Chongqing 重庆

Chongqing is the strangest great city in China: a municipality of 32 million built on cliffs, where the ground floor of one tower is the twelfth floor of another, trains go through apartment blocks, and the night skyline looks like a sci-fi film because the whole city is stacked on a hillside with the river in front. It is also Sichuan’s louder, harder, more industrial twin — hotter food, hotter weather, more fog, and more concrete. It is 90 minutes from Chengdu by train, and one night is enough to justify the detour.

• Region South-west China
• Suggested stay 1–2 days
• Best season March–May and September–November
• Getting there Jiangbei airport (CKG) + high-speed rail 1.5 h from Chengdu, 7 h from Beijing

Chongqing sits where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet, at the eastern edge of the Sichuan Basin, on rock — which is why it is vertical, why it fogs, and why it is called “the mountain city” (山城). The Yangtze gorges begin downstream; the Three Gorges cruises leave from here.Getting there: Jiangbei (CKG) airport, metro line 10 or 3; high-speed rail 1.5 h from Chengdu, 7 h from Beijing, 5 h from Xi’an. Stations are far apart — check which one. The metro is the best way to get around; the roads are stacked and the GPS will lie to you.

• Hongyadong — the stilted cliff-side tower complex lit up at night; the single most photographed thing in the city. Best viewed from the bridge across the river, then walked through.
• The riverfront at Nanshan — the classic panorama of the peninsula skyline, best at dusk from the One Tree Lookout.
• Liziba station — where monorail line 2 runs straight through the middle of an apartment building. Cheap, weird and famous.
• Ciqikou old town — a Ming-Qing porcelain-port street, commercialised but pleasant for an hour and a snack.
• The Three Gorges Museum — free and genuinely good on the dam, the river and the resettlement of 1.3 million people.
• Wulong karst andDazu rock carvings — UNESCO sites 2 h out for people with an extra day.
• Yangtze river cruises — three or four days downstream through the gorges to Yichang.

Chongqing was a Ba-state capital 3,000 years ago, then a Yangtze port town. It became important in 1937: when Nanjing fell, Chiang Kai-shek moved the wartime capital here, and the city was bombed by Japan for five years (the surviving air-raid tunnel network is now a tourist site and a very hot-pot restaurant location). The Japanese never took it. After 1949 it became an industrial base, and in 1997 it was split off from Sichuan as a direct-controlled municipality — the administrative vehicle for the Three Gorges Dam project and the resettlement that went with it. It is now one of the fastest-growing cities on earth, and it feels like it.

Daily life here is vertical: lifts, escalators, staircases between roads, and a metro that climbs 100 m between stations. People are louder, warmer and more profane than in Chengdu — “Chongqing pretty girls, Chengdu pretty boys” is a local saying about the division of labour. The climate is famous: fog for 100 days a year, 40 °C in August, one of China’s three “furnace cities”. Hotpot is eaten year-round in the open air at plastic tables, and the bowl of sesame oil with garlic that you dip in is not optional, it is medicine. Dock-porter culture (bangbang men with bamboo poles) is the city’s icon.

Chongqing invented the version of hotpot most of the world knows — the red-oil, no-nonsense, beef-tripe-and-aorta version — and it eats it at 2 am in August. Eat:Chongqing hotpot (order maoxuewang, tripe, yellow throat, and sweet potato noodles),xiaomian (the breakfast noodle, cheap, chilli-heavy, everywhere),suanla fen (sour-spicy sweet-potato noodles),laziji (chicken buried in a mountain of dried chillies — you hunt for the meat),quanshui ji (spring-water chicken), andgrilled fish. Take home:hotpot base bricks (sold everywhere, travel well),Fuling pickled mustard tuber,Chongqing tea.

Allow 1–2 days. Day 1: Hongyadong, the Liziba train-through-building, Jiefangbei, dinner hotpot. Night: Nanshan lookout or a river cruise. Day 2: Ciqikou, the Three Gorges Museum, or day-trip to Dazu.Timing: spring and autumn; summer is brutal (40 °C plus 80% humidity — this is not a joke, plan indoor afternoons), winter is grey and damp.Mistakes: underestimating distances between the two rivers and the hills; trusting a map’s estimate of walking time; and ordering hotpot “medium spicy” — in Chongqing “medium” is already serious, ask forwei la and dip into sesame oil.