Chongqing, the world’s biggest city?

Last time I was in Chongqing it was by accident. The year was 1985. I was in Kunming and I was going to Chengdu, but when I got to the train station for the afternoon train I was informed that it had left that morning. Trains were not very efficient back then. I changed my plans and took the next available train which was to Chongqing. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, because from Chongqing you could ride down the Yangtze river and the Three Gorges. This was before the giant dam was built, so I got the full experience.

Today I came in from Chengdu on the high speed train, two hours and three minutes of tunnels and river valleys, and got off at Chongqing North into a station built to the scale of an airport. I hailed a DiDi and somewhere on that ride I remembered the thing everyone tells you about this place, which is that it is the largest city in the world.

Thirty-two million people. More than Beijing. More than Shanghai. More than Tokyo, which is the one that normally holds the title.

The number is real. It is also the wrong number, and what it is actually counting turns out to be more interesting than the claim it gets used for.

A city that goes up

Chongqing is not really a tourist destination, but it is a fascinating place to spend a couple of days in anyway.

The peninsula sits in the fork where the Jialing comes down from the north and meets the Yangtze, and the city has run out of flat ground in every direction. So it goes up. Towers climb the hills on both banks, stacked so close that from the water they read as one cliff with windows. The monorail runs straight through an apartment block, which is the fact everybody quotes about this place, and it turns out to be less of a stunt than it sounds: the building was there, the line had to pass, and the practical answer was to put the station on floors six to eight.

Finding my hotel was not easy. Not because I was in the wrong place, but because it was basically inside a church, or almost. My taxi dropped me off at the right address, but there was no sign, only a church and a bunch of buildings around it. I circled it, didn’t find my hotel. Finally I realized that you have to go in through the church door, and there, inside, was the reception. The adventures of travelling.

Ciqikou, and the panda problem

I took the subway out to Ciqikou on the second morning, an old town on the Jialing about half an hour west, and had my first go at dumplings for breakfast. I ordered the mushroom ones, which is to say I pointed at a picture and hoped. They were good.

The lanes are restored Ming and Qing, stone underfoot, and busy from early in the morning. What struck me was not the architecture but the merchandise. The panda infection has spread from Chengdu to Chongqing. Same soft toys, same coffee cups, same ice cream moulded into the same face, eight hundred kilometres east of the breeding base and in a city that has nothing to do with them. Chengdu sells the panda because the panda lives there. Chongqing sells it because it sells. Ciqikou is still worthwhile visiting, as long as you ignore the souvenir stands.

Across the Yangtze

In the late afternoon I took the cable car across the Yangtze, from the Yuzhong side over to Nan’an. It is a working piece of transport that has become a ride, and the queue is the price you pay. Halfway across, the peninsula stands up behind you all at once, and you finally see the shape of the city you have been walking around inside.

On the far bank there is an old neighbourhood, restored and pleasant, and I spent an hour there. I also went down to Chaotianmen, where the two rivers meet and the water changes colour along a line you can actually see, the Jialing coming in greener than the Yangtze.

Mostly, though, I walked. Two days of no particular plan, a lot of window shopping, and an evening at Guanyinqiao in an electronics centre the size of a department store, where I bought an Osmo 4P camera I did not strictly need. Another small step towards becoming a vlogger?

The river I left on

On the Sunday afternoon I ended up on the bank of the Jialing, and worked out that it had been forty years since I was last here. I said fifty first, then corrected myself, which tells you something about how time flies.

In 1985 this was where the boats left from. You bought a ticket at Chaotianmen and went down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, three days of it, past towns stacked on the slopes and gorge walls that closed in until the sky was a strip. That trip still exists on paper. It is not the same trip.

The dam finished in 2012 and the reservoir behind it rose about 175 metres, drowning the lower gorges and thirteen cities, a hundred and forty towns, more than a thousand villages. Something like 1.3 million people were moved. The water is wider now and the walls are shorter, because a good part of what made them walls is under the surface. What I rode through is still there, just further down than it used to be.

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I came back to Chongqing forty years late and by a different accident, which is that the plan said Dazu rock carvings, but I skipped them and I stayed in the city instead. After all I saw a giant stone Buddha just the other day.

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