2021

Shibati was an ancient and steep stairway in the old city of Chongqing. It is said that Shibati was named after its 18 flights of steps from the top of the stairway to the water well at its bottom. As it was the most convenient passageway connecting the Jiaochang port in the upper half of the city to the Yangtze River Wharf in the lower half of the city, Shibati had gradually formed a prosperous market and dense residential area since the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

The whole stairway is about 300 m long, with a drop of up to 40 m. A large number of Bayu folk houses built close to the mountain were stacked and scattered in rows. It was the place where many native Chongqing people can best experience the memory of the old city.

The planning took protecting and inheriting the core values of the Shibati traditional style area as the fundamental principle. Based on the original urban texture of "seven streets and six lanes", it specially preserved the extremely complex height different relationship in the site as the basis of all designs. It strictly protected and repaired the cultural relics and historical buildings in the site, as well as the cliffs, stairways and trees with rich mountain city characteristics, and retained a number of landscape elements such as telegraph poles, small blackboards and iron railings that had appeared in the old image data, so as to inherit the historical memory as much as possible. Based on the original architectural layout, it re-weaved and re-constructed, according to the functional industrial planning, the most authentic architectural settlements in Bayu mountain area by means of original style, original technology and original materials.