The Unknown City of 32 Million

It’s possibly the municipality with the most inhabitants worldwide and still hardly anybody in ‚the West‘ will have heard about it: Chongqing. There is no denying Chinese could judge this ignorance as Western arrogance. Before talking to the photographer Tim in Beijing, who declared Chongqing to be his favorite city in China, I didn’t know either that besides Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin it is one of the four municipalities under direct control of the Chinese government.

(Bild von wikipedia.org)

Tim’s stories sounded great, but we didn’t know how to put Chongqing into our travel schedule until a landslide blocked our path to Lijiang. As all other transport to Yunnan’s Northwest was overbooked, we decided to take a bullet train to ‚China’s Manhattan‘. The heart of Chongqing spreads over a steep mountainous island at the confluence of the Yangtse and Jianling rivers. The only reason why tourists would end up here is to get on a boat down the three gorges to the famous dam – another one of China’s superlatives.

This giant of a city is neither beautiful nor clean, but it’s interesting, surprising and edgy. The very rich (splashing with money in the shopping street on top of the hill) and the very poor (living at the bottom of the pyramid in huts by the river) share the same slopes of this steep peninsula that is crowded with skyscrapers, serpentine roads and narrow winding stairs. There is no real historic ’sights‘ in a touristic sense except maybe a cliff village that housed the Chinese leadership when they had moved the capital here during the second world war. Roosevelt sent a note to thank the ‚People of Chungking‘, who subsequently endured heavy bombing by the Japanese air force, for their braveness.

Today there is hardly any square meter on the peninsula that is undeveloped. Because everything is so steep here, locals use the elevators in some of the highrise buildings to move up or down between the streets. We stumbled upon one, that took us up to the 11th (!) floor, where we could exit evenly onto the higher road behind the building.

Our hostel in a beautiful Qing dynasty building (complete with two courtyards and goldfish swimming around a water buffalo bronze in a little pond) was just as charming as the quirky old houses along narrow steep stairways. Interspersed are apartment blocks in (sometimes smelly) side alleys looking down on a river – Chongqing is really a crazy urban mix.

The cable cars across the Yangtse have long stopped working and the city’s museums were either old and worn out or brandnew and flashy, but not quite complete yet – somewhat symbolic for the state of the city: an urban giant being overhauled. The newly erected Three Gorges museum looks very impressive from the outside and is supposed to feature a big model of the dam, but that section is currently closed. Or the museum of city planning at the tip of the island, which houses a collection of models of some of the gigantic new architecture in the city. You can enter if you don’t mind hundreds of people working on a 30 x 50 m model of the city. And not only the impressively creative architecture on display (only little of which is completed) leaves you think that this is a city that you will hear from at some point in the future.