high. In the mountain city, buildings are often made of stones. Exceptionally, the platform was built of large bricks fired from clay, which was very precious at that time. One of the excavated bricks was inscribed with the Chinese characters "Chun You Yi Si." That's how we dated the building to 1245," said Yuan.
Overlooking the Old Drum-tower Government Offices (Photo provided to iChongqing)
"In the future heritage park, visitors will see the original appearance of the rammed earth platform, and the wooden building on it reconstructed by experts as per standards and style of the Southern Song Dynasty," Yuan added that in addition to the platform and the ruins of the government offices in the Southern Song Dynasty, 100 and 103 relics of Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty respectively have been discovered in the former site of the old drum-tower government offices. Together with the restored Ba County Yamen (a government office in feudal China), which is an important landmark in the history of Chongqing, those relics will be presented in the archaeological site park.