Trains that run through buildings and escalators with tolls: ‘The craziest city on the planet’

Expats, globetrotters and influencers are thrilled by the avant-garde, unusual Chinese city of Chongqing. The metropolis genuinely amazes those who visit it for the first time, or who discover its peculiar charms via social media.

The main attractions include a zoo, where giant pandas luxuriate while surrounded by skyscrapers; the public square, built on the roof of a 22-story building; the aerial railway, with one of its main stations inside a block of flats; suspension bridges, which seem to have been brought from the year 2070 to be grafted onto the present; or the resplendent, multicolored skyline, visible from the banks of the Yangtze River. There’s also an improbable aquatic museum, as well as an intricate, seemingly endless labyrinth of escalators that take you down into one of the deepest metro stations in the world.

TikTok and Instagram profiles, YouTube channels and podcasts run by digital nomads compete to unravel the oddities of this crazy city and show them to the rest of the planet. Media outlets — such as CGTN or Wanderplate — have begun to refer to Chongqing as the living incarnation of the city in Blade Runner, or the cyberpunk capital of China. It’s also quite common for it to be referred to as “the craziest city on the planet.”

In the opinion of Sergi Walliver — a YouTuber, traveler and adventurer — its uniqueness is due to the fact that, in recent years, it grew at a forced, rapid pace, in a setting unprepared to house such a monster. Hence, it ended up transforming into a “dystopian” city, which has developed without clear rules or inhibitions. Any eccentricity is possible.

The city of heroes

To understand Chongqing a little better, it’s worth going back to its origins. While it’s currently located near the heart of the People’s Republic of China (although slightly tilted towards the west), it was, for centuries, a small prefecture in the zone of friction between the southern and northern dynasties. The municipality is a transit point along a major waterway, but too far from the strategic Silk Road to become the first-rate commercial center it always wanted to be.

Chongqing — a town of merchants and fishermen — slept a thousand-year-long sleep. At the beginning of the 20th century, it woke up to burst into global geopolitics. This was when pressure from Western powers forced China to open the Yangtze routes to foreign trade. In 1901, a Japanese concession was opened in Chongqing, the embryo of the feverish and convulsive megalopolis it was on its way to becoming.

Not long after this first sign of opening up to the world — when Japan invaded the northern part of China, in 1938 — Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist troops established the Chinese capital in this city, which was located in the province of Sichuan. By then, it already had a population of one million inhabitants.

Chongqing — known as the “City of Heroes” in Chinese patriotic songs — suffered intense bombings during that war, which damaged its historical heritage, necessitating extensive reconstruction efforts in the decades that followed. In 1949 — when the authorities of the newly formed People’s Republic of China took control of the devastated city — the decision was made to transform it into something very different: an industrial and university center, which would soon receive a veritable flood of new residents from the southwestern provinces and the rest of China.

A labyrinth on the banks of the river

Today, Chongqing is (along with Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin) one of the four large urban agglomerations of China. These jurisdictions are directly administered by the central state and no longer belong to any province. Chongqing’s metropolitan territory — slightly larger than that of Austria — includes 26 districts and 12 counties, in which more than 32 million people live.

The metropolis is immense and it has become the gateway to southern China. It also hosts the country’s main engineering work, the nearby Three Gorges Dam — the largest hydroelectric power station in the world, built in 1997. This work — which used nearly one billion cubic feet of concrete and cost (according to various estimates) between $50 and $70 billion — marked a before and after for contemporary China. In a certain sense, it could be said that the over-the-top, fanciful Chongqing that dazzles us today grew up in the shadow of the Three Gorges, with its ambition and its pharaonic narcissism. If something like this could be created out of nothing in a rural area along the Yangtze, what couldn’t be done in the city that presides over the river? After all, this was the place where millions of displaced people ended up, due to the construction of the dam.

The official excuse for many of Chongqing’s peculiarities is that its topography drastically conditions urban development: it forces residents to build differently, while engaging in a continuous exercise of lateral thinking. The result — as described in a recent article in Architectural Digest — is a three-dimensional, multi-level labyrinth.

In the words of YouTuber and local resident Jackson Lu, the city is on an irregular mountain plateau, on the banks of two great rivers: the Yangtze and the Jialing. This means that there are few plains and it’s essential to “take advantage of vertical spaces, as in Hong Kong.” If the city wants to continue growing, it must do so upwards… sometimes climbing the slopes of the surrounding mountains, or digging holes inside them.

The sky square

Chongqing has seen the amazing proliferation of skyscrapers, residential blocks that are more than 30 floors high, as well as a local idea that’s causing a sensation on social media: sky squares. Jackson Lu — in a viral video on TikTok that has already racked up 30 million views — shows us one of the most emblematic of these spaces.

Kuixinglou Square is a large area, located on the 22nd floor of an office complex next to the river port. Imagine that you’re walking through the plaza of a major city and, at one end, you look out onto a viewing point that’s 200 feet above a river. That would be a pretty good summary of what Kuixinglou Square is like.

In his videos, Lu describes everyday life in his crazy city, from the moment he leaves his apartment (which looks more like a futuristic burrow) to enter a metro stop “that feels like an entrance of a fallout shelter.” From there, he walks through a dense network of steps, walkways and corridors, boarding a bus that travels along an elevated ring road. He crosses bridges worthy of a Tim Burton film, and descends into metro stops that are more than 300 feet underground (accessed by escalators that require a toll).

The train drops me off at home

Olivia Heath — a writer for House Beautiful — barely tries to hide her bemusement when describing the train that “passes through a hole in a 19-story block of flats, which proves to be extremely convenient for its residents because there’s a transit stop inside. They can just hop on the Chongqing Rail Transit No.2 at Liziba Station, which is located on the sixth to eighth floor of the high-rise building.” She believes it’s a creative solution derived from the need to accommodate “49 million people packed into 31,000 square miles.”

Heath is fascinated that such an original home-delivery public transportation service has been running since 2004 with hardly any complaints or significant incidents. “Noise reduction isn’t a problem for residents either,” she notes. “The sound of the train passing through is reportedly around 60 decibels, meaning it would omit the same sound as a dishwasher.”

That is the labyrinthine, futuristic Chongqing that’s been going viral in recent months. But media outlets such as Wanderplate insist that, beyond the unprecedented cyberpunk postcard, there’s a different Chongqing that’s worth discovering. Thus, they recommend a visit to the Hongya Cave complex: picturesque riverside buildings on pillars, located in a bend of the Jialing River. The original structures — testaments to Chongqing’s past as a discreet river port — had been deteriorating for decades and were demolished in 2005. From 2006, a new complex of traditional houses was built here, faithful to the design of the original town, which may appear to be the idyllic setting of a Hayao Miyazaki film. Those who visit the complex can enjoy its popular market, as well as the magnificent restaurant on its fourth floor, where they serve a famous local condiment — sala málà — so intense and spicy that it leaves your mouth numb.

Cikiqou — the last vestige of the ancient city, now a gleaming theme park — is also well worth a visit, as is the Baiheliang Underwater Museum, whose modern halls are above the deep riverbed of the Yangtze. Finally, don’t leave the city of the future without seeing for yourself how the melancholic pandas at the local zoo cope with captivity: they’re accustomed to nibbling on bushes, their gaze lost in the mountains that are dotted with skyscrapers. They do, at least, enjoy an extra dose of space in this city, which continues to build horizontal plots in the sky. There’s no room for a soul on the ground anymore.

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