Rongchang, a famous ancient city with a history that goes back 1,249 years, is dubbed the "first county" in West China's Chongqing Municipality.

Located at the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the city covers a 1,079-sq km area and has a population of 820,000.

Connecting Chongqing Municipality and Sichuan Province of Southwest China, Rongchang is the bridgehead of the West Chongqing Economic Corridor, one of the three major economic belts of the municipality.

The county is blessed with rich mineral resources such as coal, natural gas, argil and limestone. With 96 million tons of coal reserves, it produces 1.85 million tons of crude coal and 500,000 tons of refined coal annually. Rongchang also has 13 million tons and 300 million tons of proven reserves of limestone and hadite shale respectively.

The county's well-developed infrastructural facilities include the Chengdu-Chongqing expressway, and a network of railway and highways that efficiently link it with the rest of the country.

In terms of telecommunications, the county has developed comprehensive digital and mobile transmission networks. With about 100,000 sets of stored program control telephones, every village and township in Rongchang has access to the communication network. The county also has seven transformer substations with 110,000 volts and 35,000 volts capacity.

Rongchang features a fabric production industry, whose history goes back more than 1,000 years. Today, the value of Xia fabric exports to South Korea, Japan and many other southeast Asian countries touches nearly $20 million yuan every year, while creating 100,000 jobs for locals.

Rongchang has a long-established pottery industry, and is hailed as one of China's top three pottery capitals. Also, with a history of 450 years, the folding fans produced in the county compare favorably with the best of Suzhou and Hangzhou. The annual production volume of folding fans has hit 1.5 million, with 130 designs and colors.

The county is also China's biggest export base for broken black tea, with a yearly volume of more than 20,000 tons.

Rongchang has forged a complete industry system, including animal feed, animal medicine, bio-pharmacy, mechanism processing, agro- and sideline-products processing, as well as building materials.