Chongqing

About Chongqing

Chongqing is China's most vertical city: a metropolis that defies gravity, where skyscrapers sprout from mountain peaks, where cable cars swing between buildings like urban gondolas, and where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers carve through the landscape like liquid highways. This is the 'Mountain City'—a place where you can take an escalator to the 8th floor of a building and still be at street level, where staircases lead to nowhere, and where the concept of 'ground floor' is purely theoretical. Built on steep hillsides that rise 400 meters from river to peak, Chongqing is a city of impossible angles and improbable architecture, where traditional stilt houses cling to cliffs and modern glass towers pierce the mist. Once a wartime capital during China's resistance against Japan, it became a municipality in 1997, and today it's a megacity of 32 million people—the world's largest by population—sprawling across an area the size of Austria. The rhythm is industrial and spicy: morning fog that wraps the city like a blanket, afternoon heat that drives locals to air-conditioned malls, evening feasts of numbing-hot hot pot that leave your lips tingling for hours. Local food is a symphony of Sichuan flavors—ma la (numbing-spicy), with ingredients like chili peppers, Sichuan peppercorns, and fermented vegetables that create flavors found nowhere else in China. Chongqing's charm lies in its contradictions—a modern metropolis that feels like a mountain village, a city of 32 million that moves at a leisurely pace, and a place where every meal is an adventure in spice and every journey is a lesson in urban geography.